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No survey of women’s work for education would be complete without some mention of their part in promoting the circulation of good books. The educational work which women have done through libraries is both great and obvious, although the public that profits by them may not fully realize the number of traveling libraries and stationary and circulating libraries that women have directly established.

The first large concerted movement on the part of the club women was for the extension of education through books and scarcely a woman’s club in the country fails to report an initial activity in that direction. In little log cabins on the frontiers as well as in splendid buildings in the cities books have been housed and distributed among readers by the earnest efforts of women whose culture early ceased to be individual; that is, they were anxious to pass on to the multitudes such culture as they themselves possessed.

With their interest in reading and encouraging the reading habit in others, women have helped to develop a wonderful social service for the library. As truly as any other group of social workers, librarians are educators and physicians of mind and body. While too many of them still are too circumscribed in their thinking and merely reflexes of their clerical training, there is a rapidly increasing number of library workers everywhere who realize the effect of reading on social thinking and sympathies as well as on individual ambitions, and are seeking to stimulate social forces by encouraging that reading which will increase the interest in the common good. By means of bulletins, exhibits, personal suggestions, public lectures, and in many other ways, the library is developing into a people’s school, beginning with early childhood and continuing throughout life.

The library can no longer be regarded as a minor educational institution. Indeed it is closely affiliated in many cities with the schools: the teacher and the librarian coöperating definitely all the time. In some cases the library and school are housed together and this plan is warmly sanctioned by many educators. At any rate the field is growing so rapidly in connection with the furnishing of reading matter for the public that the library and the school must stand as a unit in educational consideration.

Women have kept pace with this library development and have extended the field appreciably. There is no way of measuring statistically how far initiative has been due to them, but anyone familiar with the predominance of women on library forces and governing bodies cannot fail to recognize their great influence in the library movement.

It would be impossible to enumerate all the reading rooms with library equipment that women have established. In settlements, Y. W. C. A.’s, homes for working girls, rescue homes, rural centers, villages, churches, institutions, and wherever there is the slightest chance, women have slipped in the books and the magazines. Their interest has usually been altruistic but now and then it has been augmented by hobbies of health, science, literature, poetry, art, religion, industry, and politics, one often being stimulated by observation of the advance movement of another, the work thus ending in many cases in the creation of a well-balanced assortment of books.

It is a significant fact at the present time that more girls than boys are graduating from our high schools. Women, it seems, are both giving and getting the education.