In Defense of Women

IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, by H. L. Mencken. Now here is a man, H. L. Mencken, the literary world is proud of, a newspaper commentator gone astray and became a folk-Philosopher that seemed to irritate everyone by showing that they are dead wrong in most of their settled and comfortable assumptions. In the Introduction to this book on Women Mencken describes the duties of his work: "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 cob-webbed 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." Mencken is always a delight to read, his use of words and ideas gives a twist that brings out the fact of the subject with as little pain as is possible. In this book he puts women in their place, by putting men in their place, he likes to point out that women are not always the equal of men - they are very often their superior.
Emmett F. Fields