What is on Today's Google Homepage? Isabelle Gatti de Gamond's 184th Birthday

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Google Doodle Celebrates - Isabelle Gatti de Gamond's 184th Birthday | 28 July

Today's Doodle honours Isabelle Gatti de Gamond, a Belgian teacher who was born 184 years ago. People think of her as one of the first feminists in Belgium, and she started the first secondary school for women in the country. 

On this day in 1839, Gatti de Gamond was born in Paris. When she was five, her family moved to Brussels. After her mother died in 1854, de Gamond started looking for work to help support her family. She was a private teacher for a Polish noble family, which led her to study Ancient Greek, Latin, and philosophy. 

When Gatti de Gamond went back to Brussels, she took classes paid for by the government and thought about how she could help more women go to school. She started the journal Women's Education (L'Education de la Femme) to share her ideas with the world. 

In 1864, Gatti de Gamond worked with the city council to start Cours d'Éducation pour jeunes filles, which were the first organised classes for high school girls. The fact that the programme wasn't tied to the Roman Catholic Church was a big step forward, making it the first independent secondary school for girls in Belgium. Even though the press didn't like what Gatti de Gamond was doing, her school was a big success, and in 1891, it added advanced and pre-university classes. Some of the students went on to become the first women in Belgium to go to college, work in the government, and become lawyers. This shows how successful the school was. 

Before she stopped being a teacher in 1899, Gatti de Gamond opened a lot of other schools. She worked as an organiser for the Belgian Labour Party because she wanted all adults to be able to vote. When the Labour Party decided that only men should be able to vote, she left politics.

Gatti de Gamond's school is still running and has a new name: the Isabelle Gatti de Gamond Royal Atheneum. She wrote the book on Belgium's education system for women, and women have and will continue to add to her impact because of what she did. 

Happy birthday, Isabelle Gatti de Gamond!