WOMAN IN ART
"On opening her school, Mrs Willard taught the round of light and superficial studies that the age had prescribed for "females," but in a letter she writes, "My neighborhood to Middlebury College made me bitterly feel the disparity in educational facilities between the sexes." She had already made private excursions into the realms of solid learning, forbidden to her sex, and she was profoundly conscious of woman's capacity to understand all that was highest and best in the reaches of human thought. Why should the sister be deprived of the intellectual culture that is offered to the brother? Why will not the companionship of wedded life be purer and stronger if the mental training of the wife is comparable with that of the husband? Why will not the mother give to the world nobler sons and daughters if her own character be strengthened and refined by the highest education? These are hackneyed questions today, but they were new to the world when in 1815 they first throbbed in the brain of Mrs. Emma Willard."
These thoughts with their compelling power set her to work on "a plan for improving female education." It was slow work. For two or three years she wrote and rewrote, and tested some of the theories of her plan; formed a class in moral philosophy, another in philosophy of the mind, taking Locke's great work as text book. The professors of the college were fearlessly invited to attend her examinations, and to witness the proofs that "the female mind" could appreciate and apprehend the solid studies of the college course. She desired in turn to attend the examinations of the young men, to learn how they were conducted, and to see what attainments in scholarship were made in college. "It is humiliating to think that this privilege was refused, President Davis considering that it would not be a safe precedent, and it would be unbecoming in her to attend. But let us not blame too severely this staunch defender of the proprieties; he was simply guarding well-bred society from a terrible nervous shock."
In 1818 Mrs. Willard sent her plan to Governor Clinton, of New York. It was then for a Female Seminary involving state assistance; and in his next message the Governor strongly urged an appropriation in behalf of female education. An act was passed incorporating a Female Academy at Waterford, New York, and giving to female academies a share of the literary fund. Mrs. Willard's school was removed to Waterford the ensuing spring, and her "Plan" was published under the title of "An Address to the Public, Particularly to the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education." Its circulation in several states and abroad led even-
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