School is Her Refuge

If we want girls to succeed, we need to teach them the audacity to transgress. Through the lives of students at three very different schools, an award-winning scholar-activist makes the case for “feminist schools” that orient girls toward a lifetime of achievement. In How Girls Achieve, Sally Nuemah points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what she calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender. Here is a brief excerpt about Sally’s family and how she became interested in feminist schools.

An older woman spoke to me with clear eyes and a calm tone, slowly and deliberately so that I might imagine her and Ghana in the 1970s:

I didn’t grow up with my mom because my mom was young when she had me. When my father died, my mother was learning hairdressing, so she moved . . . She was hustling, so she wouldn’t have to live with her mother.

She had the other two that came after me [when] she was still young, around 22 or 23, so my grandmother raised me. I loved my grandmother raising me. She gave me a lot of wisdom. The only thing though is, no matter how poor or what condition, you will still miss your mother. There are certain things that make me unsure or that affect me still today because of my mother.

Although my grandma loved me, I felt like I didn’t belong. I felt like the rest had some type of freedom that I didn’t have. I felt like I had to conform, that I had to listen. I felt like I could not say no when they did because I didn’t have that kind of entitlement.

When school opened, I would have to wait until everyone else got their school supplies before someone will notice that I didn’t have mine.

[Being motherless] always pushed me a little to the back. It made me a quiet person, and as a result, school became my refuge. I loved going to school.

There, I could express myself. I could show people I was better.

That is my mother’s story.

She was born and raised in Ghana, the daughter of teenage parents, although her father died soon after her birth.

My mother used school as a refuge from her home life.

She went to one of Ghana’s best secondary schools, St. Monica’s, and later entered secretarial trade school. Soon after, she was admitted into the University of Cape Coast but was unable to afford the tuition.

My mother’s educational journey came to an end.

She met my father at twenty-eight, they married, and she decided to migrate with him to America in search of better opportunities. Following their arrival, my brother and I were born, but by the time I was five my mother and father divorced.

My mother raised my brother and me.

She worked as a hotel maid and then as a parking lot patroller in Chicago throughout our childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. In her twenty-six years of working in America, she never earned more than eleven dollars an hour.

My father was present sporadically.

I am the child of immigrant parents, a first-generation American. I was raised by a single mother on a small salary in a low-income neighborhood in Chicago. I am a woman, and I am Black.

I fit most of the statistical categorizations of disadvantage.

In fact, by most statistical models, it is unlikely that I would have gained the education and prestige necessary to catalog my mother’s experiences in a published book. Yet my mother’s educational aspirations have survived through me.

School has been my refuge.

Inspired by my mother’s example, for the past ten years I have collected data on the educational experiences and aspirations of girls in South Africa, the United States, and Ghana. This book represents my attempt to develop a cohesive message from these data.

If this book has resonance in the world, I hope it leaves people with something like the following:

May the schoolhouse be a refuge for all girls . . . like it was for me and my mother.