Opening the Door
Her work for women was not a slogan and did not use the word empowerment. It was specific, administrative and often dull: a directorate here, an enrolment target there, a hostel, a sewing room, a report with eleven recommendations.
Education first
Her starting point
She did not argue that women should be educated because education is improving. She argued that education is what converts a person from a dependant into someone with options — and that without the second half, the first half is decoration.
That is why the Andhra Mahila Sabha taught matriculation subjects and sewing, tailoring, spinning, weaving and hand-made paper making in the same building. Academic and vocational teaching were not two tracks for two classes of girl. They were two halves of one argument about independence.
It is also why her committee's recommendations in 1959 are so administrative. She was not asking anyone to believe that girls should be educated. She was asking who, specifically, in which ministry, would be held responsible when they were not.
“I must in this connection pay a glowing tribute to the women and children of the South who have taken with great zeal and earnestness to the learning of Hindi.”G. Durgabai, Constituent Assembly of India Debates, Vol. IX, 14 September 1949
The specific environment she worked in
Generic accounts of “women's empowerment” obscure how particular her problem was. In the India of the 1950s the barriers were concrete and could be listed.
- Female literacy was very low, and far below male literacy at every level.
- Girls left school much earlier than boys, most of them before the end of primary schooling, largely for reasons of household labour, marriage and cost.
- Very few girls' schools existed outside towns, and very few women teachers existed to staff them — a circular problem, since teachers come from educated girls.
- No part of the education administration had responsibility for noticing any of this. Girls were counted, and that was all.
- A married woman's ability to work, study or travel depended on family consent, and little in law obliged anyone to give it.
Against that list, an inspirational speech is worthless and an administrative recommendation is worth a great deal. She wrote the latter.
The National Committee on Women's Education, 1958–59
The Government of India appointed the Committee in May 1958 with Durgabai Deshmukh as chairman; it reported in January 1959. It was the first committee after independence to take the education of girls and women as its sole subject, and it is still cited by her name. In the same year the National Council for Women's Education was constituted, with her as its first chairperson.
The recommendations that are consistently reported from the report are administrative rather than rhetorical:
- That the education of girls be treated as a matter of priority by the Centre and by the State governments alike.
- That a department, or unit, of women's education be created within the central ministry of education.
- That each state appoint a Director of Women's Education — a named official whose job it is.
- That expansion aim at universal enrolment of girls aged 6 to 11 by 1979, and of girls aged 11 to 14 by 1981.
- That closing the gap between the education of boys and of girls be given first attention, and that co-education continue through the middle stage.
Read them again and notice what kind of document this is. It creates offices, assigns responsibility and sets dated targets. It is a blueprint, in the plainest sense of the word.
The targets were not met on the dates given. India did not achieve universal enrolment of girls aged 6 to 11 by 1979. What the report did achieve was durable in a different way: it established women's education as a named administrative responsibility rather than an aspiration, and it gave later governments a framework and a vocabulary to argue with. Claiming more than that for it would not be honest.
Beyond schooling
Her work on women's position ran along several tracks at once, and they were designed to support one another.
Economic independence
Vocational training in the Andhra Mahila Sabha — tailoring, spinning, weaving, paper making — was aimed at earning, not at accomplishment. In her own view, education meant “imparting employable skills which would enable women to stand on their own feet economically”, as the institution she founded describes her position.
Legal knowledge
She read law in order to give poor women free legal aid, and she carried into the Constituent Assembly the argument that a right nobody can enforce is worthless. A woman who does not know what she is entitled to is in the same position as a woman with no entitlement at all.
Health and family welfare
The nursing home she began in Hyderabad in 1962 and the welfare programmes assisted by the Central Social Welfare Board addressed the practical conditions — illness, childbirth, the care of small children — that decide whether a woman can take up anything else at all.
Institutional support
Hostels matter more than they sound. A girl from a village cannot attend a town college without somewhere safe to live. The Sabha's hostels are the least celebrated and possibly the most load-bearing thing it built.
A wider question
What happens wheneducation becomesan institution?
A teacher can educate a class. An institution can educate a class every year for a century, train the next generation of teachers, certify what its students know so that employers accept it, and argue with a government about money. The difference is not one of scale. It is a difference in kind.
This is the strongest available reading of Durgabai Deshmukh's life. She began as a teacher, at thirteen, in a room. She spent the following six decades converting teaching into institutions: a sabha, a society, a college, a council, a national board, a report that created named offices in every state.
It is worth being careful about how far that reading can be pushed. That India's female literacy and girls' enrolment rose enormously across the twentieth century is a matter of record. That any specific part of that rise was caused by any one committee report, board or college is not something the evidence can establish, and this site does not assert it.
What can be said is narrower and still substantial: she was one of the people who insisted that the question be given a permanent home in the machinery of the state, at a moment when it had none. Institutions do not guarantee outcomes. They guarantee that someone is still asking the question in twenty years' time.