Originally 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 way, In Protection of Ladies crackles with controversy and caustic wit.

“The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization with the complementary characters of the other, is with the capacity of the highest reaches of human endeavor. Man, without a keeping touch of female in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too very easily deluded and lulled to rest by his creativity to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian, or a bank director. And woman, without some track of that divine innocence which is usually masculine, is as well harshly the realist for all those vast projections from the fancy which lie at the heart of what we should call genius. Here, as somewhere else in the world, the best results are obtained by a mingling of components.”-H. L. Mencken