A Librarian's Open Shelf: Essays on Various Subjects

by Arthur E. Bostwick

“Thank you so much for the folk-lore; but we have changed our minds and have decided to study the Chicago Drainage Canal instead.”

This hap-hazard method of programme-making is not confined to club papers, as the following anecdote will show:

An officer of a woman’s club entered a library and said that she thought it would be nice to vary the usual literary programme by the introduction of story-telling, and she asked for aid from the library staff. It was a busy season and as the librarian hesitated the clubwoman added hastily that the whole programme need not occupy more than half an hour. “We want the very simplest things, told in a few words, so that it will really be no trouble at all.”

Pressed to be more specific, she went on: “Well—no story must take more than three minutes, and we want Little Nell, Louis IX, Moses in the Bulrushes, the Princes in the Tower, Cinderella, Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Holy Night and Louis XI.

”You see that allowing three minutes apiece would bring them all within twenty-four minutes—less than half an hour, just as I said.

“And—oh, yes! we want the storyteller to sit on a platform, and just in front of her we will pose a group of little girls, all in white frocks. Won’t that be nice?”

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.

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.