This paper analyzes the politics of education in the United States by considering the ideas and lives of Emma Willard and Catharine Beecher, nineteenth century educational reformers. It argues that understanding these women as American Antigones, as working through the contradictions between their public writing and their private lives, provides a perspective on the history of educational reform that combines myth and history. This perspective refuses idealized accounts of lost moments or possibilities in the past, grounding educational reform in the project of reimagining gender relations within families and schools in the present.