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 aesthetic 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
cloth