In the Classroom

Emma Willard: As Important as Thomas Jefferson?

by Lory Hough

"Can anyone guess when female teachers in Boston could be married and keep their jobs?" Lecturer Sally Schwager, Ed.M.'76, C.A.S.'78, Ed.D.'82, says, walking to the blackboard. She waits for the students to throw out dates.

"I'm guessing later than we think," says Alexandra Joncas, a former seventh-grade teacher.

"Good guess," Schwager says.

Several other students, about 10 in all, yell out years -- none correct -- and Schwager finally writes the correct date in big numbers across the board: 1955.

"Are you kidding?" someone says. "Whoa," say a few others. The students, all former teachers (plus one librarian), are shocked. (It wouldn't be the only time during the three-hour class called "The History of Women's Education in the United States.")

During this meeting, the second of the fall semester, each student is giving a short oral presentation on a woman who taught or opened schools for girls and poor children during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Olivia Achtmeyer, Ed.M.'07, finishes her summary of Emma Willard, an early 1800s educator who was passionate about intellectual opportunities for women. The class is surprised to learn that Willard, despite her pioneering work, did not publicly support suffrage and that men controlled the schools she started (and those started by other women, as well).

"Why do you think this is?" Schwager says.

The students guess: Men handled the money? Religion?

"You're thinking like twenty-first-century people," she says, reminding them that the real reason is more practical: Because of contract law, women -- even strong women like Willard -- couldn't sign documents, so men had to run their schools.

The students then get into a back-and-forth over Willard's dismissal of suffrage: Did she truly believe women shouldn't vote, some wonder, or was she just trying not to jeopardize the progress she was making by supporting a highly debated, and sometimes contentious, movement?

Eventually they move on to other women: Katy Ferguson, a former slave who never learned to read or write (she memorized scripture), but ran a school for poor orphans in New York City for 40 years; Elizabeth Thorn Scott, a widow with three kids who moved West during the Gold Rush and started a school in the basement of a church; and Prudence Crandall, a Quaker who was officially named the "state heroine," despite being attacked (and even arrested) for trying to educate black girls during the 1830s in Canterbury, Connecticut.

Schwager starts a list of common themes on the board: married, she writes. Eventually, as the class continues, the list grows: children and politics are added. She constantly asks students to cite their sources. They range from primary sources -- personal letters and school documents -- to secondary sources like obits and encyclopedia references. Throughout the class, the students take notes, mostly in old-fashioned notebooks (one is using a Macintosh laptop), but they seem more interested in having a conversation with each other and with Schwager, who moves back and forth between the blackboard and her seat next to them. (She never uses the podium.) Surprisingly, despite being a three-hour class, none of the students have coffee: They seem too interested in the topic to need it.

Toward the end of the class, Joncas says she's amazed: Despite all of her years of education, before today, she had never heard of any of the women.

"Aren't they as important as, say, Thomas Jeff erson?" she says.

Schwager smiles and nods her head. "We don't learn about teachers at all," she says.

Editor's Note: The year when female teachers in Boston could be married and keep their jobs was incorrectly identified in this story as 1955. The correct year is 1953.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

illustration by Timothy Walker