Page 36 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Culture
Mencken on Women
The bad boy of Baltimore was a sexual counterrevolutionary.
by D.G. HART
H.L. Mencken’s reputation as the “bad boy” of Baltimore might earn him member- ship in the ranks of intellectuals who advocated a brave new world to replace
the timid old one. He was, after all, the first English translator and interpreter of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his book on Nietzsche, Mencken approvingly sum- marized the philosopher’s point that “what passed for civilization, as represented by Christianity, was making such an effort to defy and counteract the law of natural selection” that it would end in “disaster.” Self-sacrifice, according to Mencken, “was an open defiance of nature, and so were all the other Chris- tian virtues.”
When Mencken wrote on Nietzsche he was still primarily a journalist, albeit one who had larger in- terests. He had begun his career as a cub reporter but soon ascended the ranks of Baltimore’s newspaper columnists, writing books and literary criticism on the side. That moonlighting led Mencken to great ac- claim, first as co-editor of The Smart Set and then as founding editor of The American Mercury.
About a decade after his book on Nietzsche, Mencken made his mark as one of the most vigorous of literary rabble-rousers with an essay that savaged Puritanism as a force in American writing. Puritan- ism was not merely the “haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy,” it was also responsible for an outlook that produced philistines: “It is not enough that [our fellow men] are headed for heaven, and will sit upon the right hand of God through all eternity; it is also necessary that they be polite, generous, and, above all, trustworthy.” American civilization had suf- fered for having to bear that impossible burden.
Mencken’s early reputation depended on his will- ingness to flout conventional Protestant bourgeois
morality and cultural expressions. For Marion Eliza- beth Rogers, his most recent biographer, the sage of Baltimore’s significance was his courageous fight against cowardice, censorship, hypocrisy, and frauds; he was the herald of greater freedom, honesty, and truth.
But when it came to sex and marriage, Mencken was hardly the prophet of marital liberty, reproduc- tive equality, and sexual fraternity. One of his earliest harvests of thoughts about sex came in his 1918 book, In Defense of Women, a work that mocked traditional sex roles while confirming their advantages. Mencken reveled in the contradictions of American women, at once taking their side and reinforcing stereotypes. For instance, Mencken contended that women were actually smarter than men—smaller brains but big- ger as a percentage of body mass—and for this reason were too smart for the trivial tasks that consigned to them in the home. At the same time, he believed that the liberation of women had a direct effect upon the American dinner table.
“Nowhere else in the world have women more lei- sure and freedom to improve their minds, and no- where else do they show a higher level of intelligence,” Mencken intoned, but “nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy.” That the United States was both “the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman” and the home of “canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of every- thing else ready-made” was no “mere coincidence.”
The same result—women as bad cooks—emerged from the way women thought about duty and the
D.G. Hart is the author of From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism.
36 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015