Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps (July 15, 1793 – July 15, 1884) was an American scientist, educator, author, and editor. Her botany writings influenced more early American women to be botanists, including Eunice Newton Foote and her daughter, Augusta Newton Foote Arnold. Though she primarily wrote regarding nature, she also was a writer of novels, essays, and memoir.
Phelps was a native of Connecticut. Her long and active life was devoted to the education of young women. She published several popular science textbooks in the fields of botany, chemistry, and geology. Some of her works worthy of special commemoration include, The Blue Ribbon Society; The School Girls Rebellion; Christian Households; Familiar Lectures on Botany; Our Country and its Relation to the Present, Past and Future; and The Fireside Friend. Her views on topics ranging from elocution to corsets are contained in Lectures to Young Ladies, Comprising Outlines and Applications of the Different Branches of Female Education for the User of Female Schools, and Private Libraries.
Early life and education
Almira Hart was born on July 15, 1793, in Berlin, Connecticut. She was the youngest of 17 children, growing up in an intellectual, independently thinking, and religious environment. She and her family lived on a farm. Her mother, Lydia, took interest in anatomy, examining the animals she cooked and thereby developing a rudimentary knowledge of human anatomy. This afforded her the ability to reset dislocated joints and perform other basic first aid for her family and community, in cases where a doctor was not immediately available. Lydia also studied the properties of plants, and she later discussed these observations with her daughter Almira, later on after her interest in botany had begun. Lydia Hart taught her children the value of the world around them, and they learned to work hard on the farm. Through these lessons, Lydia also taught her daughters what she believed to be their place in the world, as women.
The Hart home was an open place where members of the community would often gather to debate a vast array of subjects. Almira's father, Samuel Hart, himself loved to argue and debate, and there was often a dissenter or a preacher in their home who had stopped by to argue with him. The Hart children were encouraged to question things, and to create their own opinions on various matters. Almira and her family often gathered around the fireplace, where her father and mother would share tales of their ancestors and family anecdotes. Almira's favorite tales concerned the Revolutionary war. It was in this environment, which nurtured learning and independent thought, where Almira Hart grew up.
Through her close friendship with the elderly mother of a bookseller, Almira had access to a vast array of books from an early age. She loved to read, and at first seemed to enjoy reading anything she could get her hands on. One of Almira's most influential mentors was her older sister, Emma Hart Willard. Emma would become an influential reformer of women's education, and advised her sister early on to choose good books with which to educate herself, instead of merely reading for the pastime of it. When Almira was 17, she went to live with Emma and her husband, as her sister was in charge of the female academy at Middlebury. While living with her sister, she was also mentored by John Willard and three of his fellow students who also came to live in the Willard household. She studied mathematics and philosophy. Young men from Middlebury College often boarded with the Willards, or in homes nearby, while they were attending college. This allowed Almira, and other women like her, the chance to gain a secondhand college education, engaging in discussions with the boarders and thereby learning subjects which were at that time not taught, or taught only basically, at the female academies. It was in this secondhand fashion that Almira was able to learn higher mathematics.
Career
At the age of 16, Almira began her teaching career in district schools. She later continued her own education. In 1814, she opened her first boarding school for young women at her home in Berlin; and two years later, she became principal of a school in Sandy Hill, New York.
Troy Female Seminary
In 1817, Almira married Simeon Lincoln and left her career for six years to be a housewife and mother to her three children. After her husband's death in 1823, she resumed her career in education. She became a teacher and later, in 1829, vice-principal, at the well-known Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, which was run by her sister Emma Hart Willard.