In Defense of Women | Page 5

Department
of Justice to proceed against me for the crime known to American law as "criminal
anarchy," i.e., "imagining the King's death." Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the
mails as lewd and lascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they received
many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of these complaints to be

lodged, in the hope that the resultant buffooneries would give me entertainment in those
dull days of war, with all intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of
the book. But the Comstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me to the righteous
indignation of right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists. Their concern, after all,
is not with books that are denounced; what they concentrate their moral passion on is the
book that is praised.
The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more civilized countries, and so I
have felt free to introduce a number of propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs,
that had to be omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no means
pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of any novelty. All I design
by it is to set down in more or less plain form certain ideas that practically every civilized
man and woman holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass of
sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It is a question of capital
importance to all human beings, and it deserves to be discussed honestly and frankly, but
there is so much of social reticence, of religious superstition and of mere emotion
intermingled with it that most of the enormous literature it has thrown off is hollow and
useless. I point for example, to the literature of the subsidiary question of woman suffrage.
It fills whole libraries, but nine tenths of it is merely rubbish, for it starts off from
assumptions that are obviously untrue and it reaches conclusions that are at war with both
logic and the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally,
hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers of pamphlets, handbills and
inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves the primary problem unsolved, which is to say,
the problem as to what is to be done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced
upon millions by civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In the main, it
counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as sensible as advising a dog to forget its
fleas. Here, as in other fields, I do not presume to offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I
am very suspicious of all remedies for the major ills of life, and believe that most of them
are incurable. But I at least venture todiscuss the matter realistically, and if what I have to
say is not sagacious, it is at all events not evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe
some later investigator will bring a better illumination to the subject.
It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or two about the author in
each volume. I was born in Baltimore, September 12, 1880, and come of a learned family,
though my immediate forebears were business men. The tradition of this ancient learning
has been upon me since my earliest days, and I narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of
philosophy. My father's death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into journalism, where I
had a successful career, as such careers go. At the age of 25 1 was the chief editor of a
daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same year I published my first book of
criticism. Thereafter, for ten or twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism,
with its dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purely aesthetic concerns,
chiefly literature and music, but of late I have felt a strong pull in the other direction, and
what interests me chiefly today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature
of the ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes whereby they reach
them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will be in that field. In the United States I
am commonly held suspect as a foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced.
Abroad, especially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my intolerable
Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they seem to be. The fact is that I am

superficially so American, in ways of speech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived,
whereas the native, more familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface there is
incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold