received many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a
number of these complaints to be lodged, in the hope that the
resultant buffooneries would give me entertainment in those dull
days of war, with all intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe
promote the sale of the book. But the Comstocks were pursuing
larger fish, and so left me to the righteous indignation of
right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists. Their concern,
after all, is not with books that are denounced; what they
concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.


The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more
civilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of
propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be
omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no
means pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines
of any novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain
form certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman
holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast
mass of sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It
is a question of capital importance to all human beings, and it
deserves to be discussed honestly and frankly, but there is so much
of social reticence, of religious superstition and of mere emotion
intermingled with it that most of the enormous literature it has
thrown off is hollow and useless. I point for example, to the
literature of the subsidiary question of woman suffrage. It fills
whole libraries, but nine tenths of it is merely rubbish, for it starts
off from assumptions that are obviously untrue and it reaches
conclusions that are at war with both logic and the facts. So with
the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of