19 Facts About Sarah Pierce

Sarah Pierce was a teacher, educator and founder of one of the earliest schools for girls in the United States, the Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Sarah Pierce, called Sally, born in 1767, was the fifth child and fourth daughter of Litchfield farmer and potter, John Pierce, and his wife Mary Paterson.

Sarah Pierce's mother died in 1770 and two years later her father remarried and had three more children.

John Sarah Pierce became engaged to Ann Bard, the daughter of Dr John Bard, Washington's personal doctor in New York.

Sarah Pierce seized upon the post-revolutionary rhetoric of Republican Motherhood, which stressed the responsibility of women to provide the early intellectual and moral training of their children so they could provide adequate and intelligent opinions to politics which was believed to be crucial for the survival of the country.

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Sarah Pierce did not believe women should enter the all-male colleges or professions, but believed their work as mothers and in benevolent, charitable and reform organizations was equally, if not more, important, than the work of men.

Sarah Pierce believed the most important roles a woman had in her life was to be a wife and a mother and to do so needed to be educated as the new republic would provide new and growing responsibilities for the women in it.

Not only did Sarah Pierce believe women were to educate the youth but she believed that the future of the new republic depended on them to be spiritual and moral guardians in society.

Sarah Pierce's preached this to her students and pushed them to lead lives of moral, intellectual, and spiritual growth because of the importance of their role in the survival of society.

Sarah Pierce first offered a limited curriculum of a smattering of English, ancient and European history, geography, arithmetic and composition.

Many educational historians have dismissed the importance of the Litchfield Female Academy because of the supposed emphasis on art and needlework, rather than examining the ways in which Sarah Pierce integrated the academic subjects and the ornamental arts, using painting and embroidery to enforce intellectual topics.

Sarah Pierce insisted that her students work on more than these ornamental subjects and pushed them to read aloud or have serious conversations to ornament their minds.

Unlike most women heading female academies, Sarah Pierce was lacking in any talent for art, needlework, music and French, hiring assistant teachers for those subjects.

Sarah Pierce's continued instruction in these traditional disciplines, which were demanded by most parents in the education of their daughters.

Sarah Pierce joined the school as her assistant in 1814, teaching till 1832 when he left to take over his former student Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Academy.

Sarah Pierce's ran the school efficiently making a substantial profit while providing a means of support for many members of her family.

The effort was not a success and John Sarah Pierce Brace left Litchfield to head the Hartford Female Seminary in 1832.

Miss Sarah Pierce died at her residence in this village on Monday morning, the 19th last, at the advanced age of 83 years.

In 1792, Miss Sarah Pierce established a Female Seminary in this place which, as it was the first institution of the kind in this part of the country required great celebrity and pupils resorted to it from distant States as well as from various parts of our own State.