WOMEN THE WORLD OVER.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20920, 29 July 1933, Page 3

WOMEN THE WORLD OVER.

(srrriALLT writtxn »ob the pbt.ss.) [liy " ATALANTA."] Is there a spiritual world-capital yet in existence ?—not the special city of race or creed such as Mecca is to the Moslem and Jerusalem alike to Jew and Christian ? Geneva is at least the beginning of such a conception, as we learned last week from our notable visitors, Jonkvrouwe C. M. van Asch van Wijck and Miss Charlotte Niven, world president and world secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association. That an international group comprising a million members is laying the foundations of a constructive meeting of womei \ many of whom are counted political rivals and some of them ranked as active political enemies, to be held in the present storm-centre of the world next year, should demonstrate that inter-feminine relations I are far past the tea-and-tattle stage in which they were but lately regarded. I have spoken before of the wide Asiatic field of the Y.W.C.A., but the leaders we have just entertained have shown New Zealand a hope of coming solidarity that could not be more timely than the present. The cardinal object of the Association is embodied in its name—to widen and deepen the Christian life I among girls, the future mothers of the race. Causes as a rule cannot be specifically embraced where polemics would unavoidably trench on racial predilections; but one cause, that of peace, is imperative throughout both hemispheres. There comes in the point which induced the Association slightly more than two years ago to change its headquarters to Geneva, a happy transference of venue seeing that the bigbrother Y.M.C.A. was already entrenched and sowing the seeds of peace by that blue lake of poetry and tradition. Added to this is the all-inclusive station of the mixed Student Christian Unioci, and the whole is a triple, inter-allied bloc of spiritual out-reach such as the world never yet saw ; and in it is rectified the one-sidedness of the preponderantly masculine League of Nations. If the political machine of betterment can find no way out of the impasse, let it turn to this vast, vital force at nearest range, and the rusty wheels will move and make hopeful music once more. This vital bloc is pushing against the first agent of disruption after the Deluge, the curse of Babel. Nowhere will the blessing of a common speech bear better fruits than in the mighty drive for peace which is being made by the better nationals to-day, and here the homing and homely work of the Y.W.C.A. has its fullest fruition, since it enlists the future mothers of men in the new peace army of the race, friends to each other the world over. These are curiously typical times, as even the lines of travel indicate. Jonkvrouwe van Asch van Wijck and Miss Niven, we learn, starting the tour from Geneva late in December, visited the Sino-Japan-ese storm-centre together, then parted company in Malaya, the president going to her own people in the Dutch East Indies, while the secretary went to India, long a powerful centre of Y.W.C.A. influence. Before they met again in Melbourne, undying impressions must have been made and received in two empires where great issues are already shaping for or against the desire of all nations to-day. This is a young woman's matter, and nobly are these young women rising to the need. The Lure of India. Lightly imagination glances from the sober, though sunlit, paths of this movement, a Western initiative at the first, however international now, to the chequered glooms and lights of other communions which have strangely attracted certain Western women. The present form of the Y.W.C.A., we are reminded, was attained some 28 years ago, by the coalesced energies of Britain, America, Norway and Sweden, then a peculiarly Nordic confederation. Where exactly was the Nordic idea, some 40 years ago, when the intelligence of Mrs Annie Besant capitulated to the lure of a culture which seemingly had least of all to offer to nineteenth century women? She became as far as she could a Hindu woman and devoted the strongest years of a strangely militant life to | the uplift of India as she saw it, and the reconcilement of the divided Aryanism of East and West in a common march to higher things, again as she saw them. At the present moment, there would seem to be no more pathetic figure than Dr. Annie Besant, acclaimed at last as a single-hearted peace-maker by her own first people, but with her mana gone among the Orientals whose shifting minds have sought other counsellors. A far briefer glance suffices for two other Western women whose immature discipleship has caused a ripple on the troubled surface of Indo-Britannic relations. Madeline Slade, daughter of an English admiral, and Nila Cram Cook, an American woman, both abandoned Western life and ways to follow something in that Back-to-India soulcampaign which Gandhi in his turn | launched for a purified and emancipated Hinduism. I have not the ! knowledge needful for an ultimate pronouncement on the value of the sacrifice made by these young women ; it was not sex-appeal, at least, that drew them to the feet of this little old wisp of a modern Mahatma, who willingly risked the remnant of his human life for the Dariahs his fathers had trampled to the dust for close on 30 centuries. Madeline and Nila so far show negative results. Clear and finished, however, is the story of an earlier English girl who left every attraction of Western culture to find her mission as a worker under an earlier, less controversial Hindu reformer, one of the many whom last century's permeation by Christian ideals brought into conflict with hardened and coarsened Hindu tradition. It was in the 'eighties when America staged the first pan-doctrinal conference in history, the now forgotten Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Whatever else was dreamed or lost in the upshot of that assembly, the mission of one grand young Hindu teacher, Vivekananda bore the fruit, not indeed of Christianity, but of a. purified Vedic revival

clearly influenced thereby. His call for helpers to uplift the depressed and broken caste victims in India found an answer in the heart of an English girl, Margaret Noble, who followed him as a master for the rest of her all-too-short life. Noble in nature as in name, she accepted the arduous work set her by Vivekananda. It was in his new orphanages and refuges for Indian women, waifs and children that the young English helper found her destiny and her crown. As Sister Nervadita, she rendered signal service, winning alike the admiration and respect of Hindus and Britons. Her life and that of the high-minded teacher she followed are written imperishably in the annals of India. ,