Women activists who pushed boundaries and helped equate gender

7. Emma Willard

Born on February 23, 1787, in Berlin, Connecticut, she was a leading proponent of American women’s education, founding the Troy Female Seminary, which led the way for high schools for girls and of women’s high schools and colleges and also coeducational universities. She was an activist of Women's Rights before any real major movement and her work helped pave the way for later women to ascend the social ladder.

Willard opened The Troy Female Seminary in September 1821, in Troy, New York, (renamed the Emma Willard School in 1895) which is seen as one the most influential schools in America, where science, mathematics, and social studies were taught to girls. Her school was the predecessor to Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary the first public high schools for girls.

This activist also wrote many textbooks, such as History of the United States or Republic of America in 1828, and A System of Universal History in Perspective in 1835. Willard was also a poet with her volume of poems, The Fulfilment of a Promise (1831). The most notable is, Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.

Emma Willard influenced hundred of educated women, and she was a women's educational activist. She also represented the U. S. at the World’s Educational Convention in London in 1854. Including many of the other books she has written are,  A Treatise on the Motive Powers Which Produce the Circulation of the Blood (1846), Guide to the Temple of Time; and Universal History for Schools(1849), Last Leaves of American History (1849), Astronography; or Astronomical Geography (1854), and Morals for the Young (1857), according to Britannica.com.