The Forum · BBC World Service

The fight for women’s education

May 18, 2024·49 min·3 clips

An eight-year-old girl was told 'girls don't play bass' — then became her high school's lead bass player years later.

Girls were told no. The programme opens with listener memories of ambitions cut short by gender, including university, medicine, and even the bass, before Izzy Lawrence places women's education inside a longer story of schooling and development. Teachers come first. That gives the conversation its footing, because the panel talks about schools as places shaped by the adults who either widen a girl's options or quietly close them down. Asia and Europe carry the history. Paramala describes nineteenth-century India, where colonial authorities and political leaders disagreed over what girls should learn and how far their schooling should go. Parents make the story less tidy. Some liberal Indian parents, she says, wanted daughters to study the same subjects as boys and sit the matriculation examination instead of accepting a narrower version of education for girls. Then the pioneers arrive. Savitribai Phoola and Jyothi Rao Phoola are treated as major figures, with Jyothi Rao Phoola's schools also admitting marginalized Dalit children and stretching the idea of access. John Bethune comes next. The Scottish lawyer's girls' high school in India matters because it pushed beyond primary education and became a college in 1879. Four years later, Chandramukhi Bose and Kadambini Ganguly became the first two Indian women graduates, a detail that makes the institutional story feel less distant. The UK takes a different path. Jane points to Frances Buss, founder of the North London Collegiate School for Girls in the 1850s, as part of a change in public opinion that still met resistance. The question does not stay in the past. Near the end, the programme turns to rising costs, school fees, and the strain they put on students now. Listener Jamie, speaking from the Philippines, closes on a warmer note: women are doing better in education than before, and gender does not limit what they can do. The episode is hopeful, but not smug about it. Progress is real, uneven, and still depends on families, teachers, institutions, and students refusing the old instruction to stop.

As heard by us

A clear BBC history of women's education, from pioneering schools to the costs and assumptions that still shape who gets to study.

The Forum treats women's education as a history of permission: who granted it, who withheld it, and how girls and women pushed past both. Izzy Lawrence opens with listeners remembering the old refusals, from being told to marry instead of study to hearing that girls could not…

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Why you'd press play

When you want a calm BBC World Service discussion of women's education, from listener memories to 19th-century schools in India and the UK.

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