The Project Gutenberg EBook of In Defense of Women, by H. L. Mencken

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Title: In Defense of Women

Author: H. L. Mencken

Posting Date: August 26, 2008 [EBook #1270]
Release Date: April, 1998

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN ***

Produced by Joseph Gallanar

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,