Originally Willard opened an institution in Waterford, New York but she did not receive the promised financial support and therefore moved her school to Troy, New York, where she received more support and funding. The Troy Female Seminary opened in September 1821, for boarding and day students. This was the first school in the United States to offer higher education for women. The curriculum consisted of the subjects she had longed to include in women's education: mathematics, philosophy, geography, history, and science. Willard led the school to success, and in 1831, the school had enrolled over 300 students. The school attracted students from wealthy families or families of high position. Although most of the students would still end up as housewives, Willard never hindered her students' pursuit towards women's education and continued to fight for their rights. Despite her reputation today in women's history, Willard was not a supporter of the women's suffrage movement during the mid-19th century. Willard believed that women's education was a much more important matter. When Emma Willard addressed the New York State Legislature in 1819, the year before, for example, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter in which he suggested women should not read novels "as a mass of trash" with few exceptions. "For like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged." Emma Willard told the legislature that the education of women "has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty". The problem, she said, was that "the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has been made into a standard for the formation of the female character." Reason and religion teach us, she said, that "we too are primary existences... not the satellites of men." While working at the academy in Middlebury, Willard met her future husband John Willard. He was a physician and 28 years her senior. John Willard brought four children to the marriage from his previous marriages. His nephew, also named John Willard, lived with them while attending Middlebury College, which gave Emma Willard much inspiration in forming her educational views. Emma Willard's younger sister, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, joined Emma in 1823, after the death of her first husband, Simeon Lincoln, and taught at Troy Female Seminary for eight years. Emma and John Willard had one son together, named John Willard Hart, who received the management of the Troy Female Seminary when Willard left it in 1838.