Female seminary

[citation needed] The Girls' School of the Single Sister's House was founded in 1772 in what is now Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

[4] Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, which is hailed as the first institute in the US for women's higher education.

[7]Of 6085 seminaries and academies operating in the United States in the period circa 1850, fully half were devoted to women, many of them started by Evangelical Christians.

While they may not have been a force for freeing women, "many teachers, some missionaries, many ministers' wives, and numerous other useful citizens" were counted among alumnae.

New England seminaries propagated numerous direct descendants including Lake Erie and Mills Colleges.

[9] Southern iterations were among the country's most advanced, offering the equivalent of four-year college programs before the Civil War.

By midcentury, "female seminaries and academies were everywhere, replacing the homelike atmosphere of boarding schools with a more institutional setting".

[12] In states that had not yet instituted free public secondary schools, both female and coeducational seminaries often emerged as private solutions to this need.

[14] A few, such as the Mount Carroll Seminary (which later became Shimer College), avoided this fate and continued as independent women's institutions.