In 1848, in a India where girls — especially girls from lower castes — were forbidden by custom from reading a single word, Savitribai Phule walked to a small school every morning to teach exactly that. She and her husband Jyotirao had opened one of the country's first schools for girls, and Savitribai was its first teacher.
The walk was never peaceful. Men opposed to the idea of an educated woman would throw mud, cow dung, and stones at her as she passed. So she began carrying a spare sari in her bag — she would simply change into the clean one once she reached the school gate, and teach her class as though nothing had happened.
She didn't stop there. She opened a shelter for pregnant widows and their children, ran a home to protect newborns from infanticide, and worked directly among plague patients decades later, ultimately contracting the disease herself while carrying a sick child to a hospital, and dying from it in 1897.
By the time of her death, she had personally helped open close to twenty schools and had spent almost fifty years insisting, in the face of daily hostility, that a girl's mind was worth as much as anyone's.