I've read that Sarah Schenirer was a leader in female Jewish education and the Bais Yaakov, but I'm less clear on the context around her decision to create schools for Jewish girls. Did she have any particular inspirations to draw from? Was it informed by contemporary education organizations and philosophies? Was there a growing demand or need for such institutions?
There is actually a fantastic book published recently on this subject called "Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement" by Naomi Seidman, who is a fantastic scholar of Yiddish and Jewish women's history. She created her schools at a time when secular education for girls was improving, and educated or more well off Jewish families were increasingly sending their daughters to secular schools, Schenirer herself was educated for eight years in a secular Polish school. She felt that this type of education led to assimilation and alienation from Jewish life, which she saw as particularly damaging when directed at Jewish girls. She had also grown up with access to Torah education through her father and felt it had greatly improved her life. This type of at home Jewish education was not uncommon for girls, and mainly focused around the Jewish rituals which were important for women, and was almost always conducted in Yiddish whereas boys education included learning to read and pray in Hebrew. She developed an ideology which integrated the high quality Jewish education she saw boys receiving with the structure of secular girls schools. As all children began to receive more, and better education, both religious and secular, Schenirer saw an immense and growing need for her work, and Jewish families from across the orthodox spectrum benefited, and continue to benefit, from her schools.
Her main inspirations seem to be rabbinic and based on traditional Jewish educational structures, before opening her first school she sought out council from Rabbi Flesch of Vienna and the Belzer Rebbe Issacher Dov. She certainly pulled some structural aspects of the schooling both from secular schools (mainly things like classroom structure as she disliked many aspects of secular schooling which she saw as assimilationist) and from boy's cheder's and yeshivot, integrating the parts of each that she felt would spiritually enhance the lives of Jewish girls. Her inspiration was also drawn from her own at home education, and the home education of other Jewish girls which focused specifically on being a Jewish woman, and a wife and mother. For example she taught significantly more Hebrew than most girls learned in home schooling, but still focused in the feminine mitzvot and Jewish rituals/teaching which had historically been taught at the mother's knee. Later, her all day schools integrated secular and religious education in a structure still used in Bais Yaakov and other Jewish schools today.
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/schenirer-sarah
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/bais-yaakov-schools