If she stands off a year or so, in self-pity, bemoaning the meagerness of her environment, she may work for a decade thereafter to regain lost confidence and live down a reputation for snobbishness. But if she shows herself friendly at once; if she leads only when invited, and earns the opportunity by a genuine modesty, ere long her talents, and whatever leadership capacity her college life has given her, will find plenty of exercise.
A single college graduate of the right sort can do wonders in a little country church or grange or club. The rural churches are suffering for trained laymen to make them effective institutions; but the need is sometimes just as acute for the right sort of womanly leadership, trained, tactful, enthusiastic and effective. The same is true of the social clubs and all local institutions which are open to women. With the rising standards in rural life we shall look more and more to such women of culture to bear the burdens of redirecting and vitalizing the work of rural institutions. It is a worthy work and brings its own true rewards if generously and wisely done.
The Rural Association Secretary
Far more is now being done for the country boy than for the country girl in many communities, and a few college women are discovering in this fact a great call to social and religious service.
In a few colleges, through their outside religious work, the girls have become a little acquainted with the life of the younger girls in the surrounding country. Sympathy leads them to try to help broaden the outlook of these younger sisters, and to bring them the religious ideals and the wholesome fun, both of which their lives often lack.
The Young Women’s Christian Association for a few years past has conducted community work in country towns on lines somewhat similar to the county work of the Young Men’s Christian Association. A few young women are working as county secretaries, and they are women with a vision, and a splendid earnestness. The work, however, is still quite new. It needs development and extension into the smaller villages which need it most. Doubtless this will be done as fast as college women of the right sort, with a real consecration to the needs of the country girl, present themselves as volunteers for this service.
College men are finding a splendid chance for life investment today in the rural secretaryship,—as has been described earlier in this chapter. There is no reason why their success with the country boys cannot be duplicated by successful women secretaries with the country girls and women.
It is idle to claim that the average country homes are doing all that needs doing for the country girls, or that the church life and school life are effectively safeguarding them. Moral conditions in too many villages, tardily perceived but often staggering when discovered, belie this false optimism. We must face the fact that country girls need a more wholesome recreational life than most villages afford, and higher ideals of true womanliness than they often gain at home or church or school.
College young women of the right sort, with a winsome personality and some talent for leadership, with social grace and power, with something of athletic skill and a knowledge of organized play, and above all with a wholesome Christian earnestness interpreting religion in practical modern terms, have a great field of service among these country girls with all their social hungers unsatisfied and their latent capacities unawakened. The urgent need of such work in numerous rural counties can hardly be questioned. Its vast possibilities can be discovered only by actual experiment in any community.
In very many ways today the rural problem, so fascinatingly varied and increasingly urgent, challenges the personal interest of the young women of our colleges. They are only beginning to study it. Their eyes have been all too narrowly set on the city and the town. But their rapidly increasing numbers as well as the broadening every year of their outlook upon life gives us reason for the faith that this challenge will not be unheeded. Self-sacrificing womanhood is the salvation of every civilization, urban or rural. It needs only to demonstrate the need; then consecrated womanhood will heed the call. The coming decade should see them by the hundred investing their lives in rural social service and community betterment, that the kingdom of heaven may sooner come.