In Defense of Women

by H.L. Mencken

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Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, Classics, Humor, Gender, Womens

255 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

Henry Louis "H.L." Mencken became one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and '30s, writing about all the shams and con artists in the world. He attacked chiropractors and the Ku Klux Klan, politicians and other journalists. Most of all, he attacked Puritan morality. He called Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

At the height of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."

When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

(from American Public Media)

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“[Women] see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere externals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic.”

Mencken, wielding both satire and sarcasm, oscillates between being very “Mark Twain” and being very “Archie Bunker.” I find him both hysterically funny and (often) terribly offensive. In some ways, his essays reflect the prevailing attitudes of the era, but in other ways he transcends the prejudices of America (circa 1918) by lampooning its social institutions and misogynistic civilities.

“If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.”

There are so many sardonic witticisms here that highlighting everything quote worthy became quite a chore.

“Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.”

Mencken on matrimony:

“A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worst of it...”

Mencken on feminists:

“...all of the ladies to take to this political immolation seem to be frightfully plain. I know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia only by their portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the United States I have studied at close range at various large political gatherings... I give you my word that there were not five women at either national convention who could have embraced me in camera without first giving me a chloral.”

Mencken on domestic violence:

“I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defense, almost invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical, that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses.”

It’s hard to pin Mencken down. I don’t know enough about him to decide if he’s a brilliant satirist or just an asshole... 4 tentative stars

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is hilarious! a breakdown of the methods women use to exploit the stupidity of men for their own gain. while it constantly credits women with being more intelligent, resourceful, clear-headed and practical than men, it also drives home the point that in general men don't benefit from feminine influence, instead they have their energy depleted and their potential squandered. harsh, offensive to both sexes, and funny as hell.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A man’s womenfolk, whatever their outward signs of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.” (p. 3)

To enjoy this book you have to be in the proper state of mind, because otherwise it can take on a kind of one-note tediousness. Mencken hates everyone, and everything; people are stupid and lazy, the men even more so than the women; culture, education, and progress are humbug. There is no point to anything.

Okay, but with that out of the way, if you are willing to indulge in a bit of unsportsmanlike cynicism and just go along for the ride you can have a lot of fun. Many of the things he says are exaggerated to make a point, or to emphasize his essential curmudgeonliness, but sometimes he can penetrate the vanities of people and societies, and point out things most people (men) would not want to acknowledge, such as “If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.” (p. 15)

Much of the humor in this book comes from the recognition of things that men suspect are true, but that they cannot say out loud without starting an unwinnable argument with their better halves.

His favorite subject is the eternal war of men and women, and especially husbands and wives. It reminded me of a line from Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, “The moulders of the world’s myths were unsuccessful husbands, for they agreed that woman was the root of all evils.” There are also some similarities between Mencken and his more genial contemporary James Thurber, in that they both agreed that in the war of the sexes men are hopelessly outmatched.

As woman gradually becomes convinced, not only of the possibility of economic independence, but also of its value, she will probably lose her present overmastering desire for marriage, and address herself to meeting men in free economic competition. That is to say, she will address herself to acquiring that practical competence, that high talent for puerile and chiefly mechanical expertness, which now sets man ahead of her in the labour market of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some of her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely intelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer…. (p. 159)

He is sure that monogamy etiolates men, “not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.” (p. 81)

Mencken was always alert for observations that he could abstract into general truisms about the sexes, such as “A man, speaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her soothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of his fellows. But when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly atrocities that they describe.” (p. 129)

There is also a joke on Mencken himself, which he apparently recognized but did not appreciate. He reserved special scorn for men who marry later in life, saying that they do so in their decrepitude because they are unable to resist the wiles of females looking for a husband. However, in the introduction to my copy from the Time Reading Program, it notes that after the book was published Mencken, at age 50, married a woman 22 years younger than himself. Rather than admit he was wrong, or what must have seemed to him even worse, that he could be as foolish as any other man, he refused to allow In Defense of Women to be reprinted during his lifetime.

Some of his best lines are reserved for religion:

“The essential feminine machine is no better than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator.” (p. 36)

“If the average man is made in God’s image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.” (p. 88)

“Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but with the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore, at bottom, their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their friend.” (p. 135)

“Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is in endless opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour stands against the snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory.” (p. 138)

Sometimes, even when he is being funny, he can be illuminating: “Even prostitution, in the long run, may become a more or less respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar.” (p. 153)

I have no doubt Mencken was a favorite subject of thundering denunciations by divines of all creeds.

As will be obvious, he was no fan of democracy. He felt that the average man was far too stupid to manage himself, much less a government. When he was writing this book the subject of women’s right to vote was a major issue of the day. He is at his worst when he descends into caustic mockery of Suffragettes, saying they only want to get into politics because they are too ugly to catch a husband. It’s hard to tell if he was just parroting the opinions of his day, or if even then this was considered boorish and demeaning.

The book first came out in 1918, and was edited and re-issued in 1922. It ends with a remarkably prescient statement about the peace treaty ending World War I. Although he was not alone in this opinion, certainly most people would not have been able to anticipate the dark future that he saw.

The present series of wars, it seems likely, will continue for twenty or thirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was inconclusive was shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the peace finally reached – a peace so artificial and dishonest that the signing was almost equivalent to a new declaration of war. (p. 163)

The Treaty of Versailles was signed 28 June 1919. World War II started twenty years and two months later.

It is a short book, at about 170 pages, which is the right length for something like this. If any longer it would have started to drag, and as it is it repeats some of its tropes over and over. Still, Mencken was funny and had an alarming ability to extrapolate from mankind’s foibles to some often troubling but always revealing truths.

[Rinstinkt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The editorial subtitle of the version I read had "prophetic" in it. Indeed, it is a prophetic book. But today, this book would be censurable, not because it tells lies, but because it tells the truth and has predicted the future. It has also predicted discoveries about human psychology that today fall under evolutionary psychology.

It's an entertaining read nevertheless.

Here are some selected quotes:

[...] the consequent disability and need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to feminine weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in proportion as she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man and Woman," is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of fact, stand nearly so much hardship as a man can stand, and so the law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies first. So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitude in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they have sought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing their resources in another field to the utmost, and out of that constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement of those resources.

[Predicts what later/today will be/is affirmed and confirmed by evolutionary biology and psychology.]

This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches where it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the fact that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save on the stage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in amour over his more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is viewed with the utmost suspicion by all women save the most stupid. In him the vanity native to his sex is seen to mount to a degree that is positively intolerable. It not only irritates by its very nature; it also throws about him a sort of unnatural armour, and so makes him resistant to the ordinary approaches. For this reason, the matrimonial enterprises of the more reflective and analytical sort of women are almost always directed to men whose lack of pulchritude makes them easier to bring down, and, what is more important still, easier to hold down.

-

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and natural instincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this commonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to the greatest number—of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.

-

The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. One often encounters references to her in literature, but who has ever met her in real life? As for me, I doubt that such a monster has ever actually existed. There are, of course, women who spend a great deal of time denouncing and reviling men, but these are certainly not genuine man-haters; they are simply women who have done their utmost to snare men, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid limitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run no more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so many mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such noisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract the attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises that are difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of dissuading such a propagandist from her gospel would not be difficult, and I know of no law forbidding it.

[You might have heard a similar conclusion in the internet expression, "why are most feminists ugly and fat?". He returns to this issue again later in the book, with the following:]

The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced

-

The reason why all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained from discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and less discretion, area good deal less cautious. [...] Women, in the last analysis, can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger of arousing the foe. He must be attached without any formal challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality—in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.

-

But here I rather depart from the point, which is this: that the average woman is not strategically capable of bringing down the most tempting game within her purview, and must thus content herself with a second, third, or nth choice. The only women who get their first choices are those who run in almost miraculous luck and those too stupid to formulate an ideal—two very small classes, it must be obvious. A few women, true enough, are so pertinacious that they prefer defeat to compromise. That is to say, they prefer to put off marriage indefinitely rather than to marry beneath the highest leap of their fancy.
[...]
One of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the contempt with which women normally regard their husbands—a contempt grounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To this primary sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a concrete comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the fact that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the typical husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it than his wife. He is, taking averages, one who has been loved, as the saying goes, by but one woman, and then only as a second, third or nth choice. If any other woman had ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she would have married him, and so made him ineligible for his present happiness. But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to speak, by many women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of them. Here presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the husband is the attained and disdained. = Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind—a superiority so marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate philosophers who were married men. The bachelor's very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex—in other words, of his greater approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert Spencer, until he was fifty, was ferociously harassed by women of all sorts. Among others, George Eliot tried very desperately to marry him. But after he had made it plain, over a long series of years, that he was prepared to resist marriage to the full extent of his military and naval power, the girls dropped off one by one, and so his last decades were full of peace and he got a great deal of very important work done.

-

It is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of men are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superiority dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities of lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion that the sons of great men are always dolts, the fact is that intellectual superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as bodily strength; and that fact has been established beyond cavil by the laborious inquiries of Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians of the English school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is probable, would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and grandsons of Veit Bach contributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin to biology, or those of Henry Adams to politics, or those of Hamilcar Barca to the art of war. I have said that Herbert Spencer's escape from marriage facilitated his life-work, and so served the immediate good of English philosophy, but in the long run it will work a detriment, for he left no sons to carry on his labours, and the remaining Englishmen of his time were unable to supply the lack. His celibacy, indeed, made English philosophy co-extensive with his life; since his death the whole body of metaphysical speculation produced in England has been of little more, practical value to the world than a drove of bogs. In precisely the same way the celibacy of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche has reduced German philosophy to feebleness.

[Wery nice, but imo ultimately wrong observation. The main factor that removes smart genes from the population is smart women not having (enough) children. Smart men often marry, although late in life, thus leaving descendants, while smart women when past their reproductive age - even when already married - cant leave descendants. Their egg reserve is already towards the end when they are 30 years old. Google "female egg count/reserve by age". :)]

-

No more than a century ago, even by American law, the most sentimental in the world, the husband was the head of the family firm, lordly and autonomous. He had authority over the purse-strings, over the children, and even over his wife. He could enforce his mandates by appropriate punishment, including the corporal. His sovereignty and dignity were carefully guarded by legislation, the product of thousands of years of experience and ratiocination. He was safeguarded in his self-respect by the most elaborate and efficient devices, and they had the support of public opinion. Consider, now, the changes that a few short years have wrought. Today, by the laws of most American states—laws proposed, in most cases, by maudlin and often notoriously extravagant agitators, and passerby sentimental orgy—all of the old rights of the husband have been converted into obligations. He no longer has any control over his wife's property; she may devote its income to the family or she may squander that income upon idle follies, and he can do nothing. She has equal authority in regulating and disposing of the children, and in the case of infants, more than he. There is no law compelling her to do her share of the family labour: she may spend her whole time in cinema theatres or gadding about the shops as she will. She cannot be forced to perpetuate the family name if she does not want to. She cannot be attacked with masculine weapons, e.g., fists and firearms, when she makes an assault with feminine weapons, e.g., snuffling, invective and sabotage. Finally, no lawful penalty can be visited upon her if she fails absolutely, either deliberately or through mere incapacity, to keep the family habitat clean, the children in order, and the victuals eatable.

[Very correct prediction. Remember, this book was written in 1918!]

-

I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are, in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek. In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those under her protection—say a child or a husband—she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous.

-

Nothing could be plainer than the effect that the increasing economic security of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind. The diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing birth rates show which way the wind is blowing. It is common for male statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This growing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no considerable body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that large numbers of them now approach the business with far greater fastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited. They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of a century ago could imagine nothing more favourable to her than marriage; even marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all.

-

As a result [of war] there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and as a second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare than the men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy means will be pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of women, as now, but by whole battalions and brigades of them, and he will be driven in sheer self-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the end the state will have to interfere in the business, to prevent the potential husband going to waste in the turmoil of opportunity.

[Here Mencken makes another excellen prediction. What does he predict? He predicts post WW2 "Christian" ideal that so many conservatives still today stupidly idolise without understanding why and how it happened. All demographic and economic forces. Supply and demand. Indeed a prophetic book. New war/s on the horizon. I wonder... will the "tensions" between the sexes attenuate with the reduction of the male population due to the new wars? Will women then have to compete harder with each other to please men? Will they hide and set temporarily aside their female/feminist instincts? History will tell. :)]

[Joe Drogos · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the past, when I've heard someone claim "Satire is dead," I usually put up all these protestations, refutations, etc. I should have kept my mouth shut until I read Mencken. Haven't seen too much like this around lately: "Even prostitution, in the long run, may become a more or less respectable profession, as it was in the days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar."

He's just so often acute in his observations. You get this precise and cogent summation of a hypocrite, for example: "First he sees danger, then he sees difficulty, then he sees wrong."

They should assign Mencken as vocabulary blasters to students preparing to assail the SAT. Here's just smattering of the words I'm now going to look up (and I did pretty well on my pre-college exams): manumitt, termagants, tatterdemalion, sklavemoral, brummagem, flummeries.... (Four of these six are being flagged by goodreads spellchecker, by the way.)

Lastly, I want to point out that I read the 1922 edition, because I boast huge stones.

[David Eppenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was first published in 1918 around the time of the passage of the 19th Amendment. I would guess that that amendment and the associated women's movement played a part in the motivation for the writing of this book. Since both events occurred over a century ago I would imagine a reader today would be amused in the same way one would be amused by reading a book about the etiquette, manners, and morality of polite society in the Victorian Era. Frankly, I can't say whether or not the author's intent was serious, humorous, or sarcastic as I found elements of all three throughout my reading. I can easily see readers of both sexes highlighting numerous passages for later posting on social media sites as there is something here to appeal and repulse everyone. I do not know much about Mencken so I can't offer any guidance on how to appraise his intention but bear in mind that this was a man writing a century ago. What I can offer is that the book was republished in 1922 with sections being rewritten and some new material added. I will leave the interpretation of the author's intent to the individual reader.

As for the book itself it is a relatively short read of 199 pages of text divided into 5 sections, The Feminine Mind, The War Between the Sexes, Marriage, Woman Suffrage, and The New Age. The last two sections I suspect were part of the 1922 republication since there are references to the 1920 political conventions and the election of Warren Harding as president. The overall book contains 47 short essays on a variety of subjects germaine to the section in which they are contained. I did have trouble reading some of these essays because of the both the author's writing style and what I assume are printing errors regarding missing articles or the wrong articles. The nature of the writing is both interesting and challenging. Reading something that was written a century ago does give us the opportunity to gauge how writing has changed with time. Mencken was clearly a very erudite person and his language will probably have you, like me, running for your dictionary to learn the meaning of some the words he used and to Google for the historic references. What you will not find interesting or informative is his use of run on sentences. Some of his sentences would cover as many as 10 or more lines on the page. It gave the essays the tone of an extemporaneous lecture being given by a curmudgeon but a highly educated and well informed curmudgeon on a rant. I know how that can happen.

Now is this book really a defense of women? Clearly Mencken believed women were the smarter sex but apparently because he thought them more cunning and sinister while men were primarily idiots for having anything to do with women. But a lot of his beliefs about women and men are accurate only for the time in which this book appeared but some other aspects seem to have endured. Most of the author's beliefs about women center on his belief that a woman's primary goal in life was to marry. In his time marriage was undeniably the primary goal of women because there were no meaningful options that would allow a woman economic independence. Nevertheless, some of what Mencken does say will get a nodding approval from some readers while raising the blood pressure of some others. However, my guess is that most readers will just get a chuckle from most of what is read and a lot of pages will get dog eared for later reference and primarily for one's spouse. It would be interesting to review the subjects of these essays in light of today's social and economic structure for both sexes. I would think Mencken would still be convinced that women blew a good thing by getting the vote and now their exalted status in society is lost and that men are still basically idiots and only women know this and use it to their advantage. I don't think this is a defense as much as it is an acknowledgement of who is likely to be the winner in the Battle of the Sexes and that all men can hope for is a negotiated peace. An interesting and amusing look into our past. Enjoy.

[Hansen Wendlandt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Women are despicable; but women are better than men; therefore, men are very despicable.” (introduction, x)
Mencken is best known for clever quotations about people’s general ignorance, cultural failures and radical political solutions. Here, somewhere amidst all three of those, he turns his attention and vindictive pen towards the sociology of gender. The book begins this way: “A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass… In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence.” (3) What follows first is an explanation of how women are intelligent, how men are stupid, and just how prevalent such ignorance is. So, men are buffoons, with games and hobbies (“Practically all men are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities… to which women are not ordinarily admitted” (113)), while women waste their natural perception on foppish concerns.
Next, Mencken discusses how those roles play out in marriage and culture as pathetically as everything else towards which he turns his caustic attention. For instance, even romantics should be able to agree that love is “an intellectual disaster”. (24) His take on marriage, however, is totally unique: namely, that it is a total sham perpetrated by women for economic means, the greatest trick being that men are convinced this is what they want. That convincing entails that marriages are never between equal parties, with equal wants, and that only the greatest men can stay bachelors, and even then not for very long. These points are especially interesting, insofar as they lead to the possibility that the human race is devolving, because weaker men and older geniuses reproduce. Moreover, nature/God may even prefer such a thing (87-88)! Devolution or not, women’s great weakness in mating is to always settle for their lesser choice, then complaining about it. Consider the conversations spouses have with other people: “A man, speaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly… But when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly atrocities that they describe.” (129)
Where one must disagree with Mencken is in his depiction of passion. He claims that a milk-jug is better art than the “drunken dollar-mark” (31) that is a woman’s body (which is crazy), and that silly makeup and fashion serve to trick men to more than “liaisons” (which is reasonable). Yet once caught, marriage “makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it” (81) (which seems unassailable). This is a perfect example of Mencken’s tendency to start with the impossible, but conclude with a truism, making one wonder just where the train got on the track.
So with passion such a mess, what can we do? Mencken asks, 70 years before Harry Met Sally, “In other words, is friendship [between men and women] possible without sex? Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another question: Why without sex?” (152) Or with sex, he predicts that “As women throw off the other conventions which now bind them they will throw off [virginity] too.” (152) And with or without sex, the most caring moment of the book is Mencken’s long description of his ideal peaceful moments with a sweetheart.
Beyond personal relations, this Defence implores society (in the 1920’s) not so much to accept women’s suffrage, but to let them simply run the joint. Voting, Mencken knows well enough, is a huge joke: “the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at a new [hobgoblin] and electing some mountebank.” (115) And with the dangers to come, we need something better. Are they tough enough for such politics? “Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience.” (143)
Finally, being a pastor, I can’t let go Mencken’s remarks on women and religion.
“The religion practiced by Jesus (now wholly extinct in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it.” (142)
“Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to make effective ecclesiastics.” (138)

[Mary Grace McGeehan · Rating 1 out of 5]

(This review is about the 1918 edition.) Mencken’s “defense” in a nutshell: women are hardhearted, practical creatures and men are moony, romantic idiots. Men marry for love and women marry the best catch they can find. Women are too sensible to care for idiotic male pastimes like politics, which is why most of them don’t support suffrage. If they do, it’s because they’re too old or ugly to attract a man. Mencken does make a few sensible points, like that it’s time to get rid of the notion that women don’t enjoy sex. (He can’t go into too much detail, he says, but if you want to know more you can ask a bachelor of your acquaintance–like H.L. Mencken, presumably). Overall, though, the book is hugely offensive. Mencken's defenders say it’s irony, or satire, but for something to be irony or satire the reader should be able to see the point you're trying to make. Otherwise, you're just being a jerk. This book sold only 900 copies when it was issued in 1918–ha!–but a significantly edited, apparently milder, 1922 edition did better.

[Lynn Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Women are despicable; but women are better than men; therefore, men are very despicable.” So says Mencken in his introduction. And that just about sums it up. While ostensibly defending women, he uses the war between the sexes as a platform to display his cutting wit and humorous satire.
His skill as a writer is tremendous, and he makes some astute observations - like describing the female as logical and cynical and the male as the emotional romantic - but he has such a jaded view of humanity, it's kind of hard to enjoy reading him.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

H. L. Mencken was an elitist who scorned democracy and thought most everybody was a 'booby'. He lived for the most part with his mum and had a head like an unskinned potato left to mold at the back of a cupboard for six months.

He was also very funny, in an insouciantly antagonising way. I wanted to laugh at him one minute and smack him over the head with a framed picture of Mary Wolstencraft the next. Superficially this collection is, as the title suggests, written in defence of women. In reality the opportunities for women wouldn't have advanced one step from the 1920's if Mencken was their only advocate.

He praises women for their innately superior intelligence, so much so that intelligence may rightly be considered a feminine trait. That's nice, but bear in mind that all men are boobies in his book, so much so that 'complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.'

All of a sudden women's superior intelligence is reduced to little more than an 'acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian.'

Because man might well be a booby but it's a man's world so there you have it. The best employment for a woman is as a wife or a prostitute, even though they would no doubt make a better fist of running things, as only woman are free 'from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibrium that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, night sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers in men.'

Although women rightly exist merely in the private world they aren't interested in male beauty or falling in love or in starting a family. Instead they devote all their energies into a rat race to grab the man with the best 'compound of small capacities which makes up masculine efficiency,' i.e. the one who will make the most money:

'The very fact that marriages occur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than men, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it is plainly to a man's interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, and as plainly to a woman's interest to make a favourable marriage as soon as she can.'

In terms of the opportunities available to women at that time he wasn't exactly wrong there, though he seemed to like it that way. Besides, if a woman wants to avoid marriage and make her own money she can always become a prostitute, right?

At one point Mencken observes how 'whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar.' Very true. Of course he then applies this good sense to the profession of prostitution, which he would no doubt like to see become respectable, because far from degrading women it actually ennobles women apparently.

Mencken was obviously an iconoclast and he did make me chuckle more than a few times, especially early on. But like most intentionally repellent comedians he became a bit tiresome after a while; strip all the humour away and he comes across as the kind of man who believes that people only give money to charities because they're soft and women only become feminists because they're ugly.

Yep, he actually did make that last point.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last night I completed, “In Defense Of Women“, written by H. L. Mencken and originally published back in 1918. The book took me about thirty-five years to finish (well, to start and finish).

I purchased this book as one of a series of titles under the banner of Time-Life Books. Part of the Time Reading Program Special Edition. This just means I bought two books a month for a couple of years. Way back when I got out of the Army, I decided I wanted to become more “learned”, more sophisticated, so I thought I would accomplish this by reading great books or great literature. I couldn’t afford the “Great Books” series itself, so I decided to settle for some lesser works. Hence, this series.

Each month I would dutifully receive them and then place them on my bookshelf, quite proud of myself that I was starting my own library. Now the books were sold (advertised) as secondary works of great authors. You weren’t reading their “acknowledged” best work, but you were reading something which had been deemed close. This attitude of, “No, I haven’t read that, but everyone has… Have you read this other work by him (/her)?” seemed to feed easily into my ego.

To make a longer story shorter, I’ve never read any of the books. More precisely, I have read one of them, but that was before buying it as part of the collection and that was back in my high school days. So, about three months ago, I decided to crack into one of them. There was no particular reason to choose this one over the other 30 or so except that my journal has a few quotes from the author (Mencken).

So, what do I think of the book? Despite the fact it was written almost 100 years ago, it remains remarkably relevant. It is, however, incredibly non-PC (politically correct). The author has a fairly low opinion of humankind in general and men in specific. Compared to men, Mencken finds women to be more than capable in most things. In those things which Mencken finds tiresome (business and politics), he believes women can do no worse than men, but should not try as this will only lower them to the status of men, not raise those functions to a status worthy of women.

Mencken is a terrific (if flowery) writer of prose and the book is both funny and easy to read. By easy to read I mean his ideas seem reasonable and coherently presented. The topics are wide ranging – from marriage, to sex, to suffrage, to roles in modern society. The only problem I had was sometimes the writing was so flowery, it was almost like walking through treacle – sweet, sticky and almost sickly.

I believe many who read this book will find it objectionable, but there is much to be said for any series of observations which can still raise ire even after this much time. They each contain the kernel of truth upon which both good writing and good comedy depend to make their audience uncomfortable. This is a classic and it is free to download from multiple sites. Highly recommended!!

In case you’re wondering what’s “special” about the Special Edition, the books are published in fake leather red binding. They are actually cardboard, but with gold lettering and trim, they appear quite a proper addition to a personal library.

[P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since this was written 100 years ago, it's clearly a little dated. Mencken does, however, identify with some precision the differences between the way men and women think. Many of the systemic barriers to 'women's rights' have been removed, not always, IMO, to the benefit of our society as a whole. But, I'm just one man against an onslaught of extremists when it comes to women's rights.
Women are welcome to do whatever suits them. But, they're not men. And vice versa.

[Emilie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is only getting 2 stars because several passages caused me to laugh out loud, drop my jaw and curse (sometimes all in one go), so it definitely got a reaction. Offensive to everyone but geezo, what a specimen. Full on knobhead.

[Jake McAtee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I laughed much. I think he has the Suffragettes number. Mencken eviscerates the sentimental, but his final essay, the Eternal Romance, might have been worth the price of the book.

[Cooper Ackerly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah, Mencken, you ultimate equal opportunity polemicist.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mencken's notorious wit can be cruel and repetitive at times, but this little tome is so full of riotously inappropriate insights that it comes fairly close to altering how you see the world, mostly for the better. I can only imagine how scandalous it must have been at the time (1922); everything he says in it is downright heretical to most of what we pretend to hold dear.

[R.J. Gilbert · Rating 1 out of 5]

A technical note here: My copy of this book is the original 1922 publication. The copyright, however, lists it as having been first copyrighted in 1918.

I picked up this book at an estate sale (my favorite source for old books). I did not finish this book for two reasons--foremost my concern for the binding, which is almost a hundred years old and seemed about to release most of the pages if I kept flipping through them. Second, the author's limited experience with gender differences gave me the impression that he was not a good source for an opinion on gender definitions (what makes a woman a woman, etc.).

One thing I still reference from this work is what I call the "Susan B. Anthony on a horse" phenomenon. At the time this work was written, it seems, there was a second-generation of suffragists who wanted to pick up the banner of Ms. Anthony's cause and claim it for their own interests. This happens all the time with second-generation causes and movements. Revival, reform, and progress always only last one generation because the next generation does not share the same passion for justice and love that motivated the first generation into action. Like the cat on my porch who thinks I exist to let him inside, they assume that the origins of the cause are aligned to whatever self-oriented obsession brought them into the movement. So it was, in Mencken's time, that post-Anthony feminists got the crazy idea in their head to erect a statue of their heroin sitting on a horse when, as Mencken points out early in this work, there is no historical support for the idea that Ms. Anthony ever rode a horse in her life. I suppose it has little to do with women in particular and more to do with human nature, but it was, at least, an edifying extract from an altogether caustic collection of writing.

I don't know if Mencken ever got to the point as to the reason for a woman's prowess at emotional and verbal manipulation. In my experience, here in a generation where women have worn pants since before I was born, women do not concentrate on building up their emotional and verbal manipulation skills until they are physically "bested" by their male peers. Boys stop crying because their crying is ignored; girls continue to cry because, to some extent, it still works. Boys move on and explore their physical strength and prowess, while girls develop their social prowess because they feel they cannot compete with boys on the other playing fields. It has been my observation that, where girls are encouraged to excell at math, carpentry, computer programming, or other skills that are traditionally "male", they place less reliance on their "emotional intelligence" skills. The way Mencken depicts it, I'm not so sure that's an altogether bad thing.

[Kristi Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience."

I think I would have loved to have know H.L. Mencken. I have read his biography and now having finished his "In Defense of Women" I know we would have had some wonderful conversations.

These essays cover marriage, polygamy, polyandry, birth control, suffragettes, and religion. Sometimes I wanted to strangle him in his old fashioned treatment of women, and yet in a lot of his statements he was spot on and had a better understanding of the female sex than most men, especially of his era.

This book was either published in 1918 or 1920 depending on which book blurb you believe. In either way it was very future minded and besides his contempt for suffragettes: “Years ago I predicted that these suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey.”

He had some great insights into women such as the reason women are so much more religious in Italy is that it's their only time to themselves to get away from the drudgery of hard work.

Some of his statements are dated but a lot of what he says is humorous and have a large grain of truth. He is just as hard on man as he is on woman.

Fred Williams as the narrator reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock which helped me with the understated humor.

[Scot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generally, I find Mencken’s wit and clever use of language delightful and entertaining, so I looked forward to this book as some relief reading, the kind you do when you want to cleanse your mind a bit from the concerns of business obligations, ecological disasters, or unattractive household chores left undone. Alas, it was far less entertaining than anticipated. For me the humor meter rarely moved, and when it did, it didn’t move too far.

Predictably, the old gruff from Baltimore turns things around a bit with cynical self-delight that must have seemed to him a great challenge to the Cult of Domesticity in some provocative ways, but I found his reflection on the battle between the sexes fairly predictable and in some sections, dull. I believe Aristophanes identified and evaluated several of the alleged insights here more effectively a few millennia earlier in Lysistrata. Mencken suggests women are clearly smarter than men, who are generally dolts, and so American women exploit the social system to their own advantage. Calling suffragettes ugly women who want to be men because they will never seduce any was a common enough misogynist insult of the day; it didn’t take much wit to throw that in and I thought detracted from his always reliable attacks upon American politicians and clergy, which were the standard Mencken insults that did make me grin when I occasionally found them resurfacing here. Some of his quaint, curious, and creative use of vocabulary helps the book along, too, but, truth be told, I have found such Mencken stylings far more memorable in other texts.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely phenomenoal. For a century-old book, the wisdom here has aged most remarkably well. Mencken exposes a lot of timeless ideas that we'd be well served to remember nowadays with most cunning wit. I'd rather quote extensively from the book than write further. For example take this opening paragraph of the book:

"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."

On life's problems:

"In truth, I am very suspicious of all rememdies for the major ills of life, and believe that most of them are incurable."

On women's opinion of men:

"A man's woman 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."

On masculinity:

"Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable."

On female cooking:

"The American dinner-table, in truth becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork, and beans."

On marriage:

"Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by marriage."

Fun, incindary, totally offensive, and ahead of its time. A must-read.

[Varmint · Rating 4 out of 5]

men go out and work, invent, struggle, fight, and die. while women sit home and nag. mencken argues that they have deliberately engineered this unfair situation, and are therefore smarter than men.

a simple point to drag out over the course of a whole book. but he still makes it entertaining.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got the impression this work was originally meant as satire, but Mencken's personal biases got the better of him as he went along. It comes off as more of an indictment of the rubes he disdains than an actual defense of the fairer sex.

[TR · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incisive attack on typical men (and women too). A pleasure to read.

[Chris Fellows · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered what trolls did before the internet was invented...

[Luís Garcia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Opiniões infundadas que resultam em conclusões precipitadas e erradas... não, obrigado.

(lido em Chengdu, China)

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Louis Mencken, an American of German heritage is known as the Sage of Baltimore where he was born 1880 & died 1956. In his best-selling memoir “Happy Days” is described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy." Here his father had a cigarette factory which H. L. was expected to takeover but after the death of his father he pursued his passion for writing (and reporting). In 1906 he was a columnist for the Baltimore Sun.
“In Defense of Women” is not at all what it proclaims, but it cannot either be viewed as misogynistic because H. L. writes: “I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her deficiencies, is greatly superior to the average man”. Indeed, it appears to be a syllogism proclaiming women are despicable but men are even more despicable, hence women fair in Mencken’s view as superior to men! Most people don’t understand this if they ever understand. When I told a female friend, I was reading “In Defense of Women” she scowled, muttered a nasty comment and glared at me! Be warned. Numerous times throughout the work I chuckled.
Mencken married (believe it on not) 1930 a Southern belle suffragette, Sara Haardt, numerous years his younger from Montgomery, Alabama. Sara Haardt was an English professor at Goucher College, a famous Baltimore school for intelligent women (at the time) where they met 1923 during a Mencken lecture. The marriage obtained national attention because of Mencken’s promulgated views of women, marriage, and suffrage – allegedly Mencken had proclaimed marriage as “the end of hope”. Sara Haardt was sickly, the marriage was short, she died in 1935 of meningitis.
Mencken admired Nietzsche, did not like populism and representative democracy (today’s situation make me tend to lean in his thought direction). Mencken believed representative democracy is a system in which inferior men can, and perhaps do, dominate their superiors. Also, as Nietzsche, Mencken did not believe in the church, a deity, (particularly) Christian fundamentalism, Christian Science nor creationism. He thought the middle class is simply ignorant. Of course, this did not endear him to the public and coupled with pro-Nietzsche & pro-German views during the first & second World Wars his work was generally viewed negatively.
“In Defense of Women” was out of print from 1932 until 1963 when Time, Inc. brought it back and the 1963 Time edition is the book I discovered and read.
It is an interesting read, a look-back to the thoughts of the days of the 1910's, 1920’s & 1930’s or the days before yesterday which of course is the key to the future. Enjoy.

[Andy Dollahite · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this principally to enjoy Mencken's use of language. His devilish wit recalls Twain and Bierce, so prepare for a jolly chuckle and brace for the stinging quip. Mencken's anthropology is fundamentally broken, but he still finds nuggets of provocative truth. His rejection of (blindness to, antipathy towards?) the distinct and graceful beauty of the feminine figure is surely a glaring error I cannot abide.

"A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest."

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

"Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable."

"If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation."

"The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced."

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never have I witnessed a mastery of exaggeration and literary hyperbole until Mencken. The result is an onslaught of hilarity. I've carried this collection of essays with me throughout the week—reading in a laundromat, in a waiting room, in a parking lot, on the sofa—and in every setting one could find me laughing aloud, chuckling, even on occasion cackling at Mencken's brilliance. Men are thoroughly and utterly emasculated here in a brilliant and subversive way: it is the males in fact, not the females, who are sentimental, emotional, delusional, vain. Atop this foundation of male-humiliation, Mencken begins to build a "defense" of women, whom by the end of the book, are striving with some success to clothe themselves with all the glory (read: shame) of men: the suffragettes and feminists who want the supposed sexual freedom of men as well as the freedom from marriage into independence and career. There is not one self-respecting American of today—man or woman—who could read this collection and put it down (at any point) unoffended.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like any book older than a generation or so, much more interesting than what's said is what's left unsaid because it's considered so obvious, just part of the water within we swim.

Thus it is with this book. I can't say I found it funny, or even interesting. What it did make clear was the extent to which snark, empty-headed mocking, hypocrisy, and the grouping together of large classes of people as all identical (they're not stereotypes when "we" engage in them!) were as popular among the pre-woke of say 1920 as they are among the woke of the 2020.

There's much interesting here, nothing praiseworthy. It's bilious, mean-spirited, and boring (so far as the primary thread goes) from the first page to the last.

[Erik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Misanthropic generally but more woman hating than anything, this work sound pretty nice when read aloud as long as you don't understand what the words mean. Definitely a product of its time, and like most such can be filed under the sociological collection "Citation Not Included". In the end, I binned it. If it was meant to be satirical, it failed, perhaps due to cultural or temporal barriers if I'm being charitable.

A lot of proto-incel or proto-Limbaugh type stuff in there if you want to roll your eyes. See the many quotes positive reviewers cite as reasons to like the book if you need examples.