When Meena asked me to take her children home with me, I realized we had to do more than help mothers give birth safely. We had to see the big picture. That’s why we expanded our foundation’s work in family planning. But every time I’ve thought, Okay, now we’re seeing the big picture, I’d meet another woman or girl who would show me a bigger picture. And my most important teachers were not the experts we would meet with in Seattle. They were women and girls who met us in their towns and talked about their dreams.
One of our teachers was Sona, a 10-year-old girl who came from a very poor community in a village called Kanpur, home to one of the lowest castes in India. The people there lived in about six feet of trash because of the work they did. They would go gather the garbage from other areas, bring it to their village, pick out whatever had value, and sell it—leaving whatever they couldn’t sell strewn on the ground around them. That’s how they earned a living.
Gary Darmstadt, my foundation colleague, met Sona on a visit he made to Kanpur in 2011 to talk about family planning. On the morning of his visit, he greeted our partners from the Urban Health Initiative, and they all walked through the village till they came to a place where meetings were held. As soon as the group stopped, a cluster of women gathered around them, and Sona—the only girl among them—walked up to Gary and handed him a toy parrot. She had found the raw material in the trash, bent and carved it into the form of a bird, and now offered it as a gift. When Gary thanked her, Sona looked him in the eyes and said, “I want a teacher.”
Gary was a bit thrown by this. He had come to Kanpur to discuss family planning with the women of the village, not to start a school. For the moment he left aside Sona’s comment and began talking with the mothers. It turned out they were very happy with the program. For the first time, they felt they were beginning to gain some control over their lives. It’s always gratifying to hear good news. But throughout the conversation, Gary could see Sona standing around waiting, and as soon as there was a pause, she would say to Gary, “I want a teacher. You can help me.” Over the course of three hours, probably fifty times she looked at Gary and said, “I want a teacher.”
After the group had finished its talk, Gary paused and asked one of the mothers about Sona. The woman said, “You know, we’ve told you how family planning has helped us. It’s had a tremendous impact on our lives. But the truth is, unless our kids get an education they’re going to be right back here living in trash like us. It’s good to be able to control the size of my family, but I’m still poor, and I’m still picking trash. Our kids are going to have the same life unless they can go to school.”
It takes courage to ask for what you want—especially when it’s more than people think you should have. Sona had a magical combination of courage and self-regard that allowed her to ask for a teacher even though she was a low-caste girl whose parents picked trash for a living. She probably didn’t even know how bold she was being. But the women around her knew it—and they didn’t tell her to be quiet, which in a way made Sona the spokeswoman for the group, saying what the mothers believed but didn’t quite have the nerve to say.
Sona had no leverage over anyone. She had only the innocence of a child speaking her truth and the moral power of a girl saying “Please help me grow.” That power guided her in the right direction, because more than almost anything else society and government provide, education determines who thrives.
Education is a vital step on the path to empowerment for women—a path that starts with good health, nutrition, and family planning and prepares you to earn an income, run a business, form an organization, and lead. In this chapter, I want to introduce you to some heroes of mine, people who have opened up opportunities for students who were treated like outsiders undeserving of an education.
But first, let me tell you what happened to Sona. Our partners who met with Gary to talk about family planning knew the area and its laws well. When they heard Sona saying “I want a teacher” and listened to a mother talking to Gary about education, they got together and developed a plan. The land Sona lived on with her family was not registered with the government. In fact, they had no legal right to be there. So our partners went to the local government and did all the work needed to get Sona and her neighbors registered as inhabitants, which was an amazing thing; the government officials could have found all kinds of tricks to block the change, but instead they supported it. When the people were declared legal inhabitants of that land, the families were then entitled to a full range of government services—including schools. Sure enough, Sona got a teacher. She got books. She got a uniform. She got an education. And not just Sona, but every kid in the village, and it was all triggered by one small child with courage looking a visitor in the eyes, offering him a gift, and saying over and over again, “I want a teacher.”
The lift that comes from sending girls like Sona to school is stunning—for the girls, their families, and their communities. When you send a girl to school, the good deed never dies. It goes on for generations advancing every public good, from health to economic gain to gender equity and national prosperity. Here are just a few of the things we know from the research.
Sending girls to school leads to greater literacy, higher wages, faster income growth, and more productive farming. It reduces premarital sex, lowers the chance of early marriage, delays first births, and helps mothers plan how many children to have and when. Mothers who have had an education do a better job learning about nutrition, vaccination, and other behaviors necessary for raising healthy children.
Half of the gains in child survival in the past two decades can be attributed to gains in mothers having gone to school. And mothers who have gone to school are more than twice as likely to send their own children to school.
Girls’ education can have transformative effects on the health, empowerment, and economic advancement of women. But we still don’t have detailed knowledge about why. What happens in the minds and lives of girls that leads to these benefits? Are the changes triggered by literacy, role modeling, the practice of learning, or just getting out of the house?
Many of the principal claims I’ve heard make strong intuitive sense: Women who can read and write can do better navigating the health system. School helps girls learn how to tell the stories of their families’ health issues to health providers. Learning from teachers helps mothers learn how to teach their own children. Also, when girls are in the classroom and see how they can learn, they begin seeing themselves differently, and that gives them a sense of their own power.
This last idea is especially exciting to me—it means that women can use the skills they learn in school to dismantle the rules that keep them down. When I visit schools and talk to students, this is where I feel the power of the work. It goes back to high school for me, when I volunteered in a crowded public school tutoring kids in math and English. When kids learn something new, they see they can grow; that can lift their sense of self and change their future.
People who’ve been treated like outsiders often come to school thinking that they don’t deserve more and should never demand it because they won’t get it. Good schools change that view. They instill in their students an audacious sense of who they are and what they can do. These high expectations are in direct conflict with society’s low expectations for these kids, and that’s the point. Schools that empower students on the margins are subversive organizations. They foster a self-image in the students that is a direct rebuke to the social contempt that tries to keep them in their place.
You can see this socially defiant mission in good schools everywhere—in the United States, South Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa. These schools change the lives of students who’ve been led to believe that they don’t matter, that they don’t deserve a full chance.
About ten years ago on a trip to Los Angeles, I was talking with nearly a hundred African American and Latino kids from tough backgrounds when one young woman asked me: “Do you ever feel like we’re just somebody else’s kids whose parents shirked their responsibilities, that we’re all just leftovers?”
That question shocked me. It made me want to embrace her and convince her that her life had infinite value, that she had the same rights and deserved the same opportunities as anyone. But on the same trip, I saw why she didn’t think that way. I talked to another young woman who was taking a course of studies that, even if she aced it, would not prepare her for college, or anything else. I looked at her curriculum. One lesson involved reading the back of a can of soup in a grocery store and knowing the contents. That was math class. And that wasn’t rare. I’ve seen the same thing in many school districts across the United States—one group of students studying Algebra II while others were taught how to balance a checkbook. The first group would head to college and careers; the second group would struggle to make a living.
Bill and I focus most of our US philanthropy on education. We believe a strong system of schools and colleges is the best idea our country has ever had for promoting equal opportunity. We focus on increasing the number of black, Latino, and low-income students who earn a high school diploma and also the number who continue their education after high school—both boys and girls. (I’m working to expand pathways into technology for girls, and girls of color specifically, through my office, Pivotal Ventures—a company I started to help spark social progress in the US.) The best schools lift up the students who never thought they could rise. And when you see that happen, it can make you cry with joy.
In 2015, Bill and I went to visit Betsy Layne High School in Floyd County, Kentucky, a rural community in the Appalachia region that has been devastated by the decline of the coal industry. The New York Times has called this area one of the toughest places in the country to live. Six counties in the region were ranked in the nation’s bottom ten in income, educational attainment, unemployment, obesity, disability, and life expectancy. Amazingly, though, over the previous ten years, when the region went into economic decline, student achievement in Floyd County had climbed from 145th in the state to 12th. We wanted to see how they were doing it.
We were joined on our trip by Vicki Phillips, then head of K–12 education at our foundation. Vicki knew about the challenges facing these students and teachers because she had lived them. As Vicki tells it, when she was a little girl, her mom and stepfather got married and paid the $500 owed in back taxes to buy a four-room house with dirt floors and broken windows that sat on a farm her family still owns in rural Kentucky. That’s where Vicki grew up, helping her family raise pigs, grow vegetables, and hunt for supper. They had a hand pump in the house and an outhouse in the back, and they didn’t think they were poor because none of their neighbors had any more than they did.
Vicki said her teachers were deeply devoted to their students, but looking back, she realized that the education she was getting wasn’t preparing her for college; it was preparing her to stay where she was. “Where I grew up,” she said, “a lot of people didn’t want excellence in schools. It scared people.
“My parents expected I would graduate high school, live in the community, get married, and have a family. The day I came home and told my parents, ‘I’m going to college,’ my stepfather said, ‘And you will not be my daughter. And if you do, don’t you ever come back. Don’t ever plan on coming back, because your values are not our values.’”
Vicki and her dad had fights about it till the day she left. He would say, “This is a safe community. You’re my daughter. Why would I feel comfortable about you doing that?”
Then, Vicki says, he drilled into the most sensitive issue. “Why do you want to leave home, anyway? Everything you might ever need is here. Is what we have not good enough? Are you saying we’re not good enough for you?”
These are common questions for families who fear that going to college means moving out and never coming back. As they see it, their culture doesn’t hold people back; it holds people together. In their eyes, pursuing excellence can look like disowning your people.
That’s how it was where she grew up, Vicki said. There was nothing in her culture to propel her to college. She made it there after meeting a girl from the rich end of the county who said to her one day, “What do you mean, you’re not going to college?!? You’re as smart as I am.” She began pushing Vicki to take tougher courses, take the college boards, and seek scholarships. That’s how Vicki overcame a culture that didn’t want her to go to college. She joined her friend’s culture. If you want to excel, Vicki says, you have to get support from the people around you. Very few people can do it alone.
Vicki was willing to face the conflict that came from challenging her culture. But she worked it out with her family, even with her dad. A year after she left, she got a call at college. The familiar masculine voice on the other end said, “Vicki, this isn’t working. Let me drive down and bring you home for a visit.” Her dad picked her up and took her home, and everybody reconnected. She and her dad got close again. They stayed honest about their differences, and he continued to tease her in an affectionate way for the rest of his life, calling her (in their family of staunch Republicans) “our little Democrat.”
Vicki went on to become a special education teacher, a school superintendent, and a state secretary of education who worked to change the norms and empower people who’d been pushed out. That’s the same drive that we found in the faculty at Betsy Layne.
The personalities there were exuberant and unforgettable—starting with Cassandra Akers, the principal. Cassandra has loved Betsy Layne for a long time; she was valedictorian of the class of 1984. She still lives in the house where she grew up, which her parents sold to her when she started teaching. She’s the oldest of seven children and the only member of her family to graduate from college, so she knows the community and the struggle the kids face.
“Our students have to know that we expect great things,” she said. “But they also know that whatever they need, we’re going to help them get it, whether it’s teaching, tutoring, extra help, food, clothes, a bed, whatever. You have to take care of all of them.”
One of the biggest challenges in changing the culture is lifting up the self-image of the kids. They’ve had self-doubt planted in their minds by society, the media, even members of their own families. Mothers and fathers who’ve never achieved their goals can easily plant their own doubts in the minds of their kids. When those doubts get into kids’ heads, they’re hard to change. People who are the victims of doubt often feel targeted, and the psychologist at Betsy Layne told me that many students felt that the world not only didn’t care about them but was rooting against them.
The harder people’s challenges have been, the more important it is to surround them with a new culture and a fresh set of expectations. One of the math teachers I met, Christina Crase, told me that she tells the students on the first day of school, “Give me two weeks!” She doesn’t want to hear about their failures, or how much they hate math, or how far behind they are. She says, “Give me a chance to show you what you can do!”
One of her projects is to help the kids build small-scale Ferris wheels. The first time she presented the idea to her class, the students thought she was nuts, but they were happy to do it. It was easier than learning math! So they poured themselves into their projects and built their Ferris wheels, and by the time Ms. Crase was explaining sine and cosine functions, all she had to do was link the idea back to the Ferris wheel, and they all got it.
The kids held this material so firmly in their minds that a few of them came running into class after visiting a local carnival and said, “Ms. Crase, we didn’t ride the Ferris wheel.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“We didn’t trust its structural integrity,” they said. Then they began explaining in the language of calculus and trigonometry.
After visiting classrooms, Bill and I joined some students for lunchtime pizza in the cafeteria. A number of them admitted they’d been afraid to take AP classes because “APs are for the smart kids.” But they took AP courses anyway and learned a lot, and the most important thing they learned was “We are the smart kids.”
Great schools don’t just teach you; they change you.
Equal education moves people toward empowerment, but unequal education does the reverse. Of all the divisive tools that are used to push people to the margins, unequal education is the most damaging and enduring. Unless there is an explicit effort to include everyone, schools will never be a remedy for exclusion; they will be a cause of it.
Yet in spite of the astounding benefits that come when girls get an education, more than 130 million girls around the world are still not in school. This number is often cited as progress—but only because the barriers to girls going to school used to be worse. During my own school years, far more of the world’s boys went to school than girls. This disparity was common in countries that didn’t require kids to go to school.
In past decades, though, governments have made a major push to reverse that, and they’ve been largely successful. Most countries are enrolling equal numbers of boys and girls in primary school. But the goal, of course, is not to make sure girls are deprived of an education at the same rate as boys. The goal is to remove all the barriers that keep children from attending school, and in some places the barriers are still more significant for girls than for boys. This is particularly true in secondary school, generally considered to be school years seven through twelve. In Guinea, just one in four girls is enrolled in secondary school, while almost 40 percent of boys are. In Chad, fewer than a third of girls are enrolled in secondary school, but more than two out of three boys are. In Afghanistan, too, just over a third of girls are enrolled in secondary school, compared to nearly 70 percent of boys. These barriers continue in university. In low-income countries, for every hundred boys who continue their education after high school, only fifty-five girls do the same.
Why are there fewer girls than boys in secondary and postsecondary school? Economically, sending girls to school is a long-term investment, and for families in extreme poverty, the focus is on survival. Families can’t spare the labor, or they can’t come up with the school fees. Socially, women and girls don’t need an education to play the roles that traditional societies have prepared for them. In fact, women getting an education threatens traditional roles. Politically, it’s instructive to see that the most extremist forces in the world, like Boko Haram, which kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in northeast Nigeria in 2014, have been especially hostile to girls’ education. (Boko Haram’s name actually means “Western education is forbidden.”) The extremists are saying to women, “You don’t have to go to school to be who we want you to be.” So they burn down schools and kidnap girls, hoping that families will keep their girls home out of fear. Sending girls to school is a direct attack on their view that a woman’s duty is to serve a man. One young woman who challenged that view is Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani woman who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 when she was 15 years old. Malala was known in the world before then. She was inspired by her father, who ran a chain of schools, to write a blog talking about her life as a girl going to school under the Taliban. Her blog was widely read, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize.
So when Malala was shot, it was not a random shooting of a girl who was going to school; it was a targeted hit on a well-known activist by people who wanted to silence her and frighten others who shared her views. But Malala wouldn’t keep quiet. Nine months after she was shot, she spoke at the United Nations. “Let’s pick up our books and our pens,” she said. “They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.”
A year later, in 2014, Malala became the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Peace Prize. (She learned she’d won the award when she was sitting in chemistry class!)
I had met Malala after she won the prize, and like everyone else, I was inspired by her story. But when I hosted her at an event in New York in 2017, I was even more inspired by how she told her story. Malala didn’t focus on herself. She said, “I believe we can see every girl in school in my lifetime, because I believe in local leaders.” Then she told us how she was supporting activists who were getting girls into school all around the world—and, in a surprise, she invited those activists present to come forward. They came to the stage and Malala turned the microphone over to the people who inspired her.
Today, Malala’s foundation is investing in activist-educators all over the world. One activist is educating teachers in Brazil about gender equality. Another is campaigning to end school fees in Nigeria. Another, in Malala’s home country of Pakistan, is hosting forums to persuade parents to send their daughters to school.
I’m going to follow Malala’s example. I’m going to tell you about some of the people and organizations who’ve inspired me. Governments from Kenya to Bangladesh have put massive financial resources behind making school free for girls. The UN and the World Bank have major girls’ education programs. And there are organizations, such as the Campaign for Female Education, that are making school possible for the poorest girls. Among all the great programs, I want to focus on three that especially impress me: one from a national government, one from a global organization, and one from a young Maasai woman who stood up and changed centuries of tradition.
One of the most inspiring ideas on girls’ education comes from Mexico. Some of the best ideas in development are simple ideas—after you’ve heard them. But it takes a visionary to dream them up and make them work. In Mexico in the 1990s, many families still couldn’t send their kids to school because they needed the children’s labor to get by. So in 1997, a man named José Gómez de León and his colleagues put forward a new idea. They believed that women and girls were “agents of development,” and they put that belief into practice.
The government would treat education as if it were a job and pay families to send their kids to school. Payments would be based on what children could earn if they were working for pay—a third-grader might earn $10 a month, a high schooler $60. They called the program Oportunidades—“opportunities.”
They made sure the payments for the children were given directly to the mothers. And because girls were more likely than boys to drop out, girls got a bit more money than boys to stay in school.
After the program was phased in, girls who were in Oportunidades had a 20 percent greater chance of being in school than girls who weren’t. Not only did more girls go to school, but those who did stayed in school longer. The program helped nearly 6 million families.
Just twenty years after the program began, Mexico has achieved gender parity in education—not only at the primary school level but also in high school and college. And Mexico has the world’s highest percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women.
The World Bank called Mexico’s effort a model for the world and said it was the first to focus on extremely poor households. Fifty-two countries now have some form of the same program.
I had been aware of the work of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee since it won a Gates Global Health Award in 2004, and I visited the founder, Fazle Hasan Abed, in Bangladesh in 2005. In addition to its visionary work in health and microcredit, BRAC is the largest secular private educator in the world, and focuses on educating girls.
Back in the 1970s, when Bangladesh was recovering from its liberation war, most families were running small farms, struggling to get by and relying heavily on their children, especially their daughters. As a result, by the 1980s, less than 2 percent of Bangladeshi girls were in school by the fifth grade, and half as many girls as boys were in high school. That was when Fazle Hasan Abed, a Bangladeshi who’d become a successful businessman in Europe, decided to come home to found BRAC and start building schools.
When BRAC got started in 1985, every one of their schools had to have at least 70 percent girls. All of the teachers had to be female, and they all had to come from the community, so that parents wouldn’t be afraid for their daughters’ safety. Each BRAC school set its own schedule to accommodate the growing season, so that families who relied on girls’ farm labor could send their daughters to school. Also, BRAC schools provided books and materials free of charge, so that costs could never be an excuse for keeping a girl out of school.
As the number of BRAC schools grew, the country’s religious extremists—recognizing that schools lift women up—began to burn the schools down. Abed rebuilt them. He said BRAC’s goal was to challenge the culture that kept women down, and the arsonists proved that BRAC was getting results. Today, Bangladesh has more girls attending high school than boys, and BRAC runs 48,000 schools and learning centers around the world. It goes to the most dangerous places in the world for a girl to attend school and slowly helps those cultures change.
In many rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, young girls are expected to obey the customs of their culture, not challenge them, and certainly not change them.
Kakenya Ntaiya, like most other 13-year-old girls in Kenya’s Maasai community, had her future mapped out for her the second she was born. She would go to primary school until she reached puberty. Then she would submit to female genital cutting and drop out of school and be married to the boy she became engaged to at age 5. From that day on, she would fetch water, gather wood, clean house, cook food, and work the farm. It was all planned out, and when the life of a girl is planned out, the plan serves everyone but the girl.
Change starts when someone says “No!”
I first learned about this courageous Maasai girl when our foundation helped fund a film contest for documentaries about people changing the world, and the winner was a film featuring Kakenya.
Kakenya wanted to be a teacher. That meant she couldn’t quit her studies when she hit puberty. She couldn’t get married and cook and clean for her new family. She had to stay in school. I can’t imagine her boldness. I was a good kid in grade school. I wanted everyone’s approval. I was lucky that what I wanted for my life was in line with what my parents and teachers wanted, but if my dreams and theirs had diverged, I don’t know if I could have stood up for myself.
Kakenya apparently didn’t have those doubts. When she turned 13, she offered her father a deal: She would submit to the female genital cutting, but only if he would agree that she could stay single and keep going to school. Kakenya’s father knew that if she didn’t go through with the cutting, he would be shamed in the community. He knew his daughter was tough enough to defy tradition. He took the deal.
On the designated day, Kakenya walked into a cow pen near her home and, as her entire community watched, a local grandmother cut off her clitoris with a rusty knife. She bled profusely and fainted from the pain. Three weeks later, she was back in school, determined to become a teacher. By the time she graduated, she’d won a full scholarship to attend college in the United States.
Unfortunately, the scholarship did not include plane fare, and the people in her village weren’t likely to pay her way. When she told people she got a scholarship and asked for their help, they said, “What a lost opportunity. It should’ve been given to a boy.”
Kakenya had the courage to defy tradition, but she also had the wisdom to make it work in her favor. In the Maasai community, there is a belief that good news comes in the morning. So every morning, Kakenya would knock on the door of one of the influential men in the village. She promised that if they helped her get her education, she would come back and make a difference.
Eventually, she got the village to buy her a plane ticket.
In the US, she not only got her undergraduate degree but earned a PhD in education. She worked for the UN. She learned about the rights of women and girls. Most important, she says, “I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right.”
When she returned home to her village to keep her promise, she asked the elders to help her build a school for girls. “Why not a boys’ school?” they asked. One of the elders said he saw no need for girls to get educated, but he did respect that she’d come back home to support the village. “We have several sons who have gone to the United States for school,” he said. “Kakenya is the only person that I can think of that has come back to help.”
Kakenya saw the opening. If the boys don’t come back to help and the girl does, she told him, it makes more sense to educate the girls. Now, the elder says, “What she tells us, it touches us.… She brought a school and a light and is trying to change old customs to help girls get a better life.”
The elders donated the land for the new school, and in 2009 the doors opened at the Kakenya Center for Excellence. The school reaches girls in the late primary school years, when they’re likely to be pulled from school to be married, and helps them make the transition to secondary school. The Kakenya Center provides uniforms, books, and tutoring. In return, parents must agree that their daughters won’t undergo female genital cutting and won’t be married off while they’re still in school. Some of the center’s students have scored in the top 2 percent of the Kenya National Examinations and have gone to college in Kenya and abroad.
I don’t have any idea how people find the guts to speak up against waves of tradition, but when they do, they always end up with followers who have the same conviction but not quite the same courage. That’s how leaders are born. They say what others want to say, and the others then join them. That’s how a young woman can change not only her life but her culture.
All the women I’ve talked to and all the data I’ve seen convince me that the most transforming force of education for women and girls is changing the self-image of the girl who goes to school. That’s where the lift is. If her self-image doesn’t change, then going to school will not change the culture, because she will be using her skills to serve the social norms that keep her down.
That is the secret of an empowering education: A girl learns she is not who she’s been told she is. She is the equal of anyone, and she has rights she needs to assert and defend. This is how the great movements of social change get traction: when outsiders reject the low self-image society has imposed on them and begin to author a self-image of their own.
Sister Sudha Varghese understands this better than anyone else I know. When Sudha was a young girl attending Catholic school in southwestern India, she read an article about nuns and priests who worked with the poor and knew instantly she’d been called to a life of service. She joined a religious order, became a nun, and began her work. But it didn’t inspire her. The motherhouse was too comfortable. The people she served weren’t poor enough. “I wanted to be with the poor,” she said, “and not just the poor but the very poorest among them. So I went to the Musahar.”
Her faith taught Sudha to go to the people on the margins. She chose the people on the outermost margins. Musahar means “rat eaters.” They are “untouchables” in India—people born into a caste system that sees them as less than human. They can’t enter village temples or use the village path. They can’t eat at the same tables or use the same utensils as others. The Musahar are considered so low that they are looked down on by other “untouchables.”
When Sudha first decided she wanted to work with the Musahar, there was no organized way to do it, nothing set up for her to join. So she traveled alone to a Musahar community in northeast India and asked the people there for a place to stay. She was given space in a grain shed and immediately began working to improve the lives of the lowest of the Musahar—the women and girls.
Sudha told me that she had once asked a group of Musahar women to raise their hands if they had never been struck by their husbands. Not a single woman raised her hand. She thought the question had been misunderstood, so she asked the group, “Raise your hand if your husband has struck you.” Every woman raised her hand. Every woman there had been beaten in her own home.
Outside the home was worse. Musahar women live under constant threat of sexual violence and face a continuous stream of scorn. If the girls walk outside the village, people will hiss “Musahar” at them and remind them they are untouchable. If they laugh or walk too freely, someone will grab them by the arm and tell them their behavior is unacceptable for a Musahar girl.
From the time they are born, society is constantly telling them they are completely worthless.
After working for more than twenty years to improve the lives of Musahar women—facing scorn because she lived with “untouchables” and receiving death threats for her efforts to bring rape cases to trial—Sudha decided in 2005 that the best thing she could do was to open a free boarding school for Musahar girls.
Sister says, “All they have known and heard and seen is ‘You are like dirt.’ They have internalized this. ‘This is my lot. This is where I belong. I don’t belong on the chair. I will sit on the floor, and then no one can tell me to go any lower than that.’ All their lives they are told, ‘You are the last. You are the least. You do not deserve to have.’ They learn very fast to keep quiet, not to expect changes, and don’t ask for more.” The goal of Sister’s school was to turn that self-image around.
One of my favorite lines of scripture is “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” That, to me, captures Sister Sudha’s mission, and she starts by teaching her students that no matter what their society tells them, they should never put themselves last.
She called her new school Prerna, which means “inspiration” in Hindi. When I visited Sister there, she took me by the hand and introduced me to all the students we met, by name. The girls are often homesick when they arrive, and Sister stopped to comfort a young girl who was in tears, stroking her head as they spoke. Sister touched all the girls as she talked to them, putting her hand on a shoulder, patting another on the back, pouring out love to everyone she saw. If the girls get hurt, she bandages them herself—because they aren’t used to having anyone care that they are wounded. Sister wants to undercut their sense that they are untouchable.
She says, “When they get here, they are just looking at the ground all the time. To get their eyes lifted is something.” The girls I met held their heads high and looked me in the eye. They were respectful, curious, bright-eyed, confident—even a bit cheeky. One girl heard I was married to Bill Gates and asked me how much money I had on me. I turned my empty pockets inside out as Sister and I laughed.
The girls at Prerna all take the usual subjects like English and math and music and computers. But Sister also offers a special curriculum, something she’d been trying to teach the Musahar from the moment she arrived. She insists that every girl know her rights—the right to study, the right to play, the right to walk around freely, the right to be safe, the right to speak up for herself.
They’ve been told their whole lives that they are the lowest of the low, but here they are taught “You have the same rights as other people. And you must use your skills to defend your rights.”
Defending yourself is not just an abstract lesson. Sister Sudha makes the girls learn karate. They’re often targets of sexual violence at home or in the field, so Sister wants them to know that they have the right not to be attacked—and they have the power to take on their attacker. (It turns out that teaching physical defense skills is proven to reduce violence against adolescent girls.) Sister told me with pleasure the story of one of her girls delivering a kick to the gut of a drunken man interested in sexual favors. He stumbled off and never came back.
Learning karate—or any form of self-defense—was bewildering to girls who’d been trained to accept abuse. But the girls worked hard, and their progress was so impressive that their karate teacher suggested that Prerna send a team to India’s national karate competition. Sister agreed; she thought it would be a good experience for them to travel. The girls won gold and silver medals in nearly every event they entered. The chief minister of Bihar asked to meet them and offered to pay their way to the world championships in Japan. The last will be first.
Sister got them passports and tickets and travel documents. This seemed like a good opportunity to see the world. The girls came home with seven trophies—and something more: a sense of what it’s like to be in a culture that doesn’t look down on them.
“They were so astonished by how much respect people showed them,” Sister said. “They said, ‘Imagine, bowing to me, speaking to me this way.’”
It was the first time these girls had ever been in a society that didn’t scorn them. It helped them see that in their own country they were treated with low regard not because of a flaw in them, but because of a defect in society.
A low self-image and oppressive social customs are inner and outer versions of the same force. But the link between the two gives outsiders the key to change. If a girl can lift up her view of herself, she can start to change the culture that keeps her down. But this isn’t something most girls can do on their own. They need support. The first defense against a culture that hates you is a person who loves you.
Love is the most powerful and underused force for change in the world. You don’t hear about it in policy discussions or political debates. But Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr. all did hardheaded, tough-minded work for social justice, and they all put the emphasis on love.
It’s a mark of our culture’s uneasiness with love that political candidates never talk about it as a qualification for holding public office. In my view, love is one of the highest qualifications one can have. As one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, says, “Only love can safely handle power.”
For me, love is the effort to help others flourish—and it often begins with lifting up a person’s self-image.
I’ve seen the power of self-image in my colleagues and my classmates, in grade schools and universities, and in the world’s greatest companies. I’ve also seen it in myself. When I was in high school in Dallas, I met with a college guidance counselor I knew who wanted to offer me some advice. After I told her about the schools I was hoping I might attend, she told me I couldn’t get into any of them and should scale back my ambitions. She said I should focus on going somewhere closer to home.
If I had not been surrounded by people who lifted me up, I might have taken her advice and sold myself short. Instead I stormed out of that talk furious with her and twice as determined to reach my goals. That wasn’t my power; it was the power of the people who had shown me my gifts and wanted me to flourish. That’s why I am so passionate about teachers who can embrace girls and lift them up—they change the course of their students’ lives.
A girl who is given love and support can start to break the self-image that keeps her down. As she gains self-confidence, she sees she can learn. As she learns, she sees her own gifts. As she develops her gifts, she sees her own power; she can defend her own rights. That is what happens when you offer girls love, not hate. You lift their gaze. They gain their voice.