Thurston, Matilda (1875–1958)

American educator and missionary. Born Matilda Smyrell Calder on May 16, 1875, in Hartford, Connecticut; died of arteriosclerosis on April 18, 1958, in Auburndale, Massachusetts; daughter of George Calder (a carpenter) and Margery (Patterson) Calder; educated in Hartford public schools; Mt. Holyoke College, B.S., 1896; married John Lawrence Thurston (a missionary), in 1902 (died 1904).

Taught in Connecticut secondary schools (1896–1900); volunteered for foreign mission work (1900); taught at Central Turkey College for Girls, Marash, Turkey (1900–02); traveled to China with husband (1902); taught at Yale mission in Zhangsha, China (1903); returned to China with support from Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (1913); founded Ginling College for Women (1913) and served as school's first president (1913–28); served with relief organizations in China (1940–43); interned by Japanese (early 1940s); repatriated to Auburndale, Massachusetts (1943).

The eldest daughter of a Scottish immigrant father who worked as a carpenter and a northern Irish immigrant mother, Matilda Thurston was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 16, 1875. Both parents were staunch Presbyterians, and from them the young Matilda gained a respect for practicality, hard work, and faith. When she was 13, she joined the Presbyterian Church. Social life revolved around church and family, which included her younger sister Helen Calder , to whom she was very close, and her younger brother. She also very much enjoyed her education in the public schools of Hartford.

After graduating from high school, Thurston left home for the first time, to attend Mt. Holyoke College. A missionary delegation visited the campus during her senior year there, and she enrolled in a mission study class on India. Later, she joined the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), and realized she had found her calling. After receiving a B.S. degree from Mt. Holyoke in 1896, Thurston embarked on a teaching career, spending four years in Connecticut public schools while attending SVM conferences at Northfield, Massachusetts, during the summers. These conferences heightened her desire to work as a missionary, and in 1900 she volunteered for service. Her first assignment was a two-year stint at Central Turkey College for Girls in Marash, Turkey. When she returned to America in 1902, she married John Lawrence Thurston, whom she had met during an SVM conference.

The son of a minister, Yale-educated John Thurston was a seminary student and cofounder of the Yale University Mission, for which the young couple would work in China. Not long after their marriage they sailed for China, where they spent their first months studying Chinese. They intended to find a location for what would become Yale-in-China, but John's tuberculosis forced them to return to the United States in August 1903. He died the following year in California.

Thurston continued to work for the SVM, spending two years as a field secretary before returning to China around 1906. In Zhangsha (Changsha), Hunan, she taught for five years at the boys' preparatory school at the Yale mission while also working in the mission hospital attached to the school. She was planning her departure for a trip home to America when the Chinese Revolution of 1911 erupted, forcing her to join the exodus of numerous Westerners from interior China. Anticipating expanded opportunities for women as a result of the revolution, refugee missionaries in Shanghai began to plan for a women's Christian college. While some two-year college programs already had been established, there was no four-year women's college in central China at that time.

Thurston returned to China in 1913, working under the aegis of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, one of five societies offering support for an interdenominational school for women. In November 1913, she was elected president of Ginling College for Women. As the college did not yet exist, her first charges were to locate a campus, hire a faculty, and publicize the new school. The college opened its doors with six faculty members and eight students in September 1915. Thurston established a close link with Smith College, one of the preeminent women's colleges in the U.S., and modeled the curriculum at Ginling after that of American liberal arts colleges. Both Smith and Mt. Holyoke provided teaching staff for short-term assignments. With its twin goals of furthering the Christian cause and helping women gain respect and independence, Ginling attracted the daughters both of well-to-do non-Christians and of less wealthy Christians, and its enrollment grew rapidly. Most classes were conducted in English, although Thurston frequently gave religious addresses in Chinese. In addition to handling administration of the school, she also taught astronomy, advanced mathematics, and religion, and conducted the choir. The school was known for its courses in the sciences, English, music, and physical education, and may well have been the first in China to award bachelor's degrees to women. Many of its graduates became middle-school teachers.

Thurston remained president of Ginling until 1928, when she turned the post over to one of the school's first graduates, Wu Yi-fang , in the face of continuing criticism of missionary-led schools by Chinese nationalists. She remained actively engaged at the school as an advisor, however, consulting on plans for building construction. From 1936 to 1939, Thurston lived in the United States, returning to China in 1939, after the start of World War II, to work with war and relief efforts. When the Japanese took over Nanjing (Nanking) in the early 1940s, Thurston was interned. Upon her release in 1943, she went to live with her sister Helen in Auburndale, Massachusetts. There, despite failing health from arteriosclerosis, she collaborated with Ruth M. Chester on a history of Ginling College that was published in 1955. Prior to its merger with several other schools in 1952, when the People's Republic of China brought all colleges and universities into a national system, the college had graduated about 1,000 students. Thurston died in 1958.

sources:

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980.

Lolly Ockerstrom , freelance writer, Washington, D.C.