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- Mary Mason Lyon was a pioneer in women's education. She established the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts,. Within two years, she raised $15,000 to build the Mount Holyoke School. She also established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts and served as its first president (or "principal") for 12 years. Lyon's vision for Mount Holyoke fused intellectual challenge and moral purpose. She valued socioeconomic diversity and endeavored to make the seminary affordable for students of modest means. The daughter of a farming family in Buckland, Massachusetts, Lyon had a hardscrabble childhood. Her father died when she was six, and the entire family pitched in to help run the farm. Lyon was thirteen when her mother remarried and moved away; she stayed behind in Buckland in order to keep house for her brother Aaron, who took over the farm. She attended various district schools intermittently and, in 1814, began teaching in them as well. Lyon's modest beginnings fostered her life-long commitment to extending educational opportunities to girls from middling and poor backgrounds. Lyon was eventually able to attend two secondary schools, Sanderson Academy in Ashfield and Byfield Seminary in eastern Massachusetts. At Byfield, she was befriended by the headmaster, Rev. Joseph Emerson, and his assistant, Zilpah Polly Grant. She also soaked up Byfield's ethos of rigorous academic education infused with Christian commitment. She was baptized in the Congregational Church in 1822. Lyon then taught at several academies, including Sanderson, a small school of her own in Buckland, Adams Female Academy (run by Grant), and the Ipswich Female Seminary (also run by Grant). During these years, Lyon gradually developed her vision for Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which would resemble Grant's schools in many respects but, Lyon hoped, draw its students from a wider socioeconomic range. Mount Holyoke opened in 1837. Lyon strove to maintain high academic standards: she set rigorous entrance exams and admitted no students under the age of 16. In keeping with her social vision, she limited the tuition to $60/year, about one-third the tuition that Grant charged at Ipswich Female Seminary. In order to keep costs low, Lyon required students to perform domestic tasks-- an early version of work/study. She also paid her teachers relatively poorly. Though her policies were sometimes controversial, the seminary quickly attracted its target student body of 200. Lyon died of erysipelas (possibly contracted from an ill student in her care) on March 5, 1849. The Mary Lyon dormitory at Swarthmore College, formerly a girls' school, is named in her memory.
- Mary Lyon war eine US-amerikanische Pädagogin und Frauenrechtlerin. Sie war die Gründerin und erste Präsidentin der Mädchenschule Mount Holyoke College.
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