The Trojan Women: Emma Hart Willard and the Troy Society For the Advancement of Female Education in Greece

In ancient story we are told that one oi our sex remaining in Troy wrought harm to the Greeks. In modern recital may it be said that women of American Troy have done them lasting good.-Emma Hart Willard, The Troy Press, Extra, Jan. 17, 1833In The Trojan Women, the Greek playwright Euripides focuses on the sufferings of a small group of women from the captured city of Troy as they await their departure into slavery. The play's denunciation of such brutality is symbolized in the character of Cassandra, who warns against the folly of far-flung aggression. In the end retribution comes when the god Poseidon shatters the returning Greek fleet. In the "modern recital" of the "women of Troy," as told by Emma Hart Willarcl, the scene shifts from the shores of Ilium to the banks of the Hudson River in upstate New York. There, in 1833, in the city by the same name, a small group of women led by Willard embarked on an ambitious campaign to establish, in Greece, a female seminary to train women teachers, making the women of the United States, not the ancients, the wellspring of western civilization. Women's rights arid American supremacy combine in Willard's Greek projects. Civilization will be recast simultaneously in America and the Old World to include women's influence.A leader in women's education and founder of the Troy Female Seminary (the first school to offer higher education for young women in the United States), Willard saw an opportunity to impart to the struggling Greeks, recently emancipated after four centuries of Turkish rule, some of the benefits in education that she had given to American women. Her Troy Seminary, founded in 1821, had introduced into the curriculum advanced courses in history, philosophy, morals, mathematics, and the natural sciences.' The question of female education in Greece also offered Willard a forum to enter into a much broader debate on the subject of women's rights, both at home and abroad. And like Cassandra, who foretells the consequences of male aggression against the helpless women of Troy, Willard warned against denying women their proper rights in society:[W]hen men in their legislative capacity, forget uur rights-when in extending for the education of male youth, they hestow not a thought on us-when in some cases . . . they make laws oppressive to us, it is not strange that some among us of impetuous spirits, madly seek to break the social order[.]She only had to point to the "ravings" of Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, who sought to eliminate distinctions of women's social role based on their gender. Wright was an advocate of "true equality" between the sexes; she promoted birth control, liberalized divorce laws, and legal rights for married women. Willard's goals were more moderate, but no less revolutionary.2Unlike Wright and other more "radical" feminists, Willard did not openly challenge the prevailing belief that most arenas of public life should be reserved for men. Nonetheless, she believed that the nation's future prosperity rested upon the character of its citizens-characters that would be formed by American mothers. In antebellum America, women could not participate in formal politics, nor could they pursue many professional or business careers. Married women had no property rights or a legal identity apart from their husbands. But a prevailing female ideal, under the guise of "republican motherhood," which encouraged women to exercise their maternal and domestic faculties, also recognized women's role in promoting public virtue. While it belonged to men to determine the republic's political institutions, it fell to women to provide-through education and domestic training-the foundation for giving those institutions permanence by training their sons in republican citizenship.3For Willard, women's uplift and the improved status of women marked the degree of "civilization" reached by society as a whole. When men fail to uphold women's rights, society crumbles. …