The First High School Female Teacher in Jordan - Zainab Abu Ghneimah

Zainab Ali Abu Ghneimah - The First High School Female Teacher in Jordan

She was the first Jordanian girl to join the Teacher's Training College in the first government high school established in the era of the Emirate of East Jordan in 1922, becoming the first high school female teacher and an educational pioneer in the field of education.

Mrs. Zainab was born in Irbid, northern Jordan, in 1905, where she received her education at home with the help of her well-educated and cultured brothers Mahmoud, Mohammed, and Hassan Abu Ghneimah. This home schooling enabled her to enroll in the Bimaristan School in Damascus in 1919, where she graduated after two years of high school, and began teaching in the Amman Girls' School in 1921-1922, where her eldest brother Hassan Abu Ghneimah lived, becoming the first Jordanian woman to practice high school teaching at that time.

Later, she worked as a teacher in the "Irbid Girls' Secondary School" in 1923. As mentioned in the memoirs of the late critic Hassan Abu Ghneimah in his book published in 1995, page 12: “The new house rented by my family from the Al-Nasser family was close to our old house, surrounded on all four sides by the ancient Roman garden with trees approximately two thousand years old. Behind it lay Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah High School, which was previously the Irbid Girls' Secondary School managed by my aunt (Zainab) for many years before it moved to its new location in Al-Husun Street, where the old school became a secondary school for boys in Irbid, in addition to the old Irbid school on the hill, which was the first government secondary school in Irbid.”

Mrs. Zainab furthered her post-secondary education at the Teacher's Training College in Damascus in 1924 for a year, then returned to her hometown Irbid to become the principal of the school where she had taught, until 1938.

She married Mr. Saeed Al-Nasser and left teaching until 1955 when she returned as a principal, moving to Amman to head the prestigious and well-known Princess Alia School in Jabal Al-Lweibdeh from 1957 to 1960, when she retired.

In 1973, the late His Majesty King Hussein, may God have mercy on him, awarded her the First-Class Education Medal in a grand ceremony held to honor the pioneers of education in Jordan.