 IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN by H. L. Minkin, section 10, THE NEW AGE, PART 1. THE TRANSVALUATION OF VALUES The gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the last century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly delivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the oppressions of men. But already it must be plain they have made enormous progress, perhaps more than they have made in the ten thousand years preceding. The rise of the industrial system which has borne so harshly upon the race in general has brought them certain unmistakable benefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make marriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken down that large classes of women are now almost free agents and quite independent of the favor of men. Most of these women, responding to the ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued of course by marriage and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in. But the fact remains that they now have a free choice in the matter and that dire necessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn't marry if they didn't want to. It is possible to get their bread by their own labor in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in far more difficult position. Failing marriage they not only suffered a cruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual starvation. There was simply no respectable place in the economy of those times for the free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or accept the disdainful patronage that was galling as charity. Nothing could be planer than the effect that the increasing economic security of women is having upon their whole habit of life in mind. The diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing birth rate 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 a 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 favorable to her than marriage. Even marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all. This notion is gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion. Women in general may still prefer marriage to work, but there is an increasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer the greater contentment, particularly if you be mellowed by a certain amount of flandering. There already appears in the world indeed a class of women who, while still not genuinely versed in marriage, are yet free from any theory that it is necessary or even environmentally desirable. Among these women are a good many somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in their violent earnestness. They range from the man-eating suffragists to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional shockers of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of birth control, Margaret Sanger. But among them are many more who wake the world with no such noisy eloquence, but content themselves with carrying out their ideas in a quiet and respectful manner. The number of such women is much larger than generally imagined, and that number tends to increase steadily. There are women who, with their economic independence assured, either by inheritance or by their own efforts, chiefly in the arts and professions, do exactly as they please and make no bother about it. Naturally enough, their superiority to convention and the common frenzy makes them extremely attractive to the better sort of men, and so it is not uncommon for one of them to find herself voluntarily sought in marriage without any preliminary scheming by herself, surely an experience that very few ordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium. The old order chaineth and giveth place to the new. Among the women's clubs and the women's colleges I have no doubt there is still much debate of the old and silly question. Are platonic relations possible between the sexes? In other words, is friendship possible without sex? Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another question. Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept of woman as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the whole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a revision of the medieval penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity in the female. The notion that honour in woman is exclusively a physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the highest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable thing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity. This notion is so preposterous that no intelligent person, male or female, actually cherishes it. It survives as one of the hollow conventions of Christianity, nay of the leventine barbarism that preceded Christianity. As women throw off the other conventions which now bind them, they will throw off this one too, and so their virtue, grounded upon fastidiousness and self-respect instead of upon mere fear and conformity, will become a far more laudable thing than it ever can be under the present system. And for its absence, if they say fit the dispose of it, they will no more apologise than a man apologises today. 43. The Lady of Joy 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 it ever grows quite unnecessary. Whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteem today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound as no objection to it, nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption. For example, that God observes the fall of the sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday school superintendent. The truth is, the prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of woman who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work and would not exchange places with the shop girl or a waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers and who are sent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their goodwill. Just as convicts in prison, questioned by teetotalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the slightest arrest. She is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her. All the prevailing gavel about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectation. A starving lawyer always sees injustice in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of erlick and pastor. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vesturium revolution, he almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in holy writ. The high value set upon virginity by men, whose esteem of it is based upon a mixture of vanity and voluptuousness, causes many women to guard it in their own persons with a jealousy far beyond their private inclinations and interests. It is their theory that the loss of it would materially impair their chances of marriage. This theory is not supported by the facts. The truth is that the woman who sacrifices her chastity, everything else being equal, stands a much better chance of making a credible marriage than the woman who remains chaste. This is especially true of women of the lower economic classes. At once they come into contact, hither or two socially difficult and sometimes almost impossible, with men of higher classes, and begin to take on with the curious facility of their sex the refinements and taste and points of view of those classes. The mistress thus gathers charm, and what has begun as a sordid state of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal marriage. The number of sus marriages is enormously greater than appears superficially, for both parties obviously make every effort to conceal the facts. Within the circle of my necessarily limited personal acquaintance I know of scores of men, some of them of wealth and position, who have made such marriages and do not seem to regret it. It is an old observation indeed that a woman who was previously disposed of her virtue makes a good wife. The common theory is that this is because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from the social outlawry. The truth is that she makes a good wife because she is a shrewd woman and has specialized professionally in masculine weakness and is thus extra competent at the traditional business of her sex. Such a woman often shows a truly magnificent sagacity. It is very difficult to deceive her logically, and it is impossible to disarm her emotionally. Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was evidenced to begin with of her intellectual enterprise and courage and her success as a rebelous proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness, and ecumen. Even the most lowly prostitute is better off in all worldly ways than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting. She meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busy bodies of the American city in which I live undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some of them came to me in advance as a practical journalist for advice as how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. The truth was to the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career not in the morgue, but at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen, and even twenty years, and then retired on competencies. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty percent married, and that they almost always got husbands who had been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist, there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers, and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied, there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker. That is, one who bagged a best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grand dom of the greatest dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister and a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measly superior men of the prostitute's own class, say her father and brothers, and that communion with them far from being disgusting is often rather romantic. I well remember observing during my collaboration with the vice-crusaders of Forsed the delight of a lady of joy who had attracted the notice of a police lieutenant. She was intensely pleased by the idea of having a client of such haughty manners, such brilliant dress, and what seemed to her to be so dignified a profession. It is always forgotten that this weakness is not confined to prostitutes, but runs through the whole female sex. The woman who could not imagine an illicit affair with a wealthy soap manufacturer, or even with a lawyer, finds it quite easy to imagining herself succumbing to an ambassador or a duke. There are very few exceptions to this rule. In the most reserved of modern societies, the woman who represent their highest flower are notoriously complacent to royalty, and royal women, to complete the circuit, not infrequently yield to actors and musicians, that is, to men radiating a glamour not encountered even in princes. End of In Defense of Women, Section 10 The New Age Part 1 In Defense of Women by H. L. Menken Section 11 The New Age Part 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 44. The Future of Marriage The transvaluation of values that is now in progress will go on slowly and for a very long while. That it will be ever quite complete is, of course, impossible. There are inherent differences that will continue to show themselves until the end of time. As women gradually become convinced not only of the possibility of economic independence, but also of its value, she will probably lose her present over-mastering 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 purile, 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 or buttonhole worker or newspaper sub-editor or piano tuner or house painter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid occupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably much further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their present superiority to men will always remain, and with it a shade of their relative inefficiency, and so marriage will remain attractive to them or at all events to most of them, and its overthrow will be prevented. To abolish it entirely, as certain fevered reformers propose, would be as difficult as to abolish the precession of the equinoxes. At the present time, women vacillate somewhat absurdly between two schemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their economic independence is still full of conditions, and on the other hand, they are in revolt against the immemorial conventions. The result is a general unrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and unintelligent revolt. One of those symptoms is the appearance of intellectual striving in women. Not a striving alas towards the genuine pearls and rubies of the mind, but one merely towards the acquirement of the rubber stamp that men employ in their so-called thinking. Thus we have women who launch themselves into party politics and fill their heads with a vast mass of useless knowledge about political tricks, customs, theories, and personalities. Thus too, we have the women's social reformer, trailing along ridiculously behind the tatadelmi and posse of male utopians, each with something to sell. And thus we have the women who goes in for advanced wisdom of the sort-on draft in women's clubs, in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of beliefs and propositions that are ignorant, unimportant, and untrue. Such banals striving as most prodigly in display in the United States were superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is due to the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work less than any other people in the world and, above all, to the relatively greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have been emancipated from any compulsion to productive labor without having acquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or social duty. The result is that they swarm in the women's clubs and waste their time listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still worse lectures on mater-link, Balkan politics and the sub-conscience. It is among such women that one observes the periodic rages for Berksonism and Montessori Method, the twilight sleep, and other such follies, so pathetically characteristic of American culture. One of the evil effects of this tendency I have hitherto discantered upon to wit the growing disposition of American women to regard all routine labor, particularly in the home, as infr-dignitatum, and hence intolerable. Out of that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and well-fed women engaged in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous, and a nuisance. And on the other hand we behold such a decay in a domestic arch that at first onslaught of the late war the national government had to import a foreign expert to teach the housewives of the country the various elements of thrift. No such instruction was needed by the housewives of the continent. They were simply told how much food they could have and the natural competence did the rest. There is never any avoidable waste there, either in peace or in war. A French housewife has little use for a garbage can, save as a depository for uplifting literature. She does her best with the means at her disposal, not only in wartime, but at all times. As I have said over and over again in this inquiry, a woman's dis-inglination to acquire the intricate waste that lies at the bottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active intelligence. It is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such stupid and meticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is obviously important for the average woman to make some effort in that direction, for if she fails to do so there is chaos. That chaos is duly visible in the United States. Here women reveal one of their subterranean qualities, their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are quite without that dog-like fidelity to duty which is one of the shining marks of men. They never summon up a high pride in doing what is inherently disagreeable. They always go to the galleys under protest and with vows of sabotage. Their fundamental philosophy is almost that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of men connives at this and is thus largely responsible for it. Before the average poela, apprentice in the kitchen, can pick up before through the culinary subtleties that are commonplace even to the chefs on dining-cars, she has caught a man and need concern herself about them no more, for he has to eat in the last analysis whatever she sets before him. And his lack of intelligence makes it easy for her to shut off his academic criticisms by bald appeal to his emotions. By an easy process he finally attaches a positive value to her indolence. It is a proof, he concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty incompetence, he is abashed. But as women, gaining economic autonomy, meet men in progressively bitterer competition, the rising masculine distrust and fear of them will be reflected even in the enchanted domain of marriage, and the husband, having yielded up most of his old rights, will begin to reveal a new jealousy of those that remain and particularly of the right to a fair quid pro quo for his own docile industry. In brief, as women shake off their ancient disabilities, they will also shake off some of their ancient immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a soberer and more exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of the suffrage, I believe, will encourage this awakening. In wrestling it from the reluctant male, the women of the Western world have planted dragon's teeth, which will presently leap up and gnaw them. Now that 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 underway, 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. 45. Effects of the War 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 of it was almost equivalent to a new declaration of war. At least three new contests in the grand matter are plainly in sight. One between Germany and France, to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak and incompetent nation over a strong and enterprising nation. One between Japan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and one between England and the United States for control of the sea. To these must be added various minor struggles and perhaps one or two of almost major character. The effort of Russia to regain her own unity and power, the effort of the Turks to put down the slave rebellion of Greek, Armenian, Arabs, etc., which now menaces them, the effort of the Latin Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke and the joint effort of Russia and Germany, perhaps with England and Italy aiding to get rid of such international nuisances as the insane Polish Republic, the petty states of the Baltic, perhaps also most of the Balkan states. I pass over the probability of a new mutiny in India of the rising of China against the Japanese and of a general struggle for a new alignment of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great and small, are probable. Most of them are humanly certain. They will be fought ferociously and with the aid of destructive engines of the utmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men and a large portion of these men will be under 40 years of age. As a result, 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 a score of women is now, but by whole battalions and brigades of them. And he will be driven in sheer self-defense 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. Just what form this interference is likely has not yet appeared clearly. In France, there is already a wholesale legitimization of children born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe, there has been a clamor for the legalization of polygamy. But these devices do not meet the main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost. A plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the position of the monogamous husband, now rendered increasingly uncomfortable by the laws of most Christian states. I do not think that the more intelligent sort of women faced by a perilous shortage of men would object seriously to that amelioration. They must see plainly that the present system, if it is carried much further, will begin to work powerfully against their best interests if only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination of marriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman of true discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior man even on unfavorable turns with John Smith her husband, serf, and prisoner at one stroke. The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it. The average husband, perhaps, deserves little suker. The woman who pursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims, should be properly rewarded by the state for her service to it. A service surely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that reward may conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of statutes giving her title to a large share of his real property and requiring him to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her from all obedience to him, and from all obligation to keep his house in order. But the woman who aspires to hire a game should be quite willing, it seems to me, to resign some of these advantages and compensation for the greater honor and satisfaction of being wife to a man of merit and mother to his children. All that is needed is laws allowing her, if she will, to resign her right of dour, her right to maintenance and her immunity from discipline, and to make any other terms that she may be led to regard as equitable. At present, women are unable to make the most of these concessions even if they would. The laws of the majority of western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an English woman should agree by an anti-nuptial contract to submit herself to discipline not of the current statutes, that elder common law which allowed a husband to correct his wife corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it would be competent for any sentimental neighbor to set this agreement at naught by howling her husband for a magistrate for carrying it out, and it is a safe wager that the magistrate would jail him. This plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in operation. Many a married woman, in order to keep her husband from revolt makes more or less disguised surrender of certain of the rights and immunities of existing laws. There are, for example, even in America, women who practice the domestic arts with competence and diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would be visited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who follow external trades and professions, contributing a share to the family ex-checker. There are women who obey their husbands even against their best judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who winked discreetly at their husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the oath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace indeed that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part. There would be more of them if there were more women with enough serenity of mind to see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The trouble with such triangulations is not primarily that they involve perjury or that they offer any fundamental offense to the wife. If she avoids banal theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of augmenting the husband's devotion to her and respect for her, if only as the fruit of comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men among us have sense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine mind is readily taken in by specious values. The average married man of Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some meretricious and flamboyant creature bent only upon fleecing him. Here is where the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to the sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than he would think of standing for office without consulting his wife. The result is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by women, there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite the fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours were carefully supervised by Madame Zola from the first days of their marriage and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and his mind was never distracted from his work. 46. The Eternal Romance But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be any decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at bottom of all transactions between the sexes. Women may emancipate themselves. They may borrow the whole bag of masculine tricks and they may cure themselves of their present desire for the vegetable security of marriage, but they will never cease to be women and so long as they are women they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm today lies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace vastly greater than that of acts of God and the public enemy, and they will be dangerous forever. Men fear them and are fascinated by them. They know how to show their teeth charmingly. The more enlightened of them have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzsche who called them the recreation of the warrior, not of the paltrune remember, but of the warrior, a profound saying. They have an infinite capacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small and irresistible flatteries, their acute understanding combines with their capacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable companions when the serious business of the day is done and the time has come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether. Every man, I dare say, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the fundamental conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me, and I hope I may be pardoned at the late stage of my inquiry for intruding my own personality, I reject the two commonest of them, passion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is too exciting and alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egotistic to have much desire to be mothered. What then remains for me? Let me try to describe it to you. It is the close of a busy and vexatious day, say, half past five or six of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and have stretched out on a divan in front of the fire smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed, above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze, she talks, of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of, books, music, the play, men, other women, no politics, no business, no religion, no metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious. But remember, she is intelligent. What she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eyebrow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually, I fall asleep, but only for an instant. At once observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again, slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams, and then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on. I ask you seriously, could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The sensation of falling asleep is to me the most exquisite in the world. I delight in it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetisized and made doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I match this situation against any that you can think of. It is not only enchanting. It is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end, when the girl grows miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrow somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been genuinely completely and unregradably happy. 47. Apologia in conclusion. At the end, I crave the indulgence of the cultured reader for the imperfections necessarily visible in all that I have here set down. Imperfections not only due to incomplete information and fallible logic, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to certain fundamental weaknesses of the sex to which I have the honor to belong. Man is inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog is inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he says and does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses the majestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in her actual present, so he puts on a pathetic and unescapable clownishness when he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the laboratory. There is no book on woman by man that is not stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are but two books that show even a superficial desire to be honest. The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage by Sir Almouth Wright made a gallant attempt to tell the truth. But before he got halfway through his task, his ineradicable donkey-nicious amal overcame his scientific frenzy as a psychologist, and so he hastily washed his hands of the business and affronted judicious with a half-bacon preposterous book. Perhaps I have failed too and even more ingloriously. If so, I am full of sincere and indescribable regret. The End. End of In Defense of Women by H. L. Menken read by M. L. Cohen Cleveland, Ohio June 2007 This has been a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org.