Sarah Pierce was a teacher, educator and founder of one of the earliest schools for girls in the United States, the Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut. The school having been established in her house in 1792 became known as the Litchfield Female Academy in 1827. The school for girls attracted an estimated 3,000 students from across the United States and Canada. Some of her most famous attendees and protégés were Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut, founded in 1792 by Sarah Pierce, was one of the most important institutions of female education in the United States. During the 30 years after its opening the school enrolled more than 2,000 students from 17 states and territories of the new republic, as well as Canada and the West Indies. Some 1,848 students known to have attended the school have been identified through school lists, diaries and journals, correspondence, as well as art and needlework done at the school. Many more, unidentified to date, attended, especially before 1814, when formal attendance lists were first kept. The longevity of the school, the size of the enrollments, the wide geographic distribution of the student body, the development of the curriculum and the training of teachers, all distinguish it from the numerous other female academies of the Early Republic. The young women were exposed to ideas and customs from all the relatively isolated parts of the new nation, developing a more national perspective than most Americans of the period.