Who Started India’s First School For Girls? Lessons For Caregivers From A Hidden Changemaker
Last month, I sat cross-legged on the linoleum floor of the tiny local archive near our Delhi home, my 11-year-old daughter Zara’s lemon candy sticky on the back of my hand, watching her huff over a heritage club project. All the girls in her group had picked the same half-dozen names for their women’s history presentations: Sarojini Naidu, Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi. Zara had wanted something different, and the one-paragraph blurb in her school worksheet about a woman named Savitribai Phule wasn’t enough. The librarian, a silver-haired woman who brings samosas to every school visit, dug out a tattered 1990s reprint of Phule’s writing, yellowed at the edges with someone’s old faded blue underlining, and pushed it across the table to us.
That’s how we learned that in 1848, 22-year-old Savitribai Phule opened India’s first formal school for girls in Pune. Married at 9, she’d taught herself to read with the help of her husband Jyotirao Phule, when almost no one in the country would teach a girl from a working-class family. Back then, common wisdom held that teaching a girl to read cursed her family and made her unfit for marriage. People threw rocks and cow dung at Savitribai when she walked to the school each morning; she carried an extra sari with her to change into after attacks. She didn’t just teach reading and writing, either—she taught girls arithmetic and science, at a time when most people argued girls’ brains weren’t built for that kind of learning. By 1851, she and Jyotirao ran three schools for girls across Pune, focusing on Dalit and Muslim girls who were excluded from every other form of education.
Zara looked up at me halfway through reading a poem Phule wrote about education and said, “Why don’t we know this? Why isn’t this the first thing we learn about girls’ education in India?” I didn’t have a good answer for her right then. I’ve been a parent volunteer at our school for four years, and I’ve noticed how often we frame gender equity in education as something that’s already done. We talk about girls in STEM once a year, we post about closing the achievement gap, but we rarely connect that fight back to the people who started it, people who didn’t end up on currency notes or national holidays for decades after their work. What’s more, we send kids a quiet message that change only comes from people who are already famous, or already powerful. That leaves them thinking they can’t do anything to shift things in their own world, right now.
After Zara’s presentation, a few of the other parents and I started talking about small changes we could make in our kids’ daily school and home life, nothing fancy, just small shifts anyone can do. First, we started asking our kids a different question when they get home from school: instead of “what did you learn today?” we ask “what name didn’t your teacher mention today?” It sounds silly, but it gets kids looking for the stories that are left out, instead of just absorbing what’s printed in the textbook. Last week, Zara came home talking about how her chapter on the 1857 uprising only mentioned male leaders, so she looked up Rani Laxmibai’s lesser-known contemporary Uda Devi, wrote a 1-page note about her, and stuck it in her book.
The second small change we made was checking how we talk about our kids’ strengths. A month after the project, I caught myself saying “Zara’s always been better at reading than math, that’s just how she is” and I stopped mid-sentence. Savitribai was teaching girls math 175 years ago, when the whole world said they couldn’t do it, and here I was repeating the same lazy stereotype without even thinking. Now, whenever I or another parent in our group catch ourselves tying a skill to gender, we just call it out with a quick “that’s a Phule reminder” and rephrase. No big lecture, no guilt. It’s a tiny adjustment, but it’s already changed how our kids talk about what they can do. Last month, my neighbor’s 10-year-old daughter said she didn’t want to join the after-school robotics club because “robots are for boys” and her mom just said “want to guess what Savitribai would say about that?” and the girl signed up the next day.
We also cleared a blank wall in our school lobby and turned it into a hidden changemaker wall. Any kid can add a name, a photo, or a short paragraph, no administrative approval needed. It started with Zara’s poster of Savitribai, and now it has a local midwife who started a free women’s health clinic in the 1970s, a male teacher who fought to get Dalit kids into our neighborhood school in the 1990s, and a group of teen girls who started a free tutoring program for nearby slum kids last year. It doesn’t cost anything, just some tape and printer paper.
Last week, I walked past the wall and saw a 7th grader had written a question in the margin of Zara’s poster: “Wait, some sources say there was an earlier girls’ school in Calcutta started by a British missionary. Is this really the first?” I mentioned it to Zara that night over dal and rice, and she pulled out her laptop to start digging. We still don’t know the full answer, and we probably won’t for a while. That’s okay, I think. The point isn’t to get every fact right, or to turn every forgotten person into a new celebrity. The point is to remind our kids that education for all didn’t just happen. It was built by ordinary people who did one small, unpopular thing every day, even when people threw rocks at them. And that same work still gets done one small thing at a time: by kids adding a poster to a wall, by parents catching themselves when they repeat an old stereotype, by asking “who’s missing from this story?” Right now, that’s enough for us.
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