Women's seminary

A female seminary is a private educational institution for women, popular especially in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when opportunities in educational institutions for women were scarce. The movement was a significant part of a remarkable transformation in American education in the period 1820–1850. Supporting academic education for women, the seminaries were part of a large and growing trend toward women's 'equality'. Some trace its roots to 1815, and characterize it as at the confluence of various liberation movements. Some of the seminaries gradually developed as four-year colleges.

The Bethlehem Female Seminary was founded in 1742 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Established as a seminary for girls, it eventually became the Moravian Seminary and College for Women and later merged with nearby schools to become the coeducational Moravian College. The Girls' School of the Single Sister's House was founded in 1772 in what is now Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Originally established as a primary school, it later became an academy (high school) and finally a college. It is the oldest female educational establishment that is still a women's college (Salem College), and the oldest female institution in the Southern United States.

Female seminaries were a cultural phenomenon across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. They succeeded the boarding school, which had offered a more family-like atmosphere. In contrast, seminaries were often larger institutions run by more professionalized teachers, an equivalent to men's colleges. Such parity between men's and women's education had been demanded by notable educators and women's rights activists such as Emma Willard and Catharine Beecher. Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, which is hailed as the first institute in the US for women's higher education. Beecher (the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) founded the Hartford Female Seminary in 1823, promoted female education and teaching in the American West in the 1830s, and in 1851 started the American Women's Educational Association. Much was at stake in women's education, which was reflected in the very name "seminary":

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