This book depicts one South Indian village during the fifty-year period when women’s education became a possibility—and then a reality. Despite illiteracy, religious ritual marking them as inferior, and pre-pubertal marriages, the daughters and granddaughters of the silent, passive women of the 1960s have morphed into assertive, self-confident millennial women. Helen E. Ullrich considers the following questions: can education alter the perception of women as inferior and forever childlike? What happens when women refuse the mantle of socialized passivity? Throughout , Helen Ullrich pushes us to consider how women’s lives and society at large have been altered through education.