Jotirao Phule

(1827 - 1890)

When Jotirao Phule was around eleven years old, according to some accounts, his father was convinced to withdraw him from the local school by a Brahman clerk who felt threatened by the boy’s literacy. Three years later Phule resumed his studies in English, and after graduating in 1847 he opened a school for lower-caste girls. “Female schools,” he declared, are “even more necessary than male ones, the root of education lying in the proper turn mothers give to the disposition of children between their second and third years.”