In debates over the “Woman Question” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Islamic world, the education of women was a key theme, although it attracted less attention than related debates over women’s clothing. Qasim Amin’s 1899 The Liberation of Women advocated providing women with at least an elementary education so they could educate their children and produce good citizens to serve the Egyptian nation. The disdain expressed by Amin and other scholars towards “ignorant” women who were incapable of educating their children overlooked the historic role women played in the transmission of knowledge, not only in a public way that led to the recording of their contributions as nodes in the chain of transmission of hadith or listed as the teachers of prominent scholars, but also in spaces in which they received less formal recognition, such as the home. For children from learned families, education began in the home. Both boys and girls studied with their relatives, receiving a foundation in the Islamic sciences, primarily Quran and hadith. Girls learned alongside their brothers from their fathers, grandfathers, and other relatives, and boys also learned from their mothers and grandmothers. At a time of increased institutionalization of the transmission of knowledge in the form of the madrasa, the home was still the earliest site of encounter with the basics of faith and practice, where the Quran was interpreted through stories and the rituals of prayer were inscribed. Women were a logical choice for the first teachers of young children, if they themselves had achieved a certain level of knowledge; however, they rarely show up in the official lists of teachers for a scholar (fihris) or in their biographies. Traces of this role comes across in other types of narrative sources of a more autobiographical or intimate nature. This paper will examine the lives and educations of a number of scholars from premodern North Africa and interrogate the role of female family members as both caregivers and early teachers. Using biographical and autobiographical sources, among others, this study will explore the influence of women in the early education of scholars, and argue that highly educated primary caregivers played a significant role in the intellectual development of a scholar.