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 own life, the results cannot be satisfactory.  Reactions that are sought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirations and mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just as they would be if men should seek a similar distortion.  The remedy is to let the woman’s mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just as the man’s always has done.  Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, their exercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be released from the constraint that is now pinching them and pinning them down and will bud and blossom and grow up to normal and valuable fruition.

We have started with the fact that the reading done by the members of women’s clubs, especially in connection with club papers, is often trivial, superficial, devoid of intelligence and lacking in judgment.  Treating this as a symptom; we have, I think, traced the cause to a total lack of interest due to arbitrary, perfunctory and unintelligent programme-making.  The disease may be diagnosed, I think, as acute programitis and the physician is in a position to consider what therapeutic measures may be indicated.  We shall endeavor to prescribe some simple remedies.

III—­The Remedy