orth
reading about at all, or that the fact has nothing to do with what she has
ever done or is likely to be called upon to do in the future.

That the members of these clubs are willing to pursue knowledge under
these hampering conditions is of course a point in their favour, so far as
it goes. A desire for knowledge is never to be despised, even when it is
not entertained for its own sake. And a secondary desire may often be
changed into a primary one, if the task is approached in the right way.
The possibility of such a transformation is a hopeful feature of the
present situation.

The reading that is done by women in connection with club work is of
several different types. In the simplest organisations, which are reading
clubs pure and simple, a group of books, roughly equal in number to the
membership, is taken and passed around until each person has read them
all. There is no connection between them, and each volume is selected
simply on some one's statement that it is a "good book." A step higher is
the club where the books are on one general subject, selected by some one
who has been asked to prescribe a "course of reading." By easy gradations
we arrive at the final stage, where the reading is of the nature of
investigation and its outcome is an essay. A subject is decided on at the
beginning of the season. The programme committee selects several phases of
it and assigns each to a member, who prepares her essay and reads it to
the club at one of the stated meetings. In this case the reading to be
done in preparation for writing the essay may or may not be guided by the
committee. In many cases, where the local public library cooperates
actively with the clubs, a list may be made out by the librarian and
perhaps printed, with due acknowledgment, in the club's year book. No one
can doubt, in looking over typical programmes and lists among the
thousands that represent the annual reading of the women's clubs
throughout the United States, that a serious and sustained effort is being
made to introduce the intellect, as an active factor, into the lives of
thousands of women--lives where hitherto it has played little part,
whether they are millionaires or near paupers, workers or idlers. With
this aim there must be frill measure of sympathy, but I fear we can
commend it only in the back-handed fashion in which a great authority on
sociology recently commended the Socialists. "If sympathy with what they
are trying to do