1958 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public
Service
BIOGRAPHY of Mary Rutnam
Dr. MARY RUTNAM, the former MARY HELEN IRWIN, was born on June 2, 1873 at Elora,
Ontario, Canada. Her family later moved to Kincardine, bordering Lake Huron,
where she received her education. Later she qualified as a doctor at the Toronto
Medical College for Women, and took her postgraduate work in New York.
Dr. IRWIN came to Ceylon in December 1896, "in the days of horse and bullock
coaches," to join the American Medical Mission at Jaffna. In March 1898, she
moved to Colombo where she married Samuel Christian Kanagar Rutnam, B.A.
(Madras) and M.A. (Princeton), a Tamil Ceylonese whom she had met while in New
York. Taking up private practice, she also assisted her husband in his
educational and mission work. He was a teacher by profession and later founded
Central College in Colombo.
In the following October, the doctor in charge of the newly-opened Lady Havelock
Hospital for Women and Children went on sick leave and Dr. RUTNAM was requested
by the Medical Department to act for her. Here she performed the first
orthopedic surgery in Ceylon and lectured to the first group of women medical
students, then in their final year.
Since then Dr. RUTNAM has continued to show her deep concern for others and to
minister to their needs in a private capacity as a doctor, as a municipal
councilor and as a public-spirited citizen. Over the years she has so identified
herself with the country of her adoption as to become one of its own and is now
a Ceylonese national.
The Lady Havelock Hospital, the Council of Temperance Workers, the Colombo
Municipal Council of which she was the first woman member, the Young Women's
Christian Association and, indeed, practically every women's institute or
organization in Ceylon have all come under her good influence.
Though her age dictated retirement several years ago. Dr. RUTNAM maintains a
keen interest in the many activities she was instrumental in establishing,
particularly those for the benefit of rural women in Ceylon. Now 85, she is a
member of a number of committees, including the Government Marriage and Divorce
Commission.
It was in 1904 that Dr. RUTNAM and others in Ceylon were launched on careers of
social service. Dr. Choni Oliver, then working in the Canadian Presbyterian
Mission at Indore, Central India, had been a first year student at the Toronto
Women's Medical College when Dr. RUTNAM graduated and they had many mutual
friends. When Dr. Oliver came to Ceylon for her holiday that year, she visited
hospitals with Dr. RUTNAM and spent hours telling her how the women in Canada
and the United States were venturing out in social services. She bought Dr.
RUTNAM books, subscribed for American Motherhood and other magazines, and
generated on her friend's part keen enthusiasm in the advanced service of
Western women and the great need for such work in the East. Dr. RUTNAM later
spoke of Dr. Oliver's visit as "a pebble thrown into a stream." "I was the first
wavelet," she said, "and the waves are still broadening." A few weeks after this
memorable encounter, Dr. RUTNAM's third son was born, and, shortly afterwards,
she invited a group of young mothers and teachers to a tea party and related to
them all Dr. Oliver had told her. The lengthy discussions that followed ended in
a resolve to act, but the ladies said, "we must learn ourselves before we can
teach others." When they formed the Women's Mutual Improvement Association,
husbands and the press ridiculed the "Cinnamon Gardens ladies" who wanted to
improve themselves—"what of the others?" they were asked. The group's name was
later changed to The Ceylon Women's Union, and a comprehensive constitution was
drafted which established as objectives the improvement of the women of Ceylon
as wives, mothers and true citizens and the spread of knowledge, truth and
purity in their homes and throughout the Island.
Dr. RUTNAM also has taken a deep interest in the Social Service League of Ceylon
since its founding, in 1911, by two prominent Ceylonese philanthropists. Its
objectives are to bring to the educated and wealthy in the community an
awareness of their obligation to serve those in less privileged circumstances;
to study social problems and to collect and disseminate information thereon; to
provide training in social services; to improve conditions of the poor and the
neglected; to assist all civic organizations and to foster cooperation between
them.
During its formative years, Dr. RUTNAM assisted in planning, directing and
administering the League's activities. She established the first Free Day-Care
Center in Ceylon for children of working mothers. This Center, a second League
Creche, and a Welfare Center which distributes food and vitamins to needy
families are still functioning today.
The League set up Ceylon's first free English-language night school, in 1912,
and now manages two such institutions as well as a Sinhalese-language primary
and secondary school for girls. It runs a Girls' Sewing School and a Community
Center for working men with a reading room, film shows, lectures, indoor games
and periodic basic literacy classes.
Funds for these activities come from donations in response to annual appeals,
regular membership fees, government grants for League-managed schools and
philanthropic institutions. Last fiscal year donations and subscriptions brought
in Rs.11,150; government school grants totaled Rs.5,262; and net income from the
Trust Fund was Rs.2,728.
As a municipal councilor, Dr. RUTNAM worked for better sanitary and health
conditions, addressing herself particularly to the problem of markets, the
graft-ridden buying and selling of meat, and the condition of meat stalls. For
years, she fought for a children's ward in the government hospital where
children with tuberculosis could be housed, fed and properly cared for. In 1925,
she began agitation for a better milk supply and 12 years later, in 1937, was
still calling public attention to the need for a central depot where all dairies
would be compelled to take their milk for testing.
Dr. RUTNAM's greatest contribution perhaps has been the introduction into Ceylon
of women's institutes, known as the Lanka Mahila Samiti. Affiliated to the
Associated Countrywomen of the World, the origins of this movement were in
Ontario, Canada, in 1897. There, women's institutes were begun by the Canadian
Department of Agriculture but soon took on a separate identity as a women's
movement. The program came into being in Ceylon in 1930 soon after a talk by Dr.
RUTNAM on "Women's Institutes for Rural Reconstruction" at an All-Ceylon
Conference of Social Workers.
The Lanka Mahila Samiti suggests the breadth and depth of this generous-minded
woman's work. Recognizing no barriers of caste, creed or community, these
women's institutes have done much to alter the status of the village women.
Before its inception, an observer has noted, "she was perhaps a mudalali's
(small store-owner's) wife, somebody's servant, a betel-seller . . . or an
estate laborer. Today no one thinks of her in these terms. She is a president, a
secretary, a skillful weaver of mats or bags, a demonstrator in sweet-making; we
think of her homemaking successes, her community responsibilities, her social
qualities and her economic capacity."
The women, thus bolstered, have taken an increasingly active role in their
villages, not only helping their menfolk but also initiating work themselves.
Community life, with its wholesome give-and-take spirit, took on new meaning,
and, as one account reads, "there was instilled a regeneration and a revivifying
in the sons and daughters of the land of a genuine love of the soil and the
instinct not to break faith with it."
Dr. RUTNAM seemed to be everywhere in the work of the institutes: "Her
experience helped in many ways to stabilize the movement," a report on the Lanka
Mahila Samiti states, "though with her usual foresight she adapted her knowledge
and experience to local needs." She pushed to the front potential organizers in
the women's groups. She supervised the program of balanced diets to be
introduced to the villagers, talked with rural teachers to enlist their
cooperation in the rural rehabilitation movement, taught the villagers hygienic
ways while also teaching women how to teach others. Dr. RUTNAM was with the
people who boosted food production and improved nutrition through home gardens
and simple improvements in the preparation and preservation of food, as she was
with those who laid the foundation for cottage industries. She encouraged folk
drama, folk songs and dances, explaining that these are manifestations both of
native culture and self-respecting nationalism.
Dr. RUTNAM also found time to edit a number of textbooks that today are widely
used in Ceylonese schools, including manuals on health and homecraft and a
simple recipe book for beginners in home science. During the 1942 air raids, she
compiled a leaflet—the only one of its kind in Ceylon— with simple instructions
on air raid precautions and first aid, especially suited to village needs and
utilizing local remedies.
With all her numerous public activities and her professional duties, this
slight, energetic woman was first a wife and mother of five. Three of the
Rutnams' sons and their one daughter are residing in Ceylon and one son is
presently in the United Kingdom. Dr. RUTNAM has nine grandchildren and two great
grandchildren.
In a letter published in The Times of Ceylon in 1949, Dr. RUTNAM expressed her
"thanks and deep appreciation" for gifts, letters and telegrams received on her
76th birthday and added these typical words:
"I would also wish to pay a tribute to the loyal cooperation of that splendid
band of Ceylon women of all communities with whom through the long years I have
been associated and who should share with me whatever success has been achieved.
Some of these workers are no more, some are in the forefront of useful service
today. We, too, will pass on. What of the future? Today the problems that face
an independent Ceylon are immense and the need more urgent than ever for men and
women specially trained to deal with them in an intelligent and constructive
manner.
"I feel sure that many of Lanka's daughters now in our schools, colleges and
University will heed the call to dedicate their lives and talents in useful
services for their motherland, so they may be equipped and contribute their
rightful share towards the building of a Lanka whose freedom will not only be
political but economical and spiritual as well."
August 1958
Manila
REFRENCES:
Reports of the Lanka Mahila Samiti.
Clippings from the Ceylonese press of 1937, 1949, 1955, 1956 and 1957.
Interviews with persons acquainted with Dr. Mary H. Rutnam and her work.
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