But even without this change in ideas, economic conditions steadily forced the women into educational activity.  There were not enough men available to teach the scattered country schools, and citizens had to be trained for the needs of the new democracy.  John Adams recognized this when he wrote to Mr. Warren that their wives must “teach their sons the divine science of politics;” though he would have been one of the last to favor admitting women to full participation in public life.  He did not realize that if women were to train men for citizenship, the rudiments of knowledge which they had learned in scattered schools and in their poor little academies must be greatly supplemented.  Life, however, is never logical, and at this advance men balked.  Necessity was forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence into larger preparation for their own lives; but public opinion, here as elsewhere, failed to recognize the forces that were compelling its action.

Thus the work of furnishing more advanced intellectual training for American women had to be started by the women themselves.  This is possibly the first time in human history that a great group of people feeling itself irresistibly moving toward a social, industrial and political readjustment, little less than revolutionary in its nature, has gone deliberately to work to prepare for the change through education.  The working classes of the world are doing the same thing now; but women showed them the way.  In some vague degree, American women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a mass of working men in England.  “All this passion for justice will accomplish nothing,” he declared, “unless you get knowledge.  You may become strong and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution, but you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win over ignorance."[21]

[21] The Highway, London, Nov., 1911.

American women were fortunate, too, in having for their leaders such women as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher.  Emma Willard was a woman of the world; she had traveled abroad and she brought to her work a cultivated nature, wide experience of life and natural leadership.  Her personality went far toward lifting the movement to a plane of respect.  After trying a little academy in Vermont, she appealed to the State of New York in 1814 for help.  In this appeal, she wisely adopted the prevailing view of the relation of the state to education.  The state must have good citizens, she repeats, and then goes on, “The character of children will be formed by their mothers; and it is through the mothers that the government can control the character of its future citizens.”  The State of New York granted her articles of incorporation for her academy at Waterford, N.Y., but refused her the modest sum of five thousand dollars for which she had asked.  In 1821, she established the Troy Female Seminary, where for years she trained and led the intellectual life of American women.