[1] Starting in 1831, together with his brother Jacob Abbott, conducted the Mount Vernon School for Girls in Boston, Massachusetts.

Beginning in 1841, he served with the literary department of the American Tract Society, a position he kept until 1843, when he went to New York City to found a new girls' school with his brothers: the Abbott Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies.

In an era that ordinarily heralded the cult of domesticity, in which a woman’s sphere was within the home (the four qualities that a “true” or “good” woman embodied were purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity), the Spingler Institute was a contradiction: the Institute’s catalogue stated its aim was “to provide for daughters, privileges of education equal to those of sons in our Universities, Colleges, and Halls.”[citation needed] At the school’s dedication ceremony, Abbott proclaimed, “We have between one and two hundred colleges in our country, but where is the Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton for the education of females?”.

[2] Abbott’s purpose, according to The American Journal of Education, was “the hope of calling attention to a higher order of education for daughters in our country, and of elevating its general character.”[3] Abbott’s progressive school also housed a large playground for girls and provided athletic equipment, which was unusual for the era.

On August 23, 1862, The Chicago Daily Tribune called it “one of the best if not the very best institutions in the country...Parents and guardians who wish their daughters and wards to enjoy the highest social and religious advantages, and an intellectual training equal to that which our best colleges can afford, will be sure to have them at the Abbot [sic] Collegiate Institute.”[4] He also was a significant influence on Matthew Vassar in the matter of education of women.