H.L. Mencken 
In Defense of Women (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 


Cynical quips like “Marriage: the end of hope” and “Wife: a former sweetheart” led critics to label
H. L. Mencken ‘the country’s high priest of woman-haters.’ Needless to say, his publication of
In Defense of Women must have come as quite a shock.  Here, Mencken argues that women possess a ‘superior intelligence’ and are “the supreme realists of the race.’ Man, by contrast, is a helpless romantic: ‘without a woman to rule him and to think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle.’

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H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) lived his whole life in Baltimore, and as a newspaperman he was primarily associated with the Baltimore
Sun. His columns reached a national audience through syndication, making him a well-known critic of war fever, every president from “Roosevelt I” to “Roosevelt II, ” censorship, the Ku Klux Klan and rampant lynching in the South, Prohibition, and the residual Puritanism which, in his definition, underlay most of America’s problems.  He directed his writing to what he called the “civilized minority.”