In Defense of Women | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Joseph Gallanar [email protected]

In Defense of Women by H. L. Mencken

Contents
Introduction I The Feminine Mind II The War between The Sexes III Marriage IV
Woman Suffrage V The New Age

Introduction
As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in the world is that of
manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be
instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and
sound that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force themselves

into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not confess that a large part of my
stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday,
with new labels stuck rakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn
goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and
everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought
out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new
ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. The most they can ever
accomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant spurt, and half a
dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close together and show a certain
co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner celebrated, and even immortal. Nature,
indeed, conspires against all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is
against it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably are on this
earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange
tendency to yield and have done. Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly
beset, first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad taste,
and secondly by an inner weakness that limits his capacity for it, and especially his
capacity to throw off the prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The
cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument of reflection and
speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the contemporary
metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is
far above all the ordinary airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is
suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the ghost of
some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering
corpse of a doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of
fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by
his wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his
violation of the divine edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him,
and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable
level of a patriot and taxpayer.

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present work, and entered
upon it with no expectation that I should be able to embellish it with, almost, more than a
very small number of hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional
handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I wrote
it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only possible customers were
Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike for novelty