H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 25, 1916

§1. A pair of pundits calling themselves Mr. and Mrs. John Martin (an obvious nom de guerre, for no man and wife, both being writers, could subdue their mutual envy and hatred long enough to do an article together) bedizened a recent issue of the Evening Sunpaper with a flaming attack upon college women, alleging, among other things, that these fair creatures are 63 per cent. less prolific in viable offspring than other females of the genus Homo, and that the fact is intolerably discreditable to them, and a fearful curse and burden to the human race.

So much for the mere crime. The sinister origin of it, we are told, is to be sought in what is called “the woman movement”—i. e., in feminism, in suffragettism, in the revolt against the zenana, in the vine’s war upon the oak. I quote a few sample strophes:

The woman’s movement has reduced the fertility of college women by 63 per cent. below the level to which it has been reduced by other causes. . . .

It is clear that in the halcyon day when feminism’s goal is reached the troubles of the world will speedily be cured by racial extinction. . . .

If one baby be as good as another, the child of the Bohemian peasant [is] as valuable as the child of the New England collegian. . . . But history and biology forbid the assumption. . . .

Worse even than its race suicidal effect is feminism’s selection for sterility of the best women in the land. . . .

The ablest and best-trained women are to be enticed, by college education first and by high salaries in business after, to sterility. . . .

§2.

A vast mass of gratuitous assumptions and fallacious conclusions, some of them quite childish. Not even the City Club, that day nursery for bellowing sophomores, has ever heard worse nonsense. To begin with, what reason have the learned authors for holding that the college woman is better fitted for maternity, either mentally or physically, than any other woman? Do they seriously maintain that her occasional dallying with tennis and basketball and her mastery of a few infantile gymnasium tricks make her tougher in muscle or sounder in wind than her less literate but more hard-working sister? And do they seriously maintain that the smattering she acquires of a few formal arts and sciences, chiefly under masters who actually know little more about them than a phonograph knows of Beethoven, makes her the superior of her sister intellectually? If so, they maintain two theories that have no support whatever in the known facts. And if not, then their whole case goes to pieces.

§3.

Their fundamental error, I believe, lies in their too ready acceptance of the widespread error that what is called “education” is identical with intelligence—that is, that the young man or woman who has passed through an average undergraduate college has gained thereby, either by direct tutelage or by intimate contact with mellow and well-stocked minds, an appreciable access of intellectual sensitiveness and efficiency. No belief could be more grotesquely ridiculous. Neither this effect nor the cause to which it is ascribed can be demonstrated by any intelligible process. Not only are the mental habits acquired by the average undergraduate distinct from intelligence; they are even openly antagonistic to intelligence. And not only is the average college professor not a man of mellow and well-stocked mind: he is notoriously a man of twisted and ill-stocked mind, an empty and tedious fellow, an intellectual pettifogger and charlatan, a brother to the Chautauquan rhetorician and evangelical divine.

I here speak, of course, of the college professor pure and simple, of the pedagogue who consecrates his talents to teaching undergraduates; not of the man of science, whose teaching is no more than an incident of his study and research. The latter may be, and often is, a man of the very highest intelligence; the former, with brilliant exceptions, is stupid and a snob. Surrounded at all times by immature victims, who are forced, willy-nilly, to accept not only his facts but also his logic and his philosophy, and soothed in his vanity by a ceremonial which hedges him ’round with the dignity of an ambassador, an archbishop or the warden of a penitentiary, it is no wonder that he lives out his days as lazily and as uselessly as a prize Pommeranian and leaves behind him at last, as his contribution to posterity, no more than a nickname and half a dozen anecdotes.

§4.

From such fantastic fauna, obviously, no great intellectual stimulation is to be expected. And experience bears out that lack of expectation. The average college graduate, until a harsh world has made him over, is surely not notable for his intelligence—i. e., for his sharp sense of reality, his feeling for values—but rather for his lack of intelligence. His view of the universe is warped and ridiculous; he underestimates essentials and grossly overestimates trivialities; his stock of exact knowledge is fragmentary and inconsiderable; he is full of a bumptiousness that excites to pity almost as much as to mirth. In other words, he is a sort of derisive copy of MM. his professors, and it usually takes a year or two to purge him of their deadening influence. And even then he is a couple of years behind the youth who, with inquiring mind, has practiced the pursuit of knowledge in sounder and more spacious schools, and with the example before him of men of healthier and more masculine ideals. The masterpiece of the college pedagogues is the youth who, on taking his A.B., himself becomes a professor. This is their masterpiece—and the damning evidence against them.

I speak here, not in mere enmity, but out of a copious and bitter experience. For a good many years it was part of my job to select and initiate neophytes, both male and female, for a vocation requiring, above all else, mental resilience and quickness of perception. I started out with a strong predisposition in favor of college graduates; I ended with a violent prejudice against them. And why? Simply because, taking one with another, they were hard to train—because it was more risky to trust to their general information and nimbleness of wit than to trust to the general information and nimbleness of wit of youths whose minds had not been soldered up by college professors.

§5.

But of all this, more anon. What I started out to do was to argue that it is absurd to assume that college women are more able or more intelligent than other women of their class, or even than other women in general, and that it is thus doubly absurd to denounce them for not reproducing their kind on a greater scale. The birth rate among them, when compared to the marriage rate, is not a bit lower than the birth rate among other women of the same social status. And as for the marriage rate itself, it is the same, so far as the volition of the college women themselves is concerned, as it is among any other group of women. That is to say, it is to the opportunity rate as 99.99 is to 100. Now and then, by some amazing miracle, a college woman may refuse an eligible man, but all the available information shows that this happens as rarely among the fair bachelors of arts as it does among shopgirls, suffragettes or grand opera singers. Such rare refusals, indeed, among women of all classes, whether single or widowed, may be set down very confidently as evidences of insanity.

In other words, the college woman, like any other woman, marries as soon as possible—that is, as soon as she can find an eligible man. Despite all her pretensions to knowledge, the immemorial business of her sex is still foremost in her mind, and nine-tenths of her so-called intellectuality is no more than an elaborate hocus-pocus, the essential object of which is to make her extra-interesting to the sort of man she admires. Just as the man-crazy suffragette (I could name several specific examples, but refrain out of common decency) pursues the man-hunt by pretending absurdly to a horror of men, so the college woman pursues it by pretending absurdly to an indifference to men. Neither pretense deceives the generality of pantalooned scoundrels.

§6.

But why, then, is the marriage rate among college women but .50, whereas the marriage rate among native-born white American women in general, 15 years or older, is .80? A dozen reasons at once present themselves, first among them being the fact that the average age of college women on graduation is nearly 22 years, which thus robs them of seven of the most favorable years for husband hunting. Here, indeed, they suffer a double disadvantage, for not only are they exiled from the arena, on penalty of losing their special character, during more than a third of the open season, but they also go into action handicapped, for the sort of man who may be presumed to be most appreciative of the peculiar charms of the college woman is the man of reflective character and mature age, and such a man, unluckily, is most easily bedazzled and deflected by cuties of 18 or 19. After 40 a man seldom marries a woman of more than 28, and for every year his age increases thereafter the age of the woman that he normally marries diminishes a year. Thus the man of 50 has got to the girl of 18, which puts him four years beyond the reach of the college woman. The range of age among the men she can hope to interest, indeed, is very much restricted, for most men of less than 35 are afraid of her, and most men of 46 or over, as I have said, are beyond her reach.

§7.

I have just spoken of the fear she inspires in most men of less than 35. This fear (which disappears among men above 35, for by that time they have learned that no woman, if properly handled, is actually dangerous; and, moreover, that nine-tenths of the alleged superiority of the college woman is no more than buncombe) offers one of the heaviest disadvantages that she must face, for it makes the most desirable sort of men avoid her, and so usually mates her, in the end, with the botched and neglected. Worse, it is not due to any genuine distrust among men of intelligence in women, but to a hearty distaste for that empty intellectual snobbery which the college woman so often borrows from her professors. In other words, she is not feared for what she really is, but for what she isn’t. She will not escape this handicap until she learns humility, the oldest and by long odds the most effective of all weapons in the husband-hunt. Every man, deep down, knows that the average woman is vastly more intelligent than the average man; and yet it always delights him to have some definite woman consult him and defer to him, for thereby he is soothed in his wille zur macht, and his whole sex is flattered by the tacit admission of its superiority. That superiority is even more bogus and imaginary than the superiority of the college woman to other women.

§8.

Yet, again, the marriage rate among college women is kept down by the fact that, taking them by and large, they are below rather than above the average in merely physical charm. Here I tread upon tender ground, and run the risk of being assassinated by some learned virago, vain of her complexion. But facts are facts. Among 100 girls of 18, of whom 50 are beautiful and 50 are not, it is highly improbable that as many of the former as of the latter will go to college, for most of them will be already engaged or in hopes, and some of them will be actually married. True enough, one encounters, occasionally, a college woman of striking pulchritude, and numbers of them are very charming, but the fact that a good many take to pious works, becoming nurses in hospitals for the criminally insane or missionaries to the heathen, is a fact that carries its own gruesome moral. Surely it is not argued by any intelligent person that a woman will ever go into such abhorrent occupations so long as a snarable man is in sight.

§9.

For all of these reasons (and I could add many others) I am strongly against the doctrine that college women, as a class, neglect their duty to the race. They marry, I believe, as often and as early as possible, gladly sacrificing all purely intellectual interests to that end, and they have families as large as those of other women of their general class. To blame the feminist movement for the fact that they are less fecund than immigrant women is as ridiculous as it would be to blame the binomial theorem. It is likewise ridiculous to argue that their lack of fecundity is ruinous to the race. Education cannot be transmitted to offspring, but only intelligence—and intelligence is very little affected, in its essence, by education. A college woman, when she emerges from college, may seem to be less intelligent than the average telephone operator, or even than the average chorus girl. But in the long run, if she is of sound stock, her native agility of mind will triumph over the anæsthetic effect of the mental clubbing to which she has been subjected, and she will pursue and capture a husband with the best of ’em.