Mary Tyler Mann

Life & Legacy

Mary Tyler Mann (née Peabody; November 16, 1806 – February 11, 1887) was an American teacher, author, and reformer. Mary was one of three Peabody sisters who were influential women of their day in education, literature, and art. Like her sister Elizabeth, she was a leader in education reform and establishment of kindergartens. Sophia was an artist and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mary was a participant in the Transcendentalism Movement. She was an abolitionist. She supported the work of her husband Horace Mann, an American education reformer and politician, as well as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sarah Winnemucca.
Mary Peabody began teaching at eighteen, first in Maine, then as a governess in Cuba, and she was a tutor and teacher in Massachusetts. She established a school for young children in Salem, Massachusetts about 1836. After her husband died in 1859, Mary Mann and her sister Elizabeth opened the first kindergarten school in the country, where they taught gymnastics, music, French, and social skills in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic. They published the book Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide to provide information about how to set up and operate a kindergarten.
Among her many publications, she contributed to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo, which was first published in 1868.