ABSTRACT
Education is a critical resource for human advancement at the individual and societal levels. Education occupies a critical nexus for women between the private and public spheres. It isn’t an accident that women won the right to be educated nearly a hundred years before they embarked on the campaign for suffrage. Education empowers individuals to act on the basis of their self-interest, which is why it has been treated as a restricted commodity. Early nineteenth-century Enlightenment theorists believed that education was crucial to developing the ability to reason and for attaining full citizenship. Therefore, only those who could become citizens needed to be educated, and that did not include women. Withholding education is a form of social control and a way of maintaining the status quo by ensuring that those at the bottom of the social hierarchy raise few objections.
