The Challenge of the Country: A Study of Country Life Opportunity

The call to the rural secretaryship is as genuine a call to a life of ministering love as is the call to the ministry. As a matter of fact, a few of the most successful rural secretaries are ordained ministers and find their theological training and pastoral experience of great value in their work. These secretaries are not using their present position as a stepping-stone to the city field. Few of them would accept any city opportunity, as experience has proved. They have devoted their lives to the work of rural redemption, especially saving the country boy. They have fitted themselves to be experts in rural work, the work they love, and few of them ever care to leave it. This complete consecration accounts largely for their success. Let a man not attempt to share their work unless he can bear their cross. It is a call to heroic service, but it is irksome only to the man who has missed the joy of complete consecration to the country field and to the Man of Galilee.

B. A CHALLENGE TO COLLEGE WOMENI. Some Responsibilities Shared with Men

A Necessary Partnership, and its Increasing Burden

Men can never solve the rural problem without the help of women.

In the primitive days of early barbarism, it was woman that domesticated the farm animals, – while men were away, at war and the chase, – and thus made possible agriculture and the arts of rural life. We may well expect educated modern womanhood to contribute its share even in the development of scientific agriculture; but in all the social problems of the new rural civilization the help of women is indispensable.

The rural home, school, church and grange and every other institution for the social, educational and religious welfare of country folks depend very greatly upon the cooperation and leadership of trained women. To a degree this has always been true; but in several aspects this responsibility is destined in the future to fall more heavily than ever upon women.

Responsibility for Rural Education

For various reasons men are rapidly retiring from the ranks of country school teachers. In a single generation the proportion of male teachers in American schools has diminished 50 %. In the North Atlantic states 86 % of all teachers are women; while even in the western states over 80 % are women, against 55 % in 1870.

It appears to be quite a safe statement, even judging by incomplete statistics, that there are more women teachers in the United States and Canada than in all the rest of the world combined. Whereas only 15 % of the teachers of Germany are women, and 36 % in Switzerland, 47 % in France and 64 % in Italy, the proportion in the United States the same year (1906) is found to be 76.4 %.

While from the viewpoint of the needs of adolescent boys there may be reasons to deplore this increase of women teachers, it is certainly accelerating. The educational burdens of the country are falling more and more upon women. College girls should study rural education as a real vocation and realize the vast opportunity for unselfish social service which is involved in it.

The college settlement in the city slum has aroused not merely a romantic interest but the consecration of many earnest college girls. Let more of them feel the same call to altruistic service in the rural school, accepting it with a genuine love for country boys and girls and for country life, – then the problems of rural education will lose much of their seriousness. With increasing centralization of rural schools and ever rising standards, worth-while opportunities in country teaching will rapidly develop. Nor will the need be merely for teachers in the grades and in high school work. Capable women are everywhere needed in educational leadership. Country life specialists are now needed in state and country normal schools, agricultural high schools, and county high schools, as well as the country colleges.

Responsibility for Rural Health and Sanitation

Probably the chief reason for the slow progress of modern sanitation in rural districts is the lack of training of country doctors in the modern aspects of their profession. In the country, sanitation is largely a household matter, and women have most at stake and the greatest influence here. In a few months or years one trained nurse or woman physician could raise the ideals of sanitation and hygiene in the country homes of a large area.

Old-fashioned rural neighborliness and large families have combined in the past to keep trained nurses in the city. The country people have managed to get along without them usually. But both these causes have been diminishing and there is serious need in most country sections for the expert services of trained nurses. The “district nurse association” plan has already gained acceptance in country places and its rapid spread would prevent much hardship. Combined with community ownership of sick-room appliances, this would greatly help to make country life comfortable for people accustomed to city conveniences.

Rural frugality hates to pay a woman nurse a man’s wages! But gradually efficiency will win and the higher life standards prevail, and this will give countless young women splendid opportunities for broad service, with which the petty office positions in the city cannot compare.

Conservative country folks are slow to recognize the professional authority of the woman physician; but the prejudice will soon pass. Certainly a capable woman with a modern medical equipment would not need many months to prove her superiority to the average low-grade country doctor; and she would soon find a great life work. While college men are more and more shirking this great healing profession, let the college women give it large consideration. It offers wonderful scope for serving the deepest needs of humanity as well as their bodily ills; and the college girls who dream of medical missions need not go so far from home as India to realize their visions.

Opportunities for Religious Leadership

The burdens of the country pastorate, like the burden of the ballot, ought not to fall upon the women; but the time seems to have come when there are not enough good intelligent men to maintain either.

It is impossible at present to furnish one-half of the rural churches in the United States with trained men to be their pastors. Canada imports hundreds of clergymen annually from England. Thousands of rural pulpits in the States are vacant. Tens of thousands of rural churches have merely untrained preachers. Very few have resident pastors. Dr. Wilson of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions is authority for the statement that of the 192 country Presbyterian ministers in Missouri, only two of them are living with their people in the open country.

We find the chief reason for country church decay the lack of a trained, resident pastor. Under present conditions it is impossible to meet this need from the supply of college men entering Christian work. To be sure, thousands of these unmanned churches are surplus churches. They have no real field; perhaps never had. And Providence is allowing them to die, for the glory of God! It is far better when they graciously unite with some neighboring church, – but the necessary grace is often lacking.

Very many churches with a real field need ministers and can get only untrained men. Hundreds of such churches write in vain to the seminaries every year, as the writer can testify. There seem to be plenty of untrained ministers, in most states; but it is an open question whether such leadership does more good than harm. Would not a well-trained woman, with a genuine Christian purpose, gifts of real leadership, and a complete college and theological training, be likely to do better service in the pastorate of such a church than an untrained man? It seems strange that we even consider it a subject for debate!

The number of women ministers seems to be increasing in several denominations, though not rapidly yet. Sometimes they are untrained, but when well equipped they render efficient service. Occasionally you find a woman with the true pastor’s spirit gaining surprising success in a difficult country church after a series of men have conspicuously failed. It might be well to try this experiment oftener.

We are now developing in America the second42 generation of college women. If eugenics teaches us anything, it gives us the right to expect from these college-bred daughters of college-trained mothers an increased efficiency and a new type of leadership. With every decade, a higher type of American womanhood, the peers of the ablest women of history, is being developed in the land. At last we are obliged to remove all our traditional barriers and to offer them unlimited scope for their life usefulness. Every profession is now open to them, wholly on the basis of merit.

Among these opportunities for the right sort of trained woman is the country pastorate. It requires possibly a rare type of womanhood, and probably a small percentage would succeed. But mere prejudice against the woman minister should not deprive the country churches of her sympathetic service if she is a woman of the right sort. Let fitness, training and worth decide, not mere traditions and prejudices. Sometimes a man and his wife, both ordained ministers, can together serve two churches acceptably and successfully. In fact, a case can be cited where in a western state the important work of church supervision is done conjointly by the state superintendent of home missions and his equally capable wife, both being trained, ordained ministers.

It is needless to emphasize the fact that womanly sympathy, intuition and tact are needed in the rural pastorate and that the consecration of the right type of college woman’s finest powers can perhaps find no better field, or receive deeper appreciation, than in the service of the rural churches. The question is sometimes asked, If a college woman wished to study for the ministry, how could she secure her training? Would the theological seminaries admit her as a student? The best answer to this question is the fact that there were 467 women enrolled as theological students in 46 of the 193 theological schools of the United States during the last college year, according to the annual report just issued by the National Bureau of Education. Several are non-sectarian schools; the rest represent twenty different denominations.43

Quite likely a large proportion of these young women are studying to be foreign missionaries, teachers of the Bible in college, or deaconesses. Not only in the United States, but also in the Presbyterian and Methodist churches of Canada, hundreds of young women are finding splendid scope for consecrated talents in this deaconess work. As yet, however, this branch of Christian service is wholly confined to cities, not necessarily because of greater need there, but because the city has the necessary means to pay for the work. Ordained or not ordained, the rural churches sadly need the inspiring capable leadership of our college women.

II. Some Unique Opportunities for Rural Social Service

The Opportunity of the Village Librarian

As the country grows older the number of rural public libraries increases. Not only are Carnegie libraries rather frequently seen in the smaller towns, but neat little stone structures, erected by some former resident who loved his old country home, are occasionally found even in small communities. It is one of the finest ways to honor one’s family name and to serve the social needs of one’s early home. No family monument could be more sensible or serviceable.

Usually the rural library is more than a mere reading room with book-storage attachment. It is always a center of social interest, and when built on generous lines becomes a real “neighborhood house.” As such institutions multiply, – and they certain will, – many young women of social gifts, as well as technical library training, will be needed to make the library or neighborhood house a center of social power, the value of which will be limited only by the personal resources of the librarian. Without the nerve strain of teaching, it closely parallels the teacher’s opportunity with the boys and girls, and has a growing chance to stimulate the mental life of men and women. As women’s clubs increase in the country, more farm women are cultivating the reading habit. Every year the bulletins of the agricultural colleges with their “Reading Courses for Farmers’ Wives” are getting more popular.

The Specialist in Household Economics

Perhaps the sorest spot in the rural problem is the lot of the neglected farm wife and mother. Even where agricultural prosperity is indicated by great barns filled with plenty, often a dilapidated little farmhouse near by, devoid of beauty, comfort or conveniences, measures the utter disregard for the housewife’s lot.

Money is freely spent when new machinery is needed on the farm, or another fifty-acre piece is added after a prosperous season; but seldom a thought of the needs of the kitchen. While the men of the family ride the sulky plow and riding harrow of the twentieth century, the women have neither a washing machine nor an indoors pump, – to say nothing of running water, sanitary plumbing or a bathtub!44 Sometimes the drudgery of the farm kitchen is endured by the mother uncomplainingly, or even contentedly; but the daughters recoil from it with growing discontent.

The life conditions of farm women are rapidly improving; but the gospel of better homes and convenient kitchens needs thousands of gentle apostles, equipped with modern methods of household economy, hygiene, cooking and every domestic art and science. It necessitates rare tact, and it is doubtless most effective when least professional, when its benevolence is simply veiled by neighborliness, joined perhaps with the daily routine of the teacher or librarian. But the purpose involved is a splendidly worthy one, to raise the standards of housekeeping in a whole community of homes and bring in a new comfort and efficiency for both men and women. To do this is to enrich and sweeten country life at its source.

Demonstration Centers of Rural Culture

In the cities a very effective social service is done in the settlements as demonstration centers of refinement and Christian living. We need the same quietly effective plan in thousands of rural communities where life is still crude rather than simple and where the finer life-values are too little appreciated.

As the new rural civilization develops and the higher education becomes more diffused, this gentle but powerful leavening of country life is bound to follow. In very many communities it is already in process. It ought to follow as a matter of course that wherever a college-bred woman returns to a country home, or founds a new one, there is developed a real demonstration center of rural culture. The down-drag of environment sometimes proves too strong for weaker natures and higher ideals are gradually forgotten. Sometimes, too, a tactless condescension reveals to sensitive neighbors that fatal sense of superiority which is deadly to all good influence, for rural democracy is passing proud.

But with the right spirit of neighborly helpfulness and an effort to overcome the barrier which is always raised at first by superior advantages, the woman of true unaffected culture has a great chance for fine influence in a rural community.

In such a community not many miles from Buffalo there is such a gentlewoman. She is blessing the whole neighborhood to-day in scores of simple ways. According to her own modest statement, she is just “idling” now, for ill-health interrupted her cherished plans as a successful teacher in a mission school in China.

In keen disappointment but fine cheerfulness she settled in this little village, and soon found ample scope for quiet, happy usefulness. The old house she had bought for a home was remodeled modestly but with rare effectiveness, with verandas, fireplaces, cosy corners and a convenient kitchen. With a distinctly rural note in it all, the house was furnished in inexpensive, elegant simplicity, with a charming effect which became quite the wonder of the community.

Neighborly relations were easily established and the “running in” habit was ere long encouraged. Soon the cheerful living room, so unlike the urbanized parlors of the neighborhood, became a social center for the young folks, and music and good pictures and the joyous life developed undreamed of social resources in the community, hitherto latent but unexpressed. It is a genuine demonstration center of rural culture, but unspoiled by any professional taint. It is just neighborly friendliness, with a well-guarded passion for helpfulness; and it is bringing that true human appreciation which all genuine life-sharing wins. May a thousand other college-bred women see the same vision and earn the same joy.

Womanly Leadership in Church and Club

The college woman who “buries herself” in a rural community has only herself to blame if she finds no opportunity worthy of her talents. There may be no “career” of spectacular success awaiting her, but homespun chances to serve, and be loved for her helpfulness, meet her at every turn.

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.

Nothing could better voice, to the young men and women of America, the heroic appeal of country life leadership and service than Professor Carver’s manly challenge printed on the next page. Though not written exclusively for the country, it fits rural life most admirably.

The Productive Life Fellowship

“It offers to young men days of toil and nights of study. It offers frugal fare and plain clothes. It offers lean bodies, hard muscles, horny hands, or furrowed brows. It offers wholesome recreation to the extent necessary to maintain the highest efficiency. It offers the burdens of bringing up large families and training them in the productive life. It offers the obligation of using all wealth as tools and not as means of self-gratification. It does not offer the insult of a life of ease, or æsthetic enjoyment, or graceful consumption, or emotional ecstasy. It offers, instead, the joy of productive achievement, of participating in the building of the Kingdom of God.

To young women also it offers toil, study, frugal fare, and plain clothes, such as befit those who are honored with a great and difficult task. It offers also the pains, the burdens and responsibilities of motherhood. It offers also the obligation and perpetuating in succeeding generations the principles of the productive life made manifest in themselves. It does not offer the insult of a life of pride and vanity. It offers the joys of achievement, of self-expression, not alone in dead marble and canvas, but also in the plastic lives of children to be shaped and moulded into those ideal forms of mind and heart which their dreams have pictured. In these ways it offers to them also the joys of participating in the building of the Kingdom of God.” 45

Test Questions on Chapter VIII

1. – Why are college students discovering a new interest in studying the rural problem?

2. – What proportion of your college enrollment came from country communities, and what percentage of your alumni have invested their lives in the country? Compare this with other colleges mentioned in this chapter.

3. – Show how the vital interests of the city are deeply involved in the problem of rural leadership.

4. – When adequate support is secured, what special opportunities for service do you see in the work of a country teacher?

5. – What elements in the call for trained ministers for country churches appeal to you as most urgent?

6. – Show how the modern minister, equal to his task, has as big an opportunity to-day as ever in the past.

7. – What elements of heroism in the modern ministry make equally high demands on the earnest college man, whether he stays in America or goes to the foreign field?

8. – Why are college graduates avoiding the medical profession to-day more than formerly?

9. – What do you think of the special opportunity and need of trained country physicians?