The Movement for Girls’ Education

This chapter tells the story of how women’s initiatives founded public education for girls. It describes how Persian women began opening girls’ schools, starting in 1899. For the next quarter century, these schools were founded, taught, and managed mainly by individual women, such as Safiya Yazdi and her “Effatiyeh” school. They did this on their own personal initiative, with almost no support from the state until the mid-1920s. The chapter shows how these teachers dealt with religious opposition, and even violent attack on their schools, and how they eventually succeeded in establishing an education network that the national government would adopt.