Plus ça change?

In Defense of Women, by H. L. Mencken. Octagon Books, 218 pp., $13.00.

H. L. Mencken wrote this book in 1918, a few months before the end of World War I, because he thought its subject was a safe one. The newspaper he had worked on for years would no longer print him because of his unpopular views on the Allies and on democracy—another paper for which he wrote briefly was closed by wartime censorship because its sympathies were pro-German. So he amused himself with various projects, one of which was this book on The Woman Question. Some years later, he was to describe the circumstances this way:

I faced the . . . handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I wrote it in wartime, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. . . . 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. . . . There is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized and unrewarded. . . .

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.”

Indeed, evaluations of this book still vary sharply. Charles A. Fecher, in his 1978 book, Mencken: A Study of His Thoughts, says, [He] could not think of women simply in terms of sex, and this fact in turn may have been the reason for his high opinion of their intelligence. That opinion was so high, in fact, that he wrote a whole book on the subject, and one marvels that today’s advocates of “women’s liberation” have not resurrected In Defense of Women, added it to their canonical scriptures, and spread it abroad in wide quantities.

An anonymous “Editors’ Preface” to Time Magazine’s 1963 paperback reprint of the book, on the other hand, says flatly, “It is quickly apparent that In Defense of Women is not a defense of women. The book, indeed, so abounds with insults to the unfair sex that when it was first published many women, whether conventional or emancipated, hurled it across the room.”

Poor Mencken. His attacks on human foibles were so cogent, so memorable, and so amusing, that it was often hard to figure out what he supported. The same preface to the Time reprint edition suggested that the main communication of his writings to many was a deep scorn for American law, American politics, and above all, for American business.

Again and again Mencken drove home this disdain for the elements of American civilization, not only in his books, but in his editing of The Smart Set and The American Mercury. His influence was immense in the late ’20s, especially among the nation’s college students. It helped to turn intellectuals against the business community and toward a highly emotional form of politics that substituted for the direct decisions of “average men” the control of central government, which they deemed to be superior in wisdom. Mencken, of course, hated the results. A violent anti-New Dealer, he never understood that he had had an inadvertent hand in setting up the leftward swing of American intellectuals.

What is Mencken’s thesis in this book? How can it arouse such differing responses as those quoted above?

Mencken begins by claiming that what is generally known as the maternal instinct is really a feeling of “compassionate irony” toward men on the part of women, who know that intelligence is primarily a woman’s trait. Second-rate men are skilled at trivial tasks like bookkeeping, politics, business, and games, which are in great demand; first-rate men and most women are not skilled at this “masculine bag of tricks.” What is generally called woman’s intuition is another name for clear-seeing intelligence and the ability to separate reality from illusion.

Marriage is not to man’s interest; but woman, through her superior intelligence, persuades him that it is, because the feminine attitude, unlike the masculine, is unsentimental. Woman sees clearly that marriage is her best career opportunity, and so she fosters the general delusion that man pursues while woman shrinks.

Actually, women settle for the men that are attainable and know that, in general, husbands are second rate and bachelors represent “the unattainable and hence the admirable.”

Since bachelors are those who have been skillful enough to avoid marriage, the race is only kept from totally degenerating by the fact that many married women pick bachelors of their acquaintance to father their children. The first-rate man, if he does marry, marries late, when his mental agility declines and the domestic care that marriage offers outweighs its disadvantages; by this time, however, he is less attractive, so generally the wife he finds is inferior.

Why is marriage unattractive to men? Too much intimacy unsexes; routine is boring; women are unsuited for domestic work and are encouraged not to apply themselves to master it because men’s sentimentality wants to keep them as “magnificent drones.” Changes in the law giving women rights over their own property and forbidding corporal punishment of wives have put husbands in even worse positions, as they must put up with numerous “crimes of omission” and still must support their wives. “If the average American husband wants a sound dinner, he must go to a restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum.”

At first glance, many women are going to feel, with the Editors of Time, some defense. If you have H. L. Mencken for a friend, you don’t need an enemy. He seems to have been primarily engaged in standing conventional wisdom on its head. Women are not less intelligent than men; they are more intelligent. Men, not women, have a weakness for “whatever is rhetorical and sentimental and feeble and untrue.” Men are romantic, emotional, innocent, and credulous; women, cynical and clear-headed. This difference is most clearly manifested in the War Between Men and Women in which women trap men into marriage.

Such an attitude in turn became conventional wisdom in Hollywood sentimental comedies of the ’50s and ’60s. Is this the only message that caused this book to go through eleven printings in the United States and to be published in addition in England, France, Germany, and Hungary?

No, this is H. L. Mencken speaking. He had more to say than that. Behind the quotable humorous snippets, is an incisive and accurate observer. For instance, he anticipated Betty Friedan:

Woman have broken many of their old chains, but they are still enmeshed in a formidable network of manmade taboos and sentimentalities, and it will take them another generation

[He was optimistic, in 1918!], 83 at least, to get genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest that yet marks the sex, despite its recent progress toward equal rights. It is almost impossible to find a man who honestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at some time or other in her life, is gnawed by a regret that she is not a man.

He even anticipated the emergence of Phyllis Schlafly and Maribel (Total Woman) Morgan:

Once women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they will begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by sentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and caressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world. When that reconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling of the relations between the sexes, and some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn’t let well enough alone.

Although women have benefitted from some of the changes in their position in society, Mencken claimed, they half believe that they are helpless, and sometimes seek pain and martyrdom. These pathological reactions can be explained by the fact that women lived with “repression and dissimulation,” caused primarily by men’s holding that they can’t think and are not interested in sexual fulfillment—both of which views Mencken saw to be erroneous.

The fact that the business of marriage is woman’s primary concern, Mencken argued, is being modified by industrialization, which means that many women can now earn their own livings. The ensuing general reevaluation of the relations between the sexes will be augmented, he believed, because of the shortage of husbands caused by the Great War in Europe (in a later edition, he foresaw instead a series of wars): it may lead to an acceptance of polygamous arrangements, of children born out of wedlock, of prostitution as an occupation, and of marriage contracts in which women give up some of their legal privileges.

Many of these predictions and observations are remarkably prescient. Which is the real H. L. Mencken, the observer, or the smartalec? Does this book allow us in any way to unearth what women meant to him?

I suspect not. We know that he didn’t marry until he was almost 50, and that when he announced that he was going to marry 32-year-old Sara Haardt, reporters delighted in trying to embarrass him with misogynous quotes on the tendency of the first-rate man to marry late and marry a younger woman, after being “confronted by a choice between getting a wife and hiring a nurse.”

But we also know, by unanimous report of all his friends and biographers, that until brought to an abrupt end by Sara’s death in 1935, the marriage was unusually happy. And perhaps we can get an inkling of his own final evaluation of this book from the fact that, after her death, he steadfastly refused to allow In Defense of Women to be reprinted.

To the contemporary reader, Mencken’s humor is undoubtedly more jarring than it seemed to his contemporaries. Mores have changed, and wife-beating, for example, no longer seems amusing. And what of Mencken’s concept of woman as more intelligent, as having different mental capabilities which give her a better “apprehension of the larger realities,” although a man can “add up a column of figures more accurately”? Social scientists now know that there are no innate differences between the sexes, and that Mencken is mistaken when he claims, for instance, that “the best and most intellectual—i.e., most original and enterprising—play-actors are not men, but women, and so are . . . a fair share of the best writers . . . and executants of music.”

Or do they? Even here, Mr. Mencken may not be as dated as one might think. An article in the November 1978 issue of Psychology Today, by Daniel Goleman, entitled “Special Abilities of the Sexes: Do They Begin in the Brain?” says, “Now a new breed of researchers—many of them women—are [sic] taking a second look at the biological substrates of behavior and reaching some different conclusions. While acknowledging that a vast range of sex differences reflects social influences, they also assert that the neurological constitutions of men and women lead them to think and behave in different ways.” For instance, they are finding that boys excel in mathematical skills, while girls have greater verbal ability, and do better on tests of fluency and verbal comprehension. No sensible man, said Mencken, would fail to consult his wife about problems that involve evaluating people, such as “taking a partner into his business, or about running for public office, or about combatting a blackmailer, or about marrying off their daughter.” Now Mr. Goleman supports that position with scientific studies showing that women are indeed better than men at “reading or understanding a person’s behavior from his or her facial expression, body language, and words.” They also turn out to be more interested in people, more attentive as infants to sounds and their emotional meaning, and more socially responsive and empathetic. The article even goes so far as to suggest that women are better performers and writers than men are, just as Mencken hypothesized.

So the Sage of Baltimore turns out, once again, to be wiser than he may at first look. One could wish it were otherwise; that this book had no relevance to the condition of women today; that Mencken’s humor was unintelligible to a modern audience. Has there been that little real change in the status of women in sixty years?

One final quotation, and a final caveat. Mencken is explaining why marriage is important to women.

Again, marriage offers her the only safe opportunity, considering the levantine view of women as property which Christianity preserved in our civilization, to obtain gratification for that powerful complex of instincts which we call the sexual, and, in particular, for the instinct of maternity. The woman who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more than a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never stood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her sex.

Here, Mencken is dated. Unless both women and men are willing to give up such evaluations of experience, there is no real future for the world. We are entering a time in which we simply cannot afford for every woman to have a child any more than we can afford for every man to stand in battle.

To say that every person psychologically needs to risk everything, perhaps even his or her life, in defending and creating values is a romantic ideal that is still meaningful—to destroy our world by overpopulating it or continuing to wage war is a suicidal indulgence. If all that the Woman’s Movement has done is to call to our attention and attempt to transcend these particular sexual stereotypes, then indeed, if the Movement had not existed, it would have had to be invented.

Joan Kennedy Taylor is senior editor of LR.