To-day the high authorities, the only authorities, on cooking are all men. To-day, if a woman for some reason or other is unable to nurse her new-born child, she cannot turn to the traditional wisdom of her sex,[180] she cannot even turn to a classical work on child welfare written by _one_ member of her sex, she must turn to man; for the high authorities on this subject, at the time of writing, are all men like Dr. Eric Pritchard, or else women who have learnt all they know directly from them. To-day, every fashion, whether of men’s or of women’s clothing, is entirely the creation of the male mind. A group of men in England direct the former, and a group of men in France autocratically prescribe the latter. The only circumstance that could possibly make me regret the death of a woman like Mrs. Taylor, many years before my own birth, is that it has rendered me unable to confront her with these facts, and to ask her how she accounts, or how she would have made poor Mill account, for this colossal, incurable and wellnigh incredible lack of ability in thousands of generations of women, in occupations where they had everything their own way for centuries. In England, in the Middle Ages, a proverb was current to the effect that “God sent us meat and the devil ordained the cooking of it.”[181] The cooking of food, which has remained in the hands of women for a longer period in England than in France, is, in England, notoriously atrocious. The clothing of women, which in England is more remote from the male focus of inspiration than in France, is in England proverbially inferior—despite fashion-books and a constant cross-Channel stream of British fashion-spies. While the fact that child-welfare centres are being opened up everywhere (inspired originally by male doctors, and the results of male research), in order to teach women how to take care of their babies, is surely proof enough of the abysmal ignorance into which the traditional mother of history has sunk, regarding a calling which has been her own exclusive field from the beginning of time, and which she ought to have perfected at the very dawn of history. If Mill had, with one masterly shake of his muddled head, removed those soft pink fingers from his brow, he might possibly have seen all this, and have left his MS. in some conspicuous place where his wise housemaid (who consigned Carlyle’s _French Revolution_ to the flames) might have done the same by his own _Subjection of Women_. But with characteristic confusion he mistook erotic vividness for mental vision, and thus added one great intellectual blunder to the many which contributed towards forming late nineteenth-century opinion. * * * * *