It seems hardly safe scientifically, therefore, to restrict women to the average levels in education and work and profession on the ground that eminence is beyond their range. But if the female geniuses have not been cut off by a comparatively narrowed range of mental ability, where are they? Certainly history does not reveal them in anything like satisfactory number. And it is now that women may bring forward their third weapon of attack. The female geniuses may have been missing not because of an inherent lack in the make-up of the sex, but because of the oppressive, restrictive cultural conditions under which women have been forced to live. The important rôle played by cultural conditions in the cultural achievement of various nations and races has been noted with increasing emphasis by the newer schools of sociology and anthropology. No scholar can now defend unchallenged a thesis of “lower or higher races” by urging the achievements of any race as an index of its range of mental ability. Culture grows by its own laws and the high position of the white race may be as much a product of favorable circumstances as of exceptional innate capacities. Similarly the expression taken by the genius of various nations appears to vary strikingly. This is especially impressive in the realm of music. The Anglo-Saxon peoples are singularly lacking in great musical composers. Neither Britain nor America, nor indeed any of the northern countries have contributed one composer worthy of mention beside the Beethovens and Wagners and Chopins of this art. Indeed the great names in music are generally of German, Latin or Slavic origin. Yet no one thinks of urging this fact as evidence of an Anglo-Saxon failure of major creativeness. Instead we point to achievements in other fields or at most attempt to explain this peculiar lack by some external causation. Similarly all our impatience with the un-artistic approaches of the American people does not lead us to frame a theory of their lack of genius. There are many cultural factors to be considered first. But as soon as we approach the problem of female genius, too many of us are apt to bring forward an entirely different kind of interpretation. We pass over the undoubted female geniuses lightly--granting Sappho and Bonheur and Brunn and Eliot and Brontë and Amster and Madame Curie and Caroline Herschel and perhaps even Chaminade and Clara Schumann and several others. We admit the undoubtedly significant parts women are playing in modern literature. But the question always remains.