Prelude: Why go to College?
"Why should an Indian girl want a college education?" queried Mary
Smith, as she listened to her roommate's account of the "Lighting of the
Christmas Candles." "I can see why she would need to learn to read and
write, and even a high school course I wouldn't mind; but college seems
to me perfectly silly, and an awful waste of good money. Why, from our
own home high school there are only six of us at college."
Mary Smith, fresh from "Main Street," may be less provincial than she
sounds. Her question puts up a real problem. When only one girl in one
hundred has a chance at the Three R's, is it right to "waste money" on
giving certain others the chance to delve into psychology and higher
mathematics? When there is not bread enough to go around, why should
some of the family have cake and pudding?
Something less than a hundred years ago, similar questions were vexing
the American public. Those were the days when Mary Lyon fought her
winning battle against the champions of the slogan "The home is woman's
sphere," the days in which the pioneers of women's education
foregathered from the rocky farmslopes of New England, and Mt. Holyoke
came into being. Mary Smith, who is duly born, baptized, vaccinated, and
registered for Vassar, the last requiring no more volition on her part
than the first, realizes little of the ancient struggle that has made
her privilege a matter of course.
They are much the same old arguments that must be gone over again to
justify college education for our sisters of the East. Rather say
argument, in the singular, for there is just one that holds, and that is
the possibilities for service that such education opens up.
High schools there must be in India, but who will teach them? American
and English women have never yet gone out to India in such numbers as to
staff the schools they have founded, nor would there be funds to support
them if they did. Travel through India to-day and you will find girls'
schools staffed either with under-qualified women teachers, or else with
men whose academic qualifications are satisfactory, but who, being men,
cannot fill the place where a woman is obviously needed. What could be
more contradictory than to find a Christian girls' school, supported
largely by American money, but staffed by Hindu men, just because no
Christian women with necessary qualifications are available?
Hospitals there must be, but where are the doctors to conduct them? Here
again, foreign doctors can fill the need of the merest fraction of
India's suffering womankind. But the American doctor can multiply
herself in just one way. Give her a Medical College, well equipped and
staffed, and a body of Indian girls with a sufficient background of
general education, and instead of one doctor and one hospital you will
find countless centres of healing springing up in city and small town
and along the roadside where the doctor passes by.
Leadership there must be among the women of the New India. Where will it
be found but among those women whose powers of initiative have been
developed by the four years of life in a Christian college? Church
workers, pastors' wives, social workers, child welfare promoters, where
can you find them in India? Here and there, scattered in unlikely
places, where educated women, married and home-making, yet let their
surplus energy flow out into neighborhood betterment.
Mothers of families there must be, and far be it from me to say that
non-college women fail in that high office. There comes before me one
mother of fourteen children who has never seen the inside of a college
classroom, yet whom it would be hard to excel in her qualities of
motherliness. But, other things being equal, it is to the Christian,
educated mothers that we turn to find the life of the ideal home, with
real comradeship between wife and husband, with intelligent
understanding of the children, and the coveting for them of the best
that education can give.
One other question Mary Smith may rightly ask. What about the men's
colleges already existing? Will co-education not work in India?
To a certain limited extent it has. Rukkubai, with her too brief years
of freedom, proved its possibility. Others there have been, pioneer
souls, who pushed their way into lecture halls crowded with men, took
notes in the dark and undesirable remnants of space allotted to them,
and by dint of perseverance and hard work passed the examinations of the
University and carried off the coveted degree.
They were courageous women, deserving admiration. They won knowledge,
sometimes at heavy cost of health and nerve power. They helped to make
women's education possible. But what of the fairer side of college life
could they ever know? They were accepted always on sufferance; they
never "belonged." One such pioneer was a friend of mine. In many walks
and talks she told me of life in a men's college under the patronage of
the Maharajah of a native state. Loyal to her college, and proud of the
treasures of opportunity it had opened to her, she yet sighed for what
she had missed. "When I see the life of the girls in the Women's
Christian College at Madras," she said, "I feel that I have never been
to college."
Three times the girls and women of America have reached out hands across
the sea and either founded or helped to found Christian schools of
higher education for the women of India, with the belief that they have
a right to the knowledge of the spiritual truth which has brought to
Christian women of America development in righteousness, freedom of
faith, a personal knowledge of God through Jesus Christ, and the blessed
hope of immortality.
Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, 1886.
The Women's Christian College, Madras, 1915.
The Vellore Medical School, 1918.
These three names and dates are red-lettered in the history of
international friendship, for through them the college women of America
and India are joined into one fellowship of knowledge and service.
[Illustration: BIOLOGY CLASS AT LUCKNOW COLLEGE
Head of Class Leaning on Table, and Nine Students Dissecting Nine Rabbits]