Description
Growing up in a bourgeoisie German family in Baltimore, Henry Louis Mencken described his childhood as “placid, secure, uneventful and happy”. At an early age he had already decided that he would be an author, and read every book he could get his hands on. After graduating from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute he enrolled in a free correspondence class on writing given by Cosmopolitan magazine, eventually being hired part time by the Morning Herald. For six years he worked with them as a reporter, before moving to editorial work at the Baltimore Sun. It was at this time that his first book was published, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905). Three years later, at only 27 years old, he wrote The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which quickly established Mencken’s literary reputation and did much to popularize Nietzsche in English, being one of the first books written on the man.
Ten years later, Henry Louis Mencken would write the first English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. In it Nietzsche rails against decadence, compassion, weakness, and most of all the hostility towards life found within the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Instead he calls for people to embrace life as it is, to love their fate. He foresees a new generation of men who would usher in a transvaluation of values which says yes to life in all it’s complexity. It was during this time that Mencken also penned In Defense of Women, a bombastic, funny, deeply cynical transvaluation of gender relations as they existed in 1920s America.
Henry Louis Mencken, a lover of all things new and modern, did not hate modern women. ‘In Defense of Women’ is exactly that, a defense of women against their many detractors. Where Mencken differs, however, is that he doesn’t establish his argument from a place of unreality. There are no ridiculous appeals to women’s innate nature, no reference to virtues that almost always leave readers scratching their heads and wondering if the author has ever met a woman before. Instead, Mencken defends women in the most American way possible, that is to say with a mixture of pragmatism and “telling it straight”. Mencken describes women as self serving and calculating, perfect rational agents of the modern economy, men their unsuspecting dupes. “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.” Mencken begins, and continues by lamenting that “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.”
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