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, as opposed to the way in which they are trying to do it, makes one a Socialist,” said the Professor, “then I am a Socialist.”  Here also we may sympathise with the aim, but the results are largely dependent on the method; and that method is the offspring of ignorance and inefficiency.  The results may be summed up in one word—­superficiality.  I have elsewhere warned readers not to think that this word means simply a slight knowledge of, a subject.  A slight knowledge is all that most of us possess, or need to possess, about most subjects.  I know a little about Montenegro for instance—­something of its origin and relationships, its topography, the names and characteristics of a city or two, the racial and other peculiarities of its inhabitants.  Yet I should cut a poor figure indeed in an examination on Montenegrin history, geography or government.  Is my knowledge “superficial”?  It could not properly be so stigmatised unless I should pose as an authority on Montenegro, or unless my opportunities to know about the country had been so great that failure to take advantage of them should argue mental incapacity.  The trouble with the reading-lists and programmes of our women’s clubs, inherited in some degree from our general educational methods, is that they emphasise their own content and ignore what they do not contain, to such an extent that those who use them remain largely in ignorance of the fact that the former bears a very small proportion indeed to the latter.