[4] In 1807, Willard left Berlin and briefly worked in Westfield, Massachusetts, before accepting a job offer at a female academy in Middlebury, Vermont.

She was unimpressed by the material taught there and opened a boarding school for women, the Middlebury Female Seminary in 1814, in her own home.

[5] She was inspired by the subjects her nephew, John Willard, was learning at Middlebury College and strove to improve the curriculum that was taught at girls' schools.

For example, the year before, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter in which he suggested women should not read novels, calling them a "mass of trash" with few exceptions, and added that "For a like reason too much poetry should not be indulged.

"[6] In her speech to the legislature, Willard said that existing women's education was inadequate both in the amount girls received compared to boys and in its foundational principles.

Another was "it has been made the first object in educating our sex, to prepare them to please the other" while "reason and religion teach, that we too are primary existencies... not the satellites of men.

Willard finally received support from New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, who invited her to open a school there.

The curriculum consisted of the subjects she had longed to include in women's education: mathematics, philosophy, geography, history, and science.

[12] Willard also published a book of poetry, The Fulfilment of a Promise (1831), with her most popular poem entitled "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," which she reportedly wrote while on an ocean voyage in 1839.

Three years later, she donated the proceeds from her book about her travels[14] to a school for women that she helped to found in Athens, Greece.

[10] This book Letters from France & Britain was reviewed alongside Abby Jane Morrell's account of her travels in the sub Antarctic, and they were described as "the productions of our self-taught countrywomen who [are] ... creditable to their sex".

[18] Her map-drawing geographic pedagogy became popular in the United States[19] and also influential in American missionary schools in South Asia during the nineteenth century.

The Troy Female Seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School in 1892 in her honor and today is still promoting her strong belief in women's education.

[1] A statue honoring her services to the cause of higher education was erected in Troy in 1895 and stands on what is now the Russell Sage College campus.