Savitribai's marriage to 12-year-old Jyotirao Phule in 1840, may have been the biggest stroke of luck in her life. At this time in India, there was no public education and only the Brahmin class were allowed to go to school beyond a rudimentary level.

Jyotirao, a farmer's son, was cut from school at a young age, but managed to enroll in a Scottish missionary school. There were a small number of missionary schools in the country, which were open to all castes. Jyotirao attended to year seven.

He had modern views about women and when Savitribai showed interest in learning, he taught her to read and write while contining his farm work.

Later, Savitribai attended a training course for teachers at an American missionary institute and another in the nearby town of Pune. 

Then when she was 17, in 1848, Savitribai and her husband started India's first school for girls at Bhide Wada and she became the first woman teacher.

People snubbed them socially and this was where people attacked her with rocks and manure on her walk to school. The next year Jyotirao's father kicked them out of the house because he didn't agree with them.

This first indigenously-run school for girls operated out of the home of a friend of the couple. It did not teach the Brahmanical texts as in the Indian schools for boys, but instead offered mathematics, science and social studies. Savitribai also encouraged the girls in writing and art.

​​​​​​​Girls in school in Sindh Province, Pakistan circa 1870s, courtesy of the British Library

"I believe that education is the key to every woman's liberation.

 The more you know the less likely you are to be afraid.

 Your education is your passport to a better future." ~Savitribai Phule

Savitribai did not stop at educating girls; she took on major injustices of the time including the treatment of widows. Though the law forbade burning them alive, Widows were treated horribly.

Traditionally in India, widows were considered unclean, cast out of homes, given barely anything to eat and marked by having their heads shaved. Savitribai organized barbers to strike in Pune and Mumbai to protest the custom of shaving widow's heads.

Jyotirao was also a social activist and anti-caste social reformer, thinker and writer. At a time when even the shadow of an untouchable was regarded as impure, this young couple dug a well in the courtyard of their home for the untouchable caste to get drinking water.

In possibly another first, they established a care home with the specific goal of preventing infanticide in India. Women who couldn't care for their babies could leave then at Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha. The center offered refuge and care for pregnant women no matter the circumstances, providing a safe place to deliver their babies.

Savutribai's, husband Jyotirao had died when the world's third major bubonic plague pandemic spread to India. She and her adopted son who'd become a doctor opened a clinic to treat the waves of people sickened in the area around Nalasopara in 1897. She caught the plague from her patients and, at age 66, died from it.

Savitribai's example of defiance and courage lives on, as do her books and poems expressing radically feminist views. She was a pioneering organizer developing ways for Indian women to improve their lives and push for humane, just and equal treatment.

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