though there have been few of them. I look
eventually to see woman physicists as eminent as Helmholtz and Kelvin,
woman painters as great as Raphael and Velasquez, woman musicians as able
as Bach and Beethoven. That we have had none yet I believe to be solely
the fault of inadequate education. Of this inadequacy our imitative,
arbitrary and uninspiring club programmes are a part--the very fact that
our clubwomen pin their faith to programmes of any kind is a consequence
of it. The substitution of something else for these programmes, with the
accompanying change in the interests and reading of clubwomen, will be one
step toward the rationalisation of education--for all processes of this
kind are essentially educative.

We need not despair of finding ultimately the exact differences in method
which, applied in the education of the sexes, will minimise such of the
present mental differences as we desire to obliterate. Problems of this
sort are solved usually by the discovery of some automatic process. In
this case the key to such a process is the fact that the mental
differences between the sexes manifest themselves in differences of
interest.

Every parent of boys and girls knows that these differences begin early to
show themselves. We have been too prone to disregard them and to
substitute a set of imagined differences that do not really exist. We go
about the moral training of the boy and the girl in precisely the same
way, although their moral points of view and susceptibilities differ in
degree and kind; and then we marvel that we do not get precisely similar
moral products. But we assume that there is some natural objection to the
climbing of trees by girls, while it is all right for boys--an imaginary
distinction that has caused tears and heart-burnings. We are outgrowing
this particular imaginary distinction, and some others like it. Possibly
we may also outgrow our systems of co-education, so far as this means the
subjection of the male and the female mind to exactly the same processes
of training. The training of the sexes in the same institution, with its
consequent mental contact between them, has nothing to do with this,
necessarily, and has advantages that cannot be overlooked.

Whatever we do in school, our subsequent education, which goes on at least
as long as we inhabit this world, must be in and through social contact,
men and women together. But if each sex is not true to itself and does not
live its