Vogt’s report, that women are distinguished by good memories and poor powers of generalization.  But this is to mistake the facts.  A tenacious memory is characteristic of women and children, and of all persons unskilled in the manipulation of varied experiences in thought.  But when the mind is able at any moment to construct a result from the raw materials of experience, the memory loses something of its tenacity and absoluteness.  In this sense it may even be said that a good memory for details is a sign of an untrained or imitative mind.  As the mind becomes more inventive, the memory is less concerned with the details of knowledge and more with the knowledge of places to find the details when they are needed in any special problem.

The awkwardness in manual manipulation shown by these girls was also surely due to lack of practice.  The fastest typewriter in the world is today a woman; the record for roping steers (a feat depending on manual dexterity rather than physical force) is held by a woman; and anyone who will watch girls making change before the pneumatic tubes in the great department stores about Christmas time will experience the same wonder one feels on first seeing a professional gambler shuffling cards.

In short, Professor Vogt’s report on women students is just what was to be expected in Germany forty years ago.  The American woman, with the enjoyment of greater liberty, has made an approach toward the standards of professional scholarship, and some individuals stand at the very top in their university studies and examinations.  The trouble with these cases is that they are either swept away and engulfed by the modern system of marriage, or find themselves excluded in some intangible way from association with men in the fullest sense, and no career open to their talents.

The personal liberty of women is, comparatively speaking, so great in America, suggestion and copies for imitation are spread broadcast so copiously in the schools, newspapers, books, and lectures, and occupations and interests are becoming so varied, that a number of women of natural ability and character are realizing some definite aim in a perfect way.  But these are sporadic cases, representing usually some definite interest rather than a full intellectual life, and resembling also in their nature and rarity the elevation of a peasant to a position of eminence in Europe.  Nowhere in the world do women as a class lead a perfectly free intellectual life in common with the men of the group, unless it be in restricted and artificial groups like the modern revolutionary party in Russia.

Even in America a number of the great schools are not coeducational, and in those which are so, many of the instructors claim that they do not find it possible to treat with the men and women on precisely the same basis, both because of their own mental attitude toward mixed classes and the inability of the women to receive such treatment.  In the case of women also we can say what Mr. Smith says of the Chinese and their system of education, that it is impossible not to marvel at the results they accomplish in view of the system under which they work.