It is perfectly true, of course—indeed nothing could be plainer—that man, throughout the ages, even of European history, has been unable to relieve woman of those duties which, as a mother, and therefore as a homekeeper, have necessarily devolved upon her;[179] but neither has he been able to relieve himself of the duties of the soldier, the sailor, the hewer of wood, and the drawer of water. Nobody in his senses, however (unless he were infatuated with a second Mrs. Taylor), would argue that because man has been unable to relieve woman of those duties, therefore he has distorted her “true” nature. For the truth is, the fact remains (securely as Mill was blinded to it) that even in those departments of social life which for centuries, almost from time immemorial, have constituted practically the undisputed domain of woman—woman’s Empire, woman’s peculiar field for enterprise and initiative, where her independence and supremacy have been unchallenged—in cooking, clothing and child-care, such ineptitude, such inability to improve, such gross and stubborn stupidity have been shown, that only when men took over these departments of knowledge, as special branches of study, was there any sign, any hope, any certainty of progress being made. Even if we were so easily hoodwinked as to be led to admit that woman’s relative intellectual inferiority, her lack of creative and inventive ability in other spheres, did not constitute a natural sexual characteristic, but were the outcome of a deliberate attempt on our part to withhold from her the opportunities of acquiring ability in those spheres, how are we to explain the marked deficiency of intelligence and initiative which she has shown as a sex in the elaboration and perfection of those arts or sciences, such as cooking, clothing, and child-care, which have practically been her exclusive domain for ages? Here she was supreme. Here she was entirely free and untrammelled. By now she could have converted each of these pursuits into an exact science. She has had the time, the hereditary bias, and the accumulated knowledge of tradition, all on her side. And yet, as we know, it was only when men took these departments in hand, that they began to wear the aspect of properly regulated and scientific occupations.