Elizabeth Peabody

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, (May 16, 1804-January 3, 1894) was a teacher and educational reformer, founder of the Kindergarten system in the United States, and an advocate of Native American rights and education. She was a prominent figure with the Transcendental Movement publishing their literary journal The Dial. In her journal Aesthetic Papers she published excerpts of Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in 1849. She supported important writers of that era such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller with her bookstore and publishing house that she operated in Boston, the seat of cultural and intellectual thought in the mid-1800s. She was also instrumental in the publication of Pauite Indian translator, Sarah Winnemucca's autobiography Life Among the Pauites.

Early Life and Influences

She was born in Billerica, Massachusetts. Peabody's father was the dentist Nathaniel Peabodyand her mother was Elizabeth Palmer. She had two brothers; her sisters were Sophia Amelia Peabody (who married Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, (who became the wife of educator Horace Mann)

Educational Philosophy and early experiments

During 1834-1835, she worked as assistant teacher to Bronson Alcott at his famous experimental Temple School in Boston. It was in her shop, 13 West Street bookstore in Boston, that the transcendentalist's "conversations" were held, organized by Margaret Fuller, and attended by Lydia Emerson, abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Sophia Dana Ripley, a founder of the experimental community Brook Farm, among others.

After the school closed, Peabody published Record of a School, outlining Alcott's philosophy of early childhood education.

Advocate for Kindergartens

When she opened her kindergarten in 1860, the concept of providing formal schooling for children younger than six was largely confined to German practice. Through her own kindergarten, and as editor of the Kindergarten Messenger (1873-77), Peabody helped establish kindergarten as an accepted institution in U.S. education. She also wrote numerous books in support of the cause. The extent of her influence is apparent in a statement submitted to Congress on February 12, 1897, in support of free kindergartens:

The advantage to the community in utilizing the age from 4 to 6 in training the hand and eye; in developing the habits of cleanliness, politeness, self-control, urbanity, industry; in training the mind to understand numbers and geometric forms, to invent combinations of figures and shapes, and to represent them with the pencil—these and other valuable lessons… will, I think, ultimately prevail in securing to us the establishment of this beneficent institution in all the city school systems of our country.

(Source: Library of Congress Today in History: May 16)

Later life and work

With grounding in history and literature and a reading knowledge of ten languages, in 1840 she also opened a bookstore, which held Margaret Fuller's "Conservations" and published books from Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne in addition to the periodicals The Dial and Aesthetic Papers. She was an advocate of antislavery and of Spiritualism. Morever, she also led decades of efforts for the Paiute Indians.