Mary Nourse

Mary Augusta Nourse (1880–1971) was an American educator and writer on China and the Far East, and a co-founder of Jinling College in Nanjing. The best-known of her several books was her first, a popular history of China titled The Four Hundred Million.

Nourse was born to Edwin Henry and Harriett Augusta Beaman Nourse of Lockport, New York on March 11, 1880. She was the sister of novelist Alice Tisdale Hobart and economist Edwin Nourse. The family later moved to Downers Grove, Illinois, in the suburbs of Chicago.

Nourse attended Shimer College, which at the time was located in Mount Carroll, Illinois and served as a women's preparatory school for the University of Chicago. She graduated from Shimer in 1899 and continued to the University of Chicago, receiving her Ph.B. in 1905.

After completing her college education, Nourse briefly taught high school in Rensselaer, Indiana. Soon thereafter, however, she traveled to China to work as an educator and Baptist missionary. She taught for a number of years at Wayland Academy in Hangzhou, where she also served for a time as principal.

Nourse has traditionally been considered one of the founders of Jinling College, a women's school in Nanjing, based on her having been one of the signatories of a petition circulated in 1911-1912 calling for a women's college in the Yangtze River valley.

Nourse was also among the school's six-member faculty when it opened on September 17, 1915, teaching psychology and history to an entering class of 11 students. Women's education had been encouraged by an imperial decree in 1907, but Jinling was the first women's college to open in China. Of the 11 women in Jinling's 1915 entering class, 5 graduated, becoming the first women in China to receive a baccalaureate degree.

Among these first graduates was Wu Yi-Fang, who later became president of the college. Under Dr. Fang's leadership, the school served as a refuge during the Nanking Massacre in 1937-1938.

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