The making of programmes has in many cases been influenced by the fact that some subjects are considered more “high-toned” than others.  The drama is at present a particularly high-toned subject.  The fine arts are always placed in the first class.  Apparently anything closely related to the personal lives, habits and interests of those concerned is under a ban.  The fine arts, for instance, are not recognised as including the patterns of wall-paper or curtains, or the decoration of plates or cups.  Copying from one programme to another is a common expedient.  The making of these programmes betrays, all through its processes and their inevitable result, lack of originality, blind adherence to models, unquestioning imitation of something that has gone before.  I do not believe these to be sex-characteristics, and there are signs that the sex is growing out of them.  If they are not sex characteristics they must be the results of education, for ordinary heredity would quickly equalise the sexes in this respect.  I have already stated my belief that the physical differences between the sexes are necessarily accompanied by mental differences, and I think it probable that the characteristics noted above, although not proper to sex, spring from the fact that we are expecting like results from the same educational treatment of unlike minds.  When we have learned how to vary our treatment of these minds so as to produce like results—­in those cases where we want the results to be alike, as in the present instance—­we shall have solved the problem of education, so far as it affects sex-differences.

It has long been recognised that whenever woman does show a deviation from standards she is apt to deviate far and erratically.  So far, however, she has shown no marked tendency so to deviate in the arts and a very slight one in the sciences.  There have been lately some marked instances of her upward deviation in the field of science.  In literature, no age has been wanting in great woman writers, 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.