- Lived:
- 3 January 1831, Naigaon (Satara district) – 10 March 1897, Pune — a life spent almost entirely between a village and the city that fought her, forty kilometres apart
- Field:
- education and social reform — India's first trained woman teacher and headmistress of the modern era; Marathi poet; co-builder, with her husband Jyotirāo, of the anti-caste movement
- The Big Idea:
- Education is not an ornament for women and the low castes but the door out of their servitude — and someone has to be first through the door, hold it open, and take the stones that come flying after.
- In their words:
- "Sit idle no longer — go, get education; end the misery of the oppressed and forsaken. You have the golden chance to learn: so learn, and break the chains of caste." (from "Go, Get Education," Kāvya Phule, 1854; our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- A girl married at nine and taught to read by her husband became, by seventeen, the teacher of India's first Indian-run school for girls — she walked to work carrying a spare sari because men threw dung at the one she wore, and forty-nine years later she died of plague caught carrying a sick child on her back.