Front matter

A Reprint of the Second Edition of 1819

“My neighborhood to Middlebury College made me bitterly feel the disparity in educational facilities between the sexes.”

From a letter of Mrs. Willard

Published by Middlebury College on the 100th anniversary of the issue of the first edition

Middlebury, Vermont 1918

The following pages reproduce without change a document which has been called the Magna Carta of the higher education of women in America. It was written during the two or three years preceding 1819 in Middlebury, in a house just across the street from the campus of Middlebury College. Some years earlier Mrs. Willard had conducted in Middlebury a school for young women not essentially different from the boarding schools she condemns so vigorously. It was in contact with the worthier education offered to young men in the college that she developed her conviction of the need of radical change in the education of women and the principles she put in force in her second school in Middlebury, which was later removed to Troy.

The world war and its attendant changes in the position and occupations of women is leading to a re-examination of the purposes and methods of women’s education. This notable address of one of the great pioneers in the higher education of women in America is re-published, not merely as a bit of antiquarian zeal on the part of the college which furnished stimulus and suggestion to its author, but also as a statement of principles and ideals which ought not to be neglected in the effort to adapt the higher education of women to the larger place in the life of the world which they are henceforth to occupy.

AN ADDRESS TO THE PUBLIC; PARTICULARLY TO THE MEMBERS OF THE LEGISLATURE OF NEW-YORK, PROPOSING A PLAN FOR IMPROVING FEMALE EDUCATION.

BY EMMA WILLARD.

SECOND EDITION.

MIDDLEBURY: PRINTED BY J. W. COPELAND, 1819.