Cynical quips like "Marriage: the end of hope" and "Wife: a former sweetheart" led critics to label H. L. Mencken "the countrys high priest of woman-haters." Needless to say, his publication of In Defense of Women must have come as quite a shock. Here, Mencken argues that women possess a "superior intelligence" and are "the supreme realists of the race." Man, by contrast, is a helpless romantic: "without a woman to rule him and to think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle."