Emily Dickinson was a woman who lived in a small New England town surrounded by rigid religious rules, thoroughly suppressed by a society which gave women virtually no opportunity for self-expression. In Emily Dickinson's time, women were the property of men. They could own neither money or land, nor they could not vote.

Education was a luxury, not a right, and here Emily had an advantage in that she did receive some formal education, first at the Amherst Academy, later at the Mount Holyoke Seminary in nearby South Hadley, a school for women with a strict religious orientation. While at Mount Holyoke, Emily studied Geology, Latin, Botany and Philosophy, wrote compositions and endured a generous amount of lecture in religious education.