The sydenstrickers spent several months making the journey from China to Virginia. After traveling north by canal boat and train from Chinkiang to Peking and then to Manchuria, they endured ten days on the Trans-Siberian railroad to Moscow. The train had no food onboard and no toilet facilities; the whole family shared a single cabin. Pearl was dismayed by the impoverished Russian peasants she saw at every station. The crowds of clamorous beggars represented human deprivation on a scale she had not seen in China except during the worst years of drought and famine. Those scenes remained a vivid memory for the rest of her life. She felt liberated when the family crossed the borders of Western Europe. The Sydenstrickers spent a month in Switzerland, where Pearl was tutored in French, then continued west, sightseeing in Paris and London. In September, 1910, they reached Lynchburg and enrolled Pearl as a freshman in Randolph-Macon Woman's College, one of the few women's colleges in the South.

Creating opportunities for the collegiate education of women was a belated but splendid achievement of the American nineteenth century. The all-male world of higher education was altered in two fundamental ways during the 1800s: through the establishment of women's colleges and through the simultaneous shift toward coeducation in most men's colleges. Between them, coeducational and women's colleges enrolled upwards of 140,000 women by 1910, the year of Pearl's matriculation. Although this figure still represented only a small fraction of the population, women did make up nearly 40 percent of all college students.

Historically, the women's colleges have produced a disproportionate share of female professionals, including scholars, scientists, lawyers, and civic leaders.