This paper reviews the demographic research of the past 35 years regarding the influence of women’s school attainment on mortality, fertility and health practices. The empirical findings are unmistakably logic across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, with clear associations between female primary and secondary school attainment and child mortality in the Gakidou et al. (2010) study of 175 countries. Associations with fertility and health practices are also logic. What are the processes that account for these associations? The paper presents, based on a study evaluating maternal literacy in four different countries (Venezuela, Mexico, Nepal and Zambia), that literacy abilities and teacher-pupil interaction in the classroom are pivotal to the processes by which school experience alters maternal behavior in developing countries. Basu and Stephenson (2005) arrived at comparable conclusions independently from their assay of the 1992/93 Indian National Family Health Survey, but final conclusions regarding the causal processes involved are not possible without longitudinal inquiry.