In Defense of Women | Page 6

to be sound. Thus If all
between two stools--but it is more comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I
am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many
men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The
only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a
necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer
man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the
Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is
nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd
probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of
bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it.
H. L. Mencken

The Feminine Mind

The Maternal Instinct
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority,
always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy
sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him
for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of
feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of
that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual
immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly
between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is
a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.
The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of masculine manufacture. It is
both insincere and untrue: insincere because it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he
is potentially a hero to everyone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate man
himself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate his master's charlatanry.
Who ever heard of valet who didn't envy his master wholeheartedly? who wouldn't
willingly change places with his master? who didn't secretly wish that he was his master?
A man's wife labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough,
certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his
masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his
peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind
the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies
him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.
This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding
of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which
paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply
because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching
self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole
tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of
mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From

the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her
character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a
single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.

2.
Women's Intelligence
That is should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to
argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the
defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and
masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted feminists,
approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them think it necessary to bring up a
vast mass of evidence to establish what should be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman,
W. L. George, one of the most sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on the
demonstration, and then, with a great air of uttering something new, gives it the
humourless title of " The Intelligence of Women. " The intelligence of women, forsooth!
As well devote a laborious time to the sagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!
Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the
subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself,