In Defense of Women | Page 4

in the domain of the intellect I
have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I
need do here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among the great nations
of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything--not only
in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life.
Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public
clamour(usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of
Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief railway station, or
the purchase of a dozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to
the Structural Iron Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in the town
Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes such a proposal--on the

ground, say, that Miss Anthony never mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen
leopards would be less useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the
Structural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and knock down
the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms-- this citizen is commonly denounced as an
anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be
immoral. And many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any of the
articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for him to run grave risks of
social disaster. The old English offence of "imagining the King's death"has been formally
revived by the American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for
committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some parts of the country
at least, it now embraces such remote acts as believing that the negroes should have
equality before the law, and speaking the language of countries recently at war with the
Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such
toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a sense,
perhaps they are. For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that
they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to
pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United
States this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise, not
even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the rulers of the land so steadily,
or makes heavier demands upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion.
Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to change the plates of my
"Book of Prefaces," a book of purely literary criticism, wholly without political purpose
or significance, in order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure
upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening it with
any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So deciding, I presently added a
bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting itself over all
prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that
was not already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbial philosophy, or
folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including the Chinese. To this rule I remained
faithful throughout. In its original form, as published in 1918, the book was actuary just
such a pastiche of proverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to
Congressmen, newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy to hold
to this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert notions that seemed to have
escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the
work, I managed to get through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There
is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized and unrewarded. In
fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it, and most of them slated the book
violently as a mass of heresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known
and revered truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the national
decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes to extraordinary lengths, even
for the United States, some of the newspapers actually denounced the book as German
propaganda, designed to break down American morale, and called upon the