In Defense of Women
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H. L. Mencken >> In Defense of Women
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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, first by a
public opinion that regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad
taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that limits his capacity for
it, and especially his capacity to throw off the prejudices and
superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel,
does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument of reflection and
speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the
contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most
gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary
airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is
suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is
simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced
into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was
made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of
fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched
upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of
intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine
edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him,
and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce
him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer.
I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present
work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able
to embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of
hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional
handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas
before me, for I wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut
off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. Of their
unprecedented dislike for novelty in the domain of the intellect I
have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into
the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the
United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a
right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything--not only
in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters
of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen
who, in the face of an organized public clamour(usually managed by
interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan
B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief
railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the
municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron
Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in the town
Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes
such a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never
mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less
useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural
Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and
knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms-- this citizen
is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It
is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And
many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any
of the articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for
him to run grave risks of social disaster. The old English offence of
"imagining the King's death"has been formally revived by the
American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for
committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some
parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts as
believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and
speaking the language of countries recently at war with the
Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making
synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as
attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are.
For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies
that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even
half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to
penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not
only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise,
not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the
rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their
ingenuity and their patriotic passion.
Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to
change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely
literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in
order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure
upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to
avoid burdening it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal
nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the
unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting itself over all
prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go
into the book that was not already so obvious that it had been
embodied in the proverbial philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some
civilized nation, including the Chinese. To this rule I remained
faithful throughout. In its original form, as published in 1918, the
book was actuary just such a pastiche of proverbs, many of them
English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen, newspaper
editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy to hold to
this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert notions
that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But
in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get
through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There
is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized
and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it,
and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and
contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered
truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the
national decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes
to extraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the
newspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda,
designed to break down American morale, and called upon the
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 he 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 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, indeed, might be reasonably described
as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its
manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of
cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in
physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love
what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith,
hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are
amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true
fundamentals of intelligence--in so far as they reveal a capacity
for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion
and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth--to that extent,
at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their
mothers. "Human creatures," says George, borrowing from
Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no
men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an
obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and
illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show
you aman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it;
Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in
Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to
down right homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the
male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same
time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles
and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a
truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the
frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.
It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior
talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine
flavour--that complete masculinity and stupidity are often
indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do
not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the complex
of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call
talent; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the
feminine contribution that it is a product of the interplay of the two
elements. In women of genius we see the opposite picture. They
are commonly distinctly mannish, and shave as well as shine. Think
of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa
Bonheur, Teresa Carre¤o or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that
neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary
characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human
endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too
doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to
sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a
theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of
that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist
for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what
we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects
are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man
lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and
secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too
cynical a creature to dream at all.
3.
The Masculine Bag of Tricks
What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that
mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges,
that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief
mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is
more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of
figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile
jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish
between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the
minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession,
say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are
not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely
superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more
strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning
how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks
of the average business man, or even of the average professional
man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to
carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle
out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than intakes to
operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed,
can come into close contact with the general run of business and
professional men--I confine myself to those who seem to get on in
the world, and exclude the admitted failures--without marvelling at
their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their
appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a
grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of
another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the
chief business "geniuses" of that paradise of traders and
usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never
heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were
vigorous and masculine men, and in a man's world they were
successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.
There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney
were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross
an driveling concerns--that their very capacity to master and retain
such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their
inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar
incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical
concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven
multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor
could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway
share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundred
weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by
the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at
grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at
which what are called successful men commonly divert
themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis
found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in
almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do
not understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by
book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they
are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the
average men's highest performances, and are easily surpassed by
men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the
Simidae.
This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial
character--which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as
stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility--is
a character that men of the first class share with women of the first,
second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth,
something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost
invariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have
described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that
women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men
as a class. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the
occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly--for
example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie.,
matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits,
keeping books, or managing factories--despite the circumstance that
the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical
powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social
barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why
women shouldn't succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide
open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them
on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates
in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make
a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women
should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as
managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or
as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small
force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity;
once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within.
But, as every one knows, the number of women actually
practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of
them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.
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