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.