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Start giftingIn Defense of Women
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreOriginally published in 1918, this book considers topics that remain of vital interest to today’s readers, including monogamy and polygamy, the double standard, sexual harassment, and declining marriage rates. Written in Mencken’s characteristic no-nonsense manner, In Defense of Women crackles with controversy and caustic wit.
“The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian, or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements.”—H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), Baltimore journalist, critic, and essayist, began his career on local newspapers in 1899, becoming a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, and later joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, for which he worked throughout most of his life. He became literary critic of the Smart Set in 1908, and was coeditor of this lively periodical with George Jean Nathan. Mencken and Nathan also founded the American Mercury in 1924, which Mencken edited until 1933. Mencken is best known for the aggressive iconoclasm of his editorial policies in these magazines, especially during the decade following World War I, when he exhibited a savagely satirical reaction against the political and cultural imperfections of the time.
Fred Williams, a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, works in theater, film, television, and radio in England, Ireland, and America. Besides narrating audiobooks, he is a performer in living-history reenactments, an archer, and a poet.