IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN by H. L. Mencken CONTENTS Introduction I. The Feminine Mind 1. The Maternal Instinct 2. Women’s Intelligence 3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks 4. Why Women Fail 5. The Thing Called Intuition II. The War Between the Sexes 6. How Marriages are Arranged 7. The Feminine Attitude 8. The Male Beauty 9. Men as Aesthetes 10. The Process of Delusion 11. Biological Considerations 12. Honour 13. Women and the Emotions 14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia 15. Mythical Anthropophagi 16. A Conspiracy of Silence III. Marriage 17. Fundamental Motives 18. The Process of Courtship 19. The Actual Husband 20. The Unattainable Ideal 21. The Effect on the Race 22. Compulsory Marriage 23. Extra-Legal Devices 24. Intermezzo on Monogamy 25. Late Marriages 26. Disparate Unions 27. The Charm of Mystery 28. Woman as Wife 29. Marriage and the Law 30. The Emancipated Housewife IV. Woman Suffrage 31. The Crowning Victory 32. The Woman Voter 33. A Glance Into the Future 34. The Suffragette 35. A Mythical Dare-Devil 36. The Origin of a Delusion 37. Women as Martyrs 38. Pathological Effects 39. Women as Christians 40. Piety as a Social Habit 41. The Ethics of Women V. The New Age 42. The Transvaluation of Values 43. The Lady of Joy 44. The Future of Marriage 45. Effects of the War 46. The Eternal Romance 47. Apologia in Conclusion 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