Alice B. Van Doren

“ Suffrage and prohibition are echoed in the streets of Poona and in the councils of Delhi. Labor strikes in West Virginia and Wales produce reactions in the cotton mills of Madras. And the American girl in high school, in college, in business, in society, in a profession, is producing her double under tropic suns, in far-off streets where speech and dress and manners are strange, but the heart of life is one. That time is past; we cannot let them alone; we can only choose what shall be the shape and fashioning done by hands that reach across the sea. ”

“ To those days of long ago modern India looks back as to a golden age, for she was then in the forefront of civilization, passing out her gifts with a generous hand. Of that ancient heritage not the least part is the tradition of womanhood,—a heritage trampled in the dust of later ages, its restoration only now beginning through that liberty in Christ which sets free the woman of the West and of the East. ”

“ For long stretches the road passes through apparently uninhabited country, yet here they are, the lame, the halt, and the blind, as though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the tamarind trees, stands one village; at the edge of the rice fields huddles another. The roofs of thatch or earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of child-birth pain, its fever-burnings, its germ-borne epidemics where sanitation is unknown, its final pangs of dissolution. ”

“ Ida Scudder's heart and brain the desire to found a Medical School, where the American Doctor might multiply herself and reproduce her life of skillful and devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian women physicians? It is the only way that the message of the Good Physician, His healing for soul and body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, disease, and ignorance. One hundred and sixty women doctors at present try to minister to India's one hundred and sixty millions of women, shut out by immemorial custom from men's hospitals and from physicians who are men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The schoolroom is so primitive that you would hardly recognize it as such. Light and air and space are all too little. There are no desks or even benches. A small, wooden blackboard and the teacher's table and rickety chair are all that it can boast in the way of equipment. The only interesting thing in sight is the children themselves, rows of them on the floor, writing letters in the sand. Unwashed they are, uncombed and almost unclothed, but with all the witchery of childhood in their eyes. In that bare room lies the possibility of transforming the life of the Village of the Seven Palms. ”

“ Being average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class which is in India as everywhere the backbone of society. Meenachi's father is a weaver of the far-famed Madura muslins with their gold thread border. Her earliest childhood memory is the quiet weavers' street where the afternoon sun glints under the tamarind trees and, striking the long looms set in the open air, brings out the blue and mauve, the deep crimson and purple and gold of the weaving. ”

“ It has been proven that Indian girls can be educated, their minds are keen and eager, they are Christian, many of them, in a sense which girls of America cannot comprehend. Their task is infinitely greater than yours. If they fail, the redemption of Indian womanhood will not be realized, and so we see them taking as the college emblem, not the beautiful, decorated brass lamp of the palace, but the common, little clay lamp of the poorest home and going out with the flickering flame to lighten the deep darkness of their land. College girls in America sometimes wear their degree as a decoration. ”

“ Yet not all reformers are such. There are an increasing number whose deeds keep pace with their words. Such may be found among the members of The Servants of India Society, who spend part of the year in social studies; the remainder in carrying to ignorant people the message they have learned.
Such is the heritage of the Hindu woman of ancient freedom; centuries when traditions of repression have gripped with ever-tightening hold; to-day a new ferment in the blood, a new striving toward purposes half realized. ”

“ To the North India girl, perhaps the most vexing social question is that of purdah. How can education reach women who live shut away from the sky and the sun and the lives of men? On the other hand, if after the seclusion of a thousand years freedom were suddenly thrust upon women not even trained to desire it, who can measure the disaster that would follow? ”

“ There is none high or low amongst them, being all alike, and these are our tutors, and the sunflower itself turns to the sun, the great giver of life, for its inspiration, ever turning to him, never losing sight of his face. A force inexplicable draws the flower to the King of Day, even as our hearts are turned to Him at morn and at eve, be we East or West. ”

“ Believing that eventually his daughter would marry, he felt that as a doctor from her own home she could carry relief and healing into her small neighborhood. Paru, to please her father, went into the long grind of medical college, conquered her aversion for the dissecting table, and "made good." What does he think, one wonders, as, looking upon her to-day with the clearer vision of the life beyond, he sees the beloved daughter, thoughts of home and husband and children put aside, but with her name a household word among the women of a thousand homes. ”

“ Co-operation in school government and discipline is one of the most educational experiences that an Indian girl can pass through. To feel the responsibility for her own actions and those of her schoolmates, to form impersonal judgments that have no relation to one's likes and dislikes, these are lessons found not between the covers of text-books, but at the very heart of life-experience. Under such moral strain and stress character develops, not as a hothouse growth of unreal dreams and theories, but as the sturdy product of life situations. ”

“ It is fitting that the sunflower should bloom in a garden, and so it does. This time it is not a walled garden like that of Lal Bagh; the Women's College is situated out from the city in a green and spacious suburb, where the little River Cooum wanders by its open spaces. The ten acres have much the air of an American college campus,—the same sense of academic quiet, of detachment from the work-a-day world. ”

“ The high hour of Indian womanhood had passed, not to return until brought back by the power of Christ, in whose kingdom there is "neither male nor female, but all are one." Yet as the afterglow flames up with a transient glory after the swift sunset, so in the gathering darkness of Muhammadan domination we see the brightness of two remarkable women. ”

“ At the far end the class in obstetrics is going on. And behold, the irrepressible Ford has entered into a new province. This truly American product will probably be found to-day in every continent and nearly every country in the world, but one ventures to prophesy that Vellore is the only spot on the habitable globe where its cast-off tires have been metamorphosed into models of human organs! Every student not working over an actual mother or baby is busy performing on these home-made rubber models the operations she may some day be called to do upon a living patient. ”

“ Miss Van Doren has given emphasis in the book to the privileged young woman of India; she shows the possibilities, and yet you will see in it something of the black shadow cast by that religion which holds no place for the redemption of woman. If you could see it in its hideousness which the author can only hint at, you would say as two American college girls said after a tour through India, "We cannot endure it. Don't take us to another temple. We never dreamed that anything under the guise of religion could be so vile." ”

“ How many more weary generations must pass before we, His followers, make such incidents impossible? How many before Indian women with pitying eyes and tender hands shall have carried the gift of healing, the better gift of the health that outstrips disease, through the roads and villages of India? ”

“ At that beginning we do not wonder; what makes us marvel is that a repressing custom became so strong that, even after a century and a half of British rule, all over North India and among some conservative families of the South seclusion and the veil still persist. Walk the streets of a great commercial town like Calcutta, and you find it a city of men. An occasional Parsee lady, now and then an Indian Christian, here and there women of the cooly class whose lowly station has saved their freedom—otherwise womankind seems not to exist. ”

“ In Madras you may visit a Widow's Home, where through the wise efforts of a large-hearted woman in the Educational Department of Government more than a hundred Brahman girl-widows live the life of a normal schoolgirl. No fastings, no shaven heads, no lack of pretty clothes or jewels mark them off from the rest of womanhood. Schools and colleges open their doors and professional life as teacher or doctor offers hope of human contact and interest for these to whom husband and child and home are forever forbidden. ”

“ What Lotus feels she expresses simply, naturally, be it her interest in biology, her friendship for you, or her response to the love of the All-Father. And that response is deep and genuine. There is a spiritual quality, an answering vibration, which one seldom finds outside the Orient. You lead morning prayers and to pray is easy, because in those schoolgirl worshippers you feel the mystic quality of the East leaping up in response. You teach a Bible class and the girls' eager questions run ahead so fast that you lose your breath as you try to keep pace. ”

“ Love of nature is not as spontaneous in the Indian girl as in the Japanese. Yet with but a little training of the seeing eye and understanding heart, there develops a deep love of beauty that includes alike flowers and birds, sunsets and stars. ”

“ Education is essential and as long as Indian women, the future mothers of India, do not realize their responsibility, it is much better and wiser that they should remain behind the scene.
"The help we can give in bringing about this great reform is to show by our example. Freedom does not mean simply coming out of purdah and taking undue advantage and misuse of liberty. We who have done away with our purdah should not be stumbling blocks to others. Freedom guided and governed by the Spirit of God is the only freedom and every true citizen ought to help to bring it about." ”