In Defense of Women is H. L. Mencken's book on women and the relationship between the sexes. While Mencken does not champion women's rights, he describes women as wiser in many novel and observable ways. The book is not so much a defense of women as a critique of the relationship between the sexes.

Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches is a “brilliant, well-documented” celebration (Le Monde) by an acclaimed French feminist of the witch as a symbol of female rebellion and independence in the face of misogyny and persecution. Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed? Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct descendants to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who live their lives on their own terms.

He was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, but like most men of his time, he was never more clueless about women than when he believed himself most enlightened about them. American satirist and cultural critic HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN (1880-1956) "clarified" his many contradictory ideas about women-espoused over a long career as a journalist-in this controversial 1918 treatise on the relationship between the genders that even some contemporary critics saw as misogynist. Today, we may generously deem Mencken's ideas on women ironic, but an honest 21st-century reading will find them demeaning, if entertainingly so. This very modern man declares women more intelligent but less civilized than men, and pretends to insult men as a way to elevate women, which does nothing but place women in the very spot today's feminists rankle to be in: on a pedestal. In the end, Mencken reveals his preferred woman: intelligent enough to amuse him, but not so intelligent that she's frustrated by being reduced to such an undignified role. From the supposed end of marriage to "woman suffrage" (the author was not a fan), this is a work that is both essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the mind of Mencken and an important supplementary text of feminist history...if only as a demonstration of a contrary position.

A champion of women’s rights reflects on her illustrious career litigating groundbreaking cases on reproductive rights, sexual harassment, and violence against women In the boys’ club climate of 1975, Nancy Gertner launched her career fighting a murder charge on behalf of antiwar activist Susan Saxe, one of the few women to ever make the FBI’s Most Wanted List. What followed was a storied span of groundbreaking firsts, as Gertner threw herself into criminal and civil cases focused on women’s rights and civil liberties. Gertner writes, for example, about representing Clare Dalton, the Harvard Law professor who famously sued the school after being denied tenure, and of being one of the first lawyers to introduce evidence of Battered Women’s Syndrome in a first-degree murder defense. She writes about the client who sued her psychiatrist after he had sexually preyed on her, and another who sued her employers at Merrill Lynch—she had endured strippers and penis-shaped cakes in the office, but the wildly skewed distribution of clients took professional injury too far. All of these were among the first cases of their kind. Gertner brings her extensive experience to bear on issues of long-standing importance today: the general evolution of thought regarding women and fetuses as legally separate entities, possibly at odds; the fungible definition of rape and the rights of both the accused and the victim; ever-changing workplace attitudes and policies around women and minorities; the concept of abetting crime. “With wit, heart, and honesty, Gertner . . . looks back on the decades just after feminism’s Third Wave, when issues like abortion for poor women, shield laws for rape victims, ‘battered wife syndrome,’ and the rights of lesbians to adopt children were unconventional, to say the least.” —Renee Loth, The Boston Globe “This is a fascinating memoir of a life lived in the law with passion, guts, humor, and great skill.” —Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and author of Before Roe v. Wade

"Meticulously researched. . . . Too Heavy a Load reads like a wonderful historical novel."--Akilah Monifa, Emerge

The beginning of the eighteenth century opened Spain to an influx of people, books and ideas and gave the country its own brief age of Enlightenment. At this time of momentous change, the three authors represented in this volume contributed to the Europe-wide debate over the nature of women and their position in society. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo was an admired scholar and a prolific author. One of his most controversial essays was Defence of Women, which argued that women were men's intellectual equals. This sparked a pamphlet war that continued for twenty-five years. Josefa Amar y Borbón was a writer and translator who submitted her own spirited argument, the Defence of the Talents of Women, to a debate on whether women should be admitted to the new Economic Societies. She also demanded in her Discourse on the Education of Women that women should be given the opportunity to study and learn. At the very end of the century, Inés Joyes y Blake published an Apology for Women, arguing that women should develop self-respect, support each other and refuse to be manipulated by insincere lovers and domineering husbands. All three writers wrote with verve and imagination about one of the most important social questions of their day

In Defense of Women is H. L. Mencken's 1918 book on women and the relationship between the sexes. Some laud the book as progressive while others brand it as reactionary. While Mencken didn't champion women's rights, he described women as wiser in many novel and observable ways, while demeaning average men. According to Mencken's biographer, Fred Hobson: Depending on the position of the reader, he was either a great defender of women's rights or, as a critic labelled him in 1916, 'the greatest misogynist since Schopenhauer', 'the country's high-priest of woman-haters.