Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in IndiaVan Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
History
Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in India
Van Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
India -- Social conditions; Women -- India
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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