A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (12 page)

This and other hints suggest that at a very early stage, the new faith found adherents among women of the very highest rank. It penetrated even into the imperial family by the end of
the first century
AD
⁷⁹
Dissatisfied middle- and upper-class women have frequently been a fertile ground for those seeking converts to new cults and religions, as the experience in the United States has shown, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Other Eastern religions with a strong appeal to women, including those devoted to the great goddesses Bona Dea and Isis, had spread through the empire. But aspects of Christianity’s moral code gave women an advantage unlike any found in the competition.

Because Christians held that every member of the faithful carries the spark of the divine in his or her soul, infanticide was forbidden, as was abortion.
⁸⁰
Since a majority of exposed infants were girls, this meant that gradually the proportion of females who were Christians began to rise. Women’s numbers were further augmented in this new faith by its ban on abortion, which due to the dangers of the operation, killed many women and often rendered those who survived it infertile.
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In the ancient world, both in Greece and Rome, it was the man who, as head of the household, had the legal power to order a woman to have an abortion. Aristotle advocated it as a form of birth control. Evidence also shows that Christian women married later than their pagan contemporaries, so had better chances of surviving their first pregnancy. Nor were widows compelled to remarry, as was the common practice as enforced by the Lex Julia (see
Chapter 2
). Christians were expected to marry for life, and infidelity was regarded as being as much of a sin for a man as for a woman. In this, Christianity levelled the moral playing field for women. Christian women were also less likely to be forced to marry, as Christians valued virginity. Traditionally, in the world of Classical Antiquity, men had been called on to resist the wiles of women. Now, for the first time, women were being told that they could reject men. Women were being offered a choice
whether to marry or not. Since marriage was a perilous state, quite a few exercised that choice and opted for celibacy. It offers interesting parallels and contrasts with what happened in the West during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when for the first time women could control their own fertility, thanks to the contraceptive pill. Though the early Christian revolution was in many ways anti-sexual, it was like the 1960s in one important aspect: it offered women the right to choose whether or not they wanted to reproduce.

The phenomenon of women choosing celibacy was undoubtedly one of the factors that attracted them to the new faith and so conspired to increase the ratio of Christian women to men. The lists of those who died during the occasional persecutions against Christians bear this out. In Lyons, Gaul, in
AD
177, 24 men and 23 women were martyred; at Scilli, in Italy, three years later, it was seven men and five women who died. According to Rodney Stark: ‘The ancient sources and modern historians agree that primary conversion to Christianity was far more prevalent among females than among males.’
⁸²
The result was that with a shortage of women in the larger, surrounding pagan culture, pagan men often married Christian women; and a significant number of these men then underwent secondary conversion. In his studies of modern religious movements, Stark has invariably found the same pattern of conversion. Its impact on the rapid growth of Christianity can be seen when the numbers are considered. The best guess is that by
AD
40 – seven years after the crucifixion of Jesus – there were approximately 1,000 Christians in an empire with an estimated population of 60,000,000. Surveying the best available evidence, Stark estimates that the most probable growth rate of the new faith was 40 per cent per decade. By the beginning of the second century, there were over 200,000 Christians, and by
AD
300,
6,299,832. Just over a decade later, weight of numbers was one of the factors that led the emperor Constantine to recognize Christianity, ending the sporadic persecutions that had been launched against those who practised it. By
AD
350 Christians represented over 50 per cent of the empire’s population.

Evidence gathered by Guttentag and Secord on the relationship between the status of women in any society and the proportion of males to females, links high ratios of females to males to higher status for women. Stark believes that in early Christianity, women enjoyed higher status than they did in the pagan world around them.
⁸³
St Paul’s references to women as deaconesses are cited to support this contention. According to St Paul, deacons were important in the early Church, assisting in liturgical functions and administering the Church’s charitable activities. And it is clear that Paul regarded it as entirely proper for women to be deaconesses.
⁸⁴

Several later sources also reference the prevalence of women deacons in the early Church. The most compelling evidence of all, of course, of the high regard for women in the early Church, is St Paul’s statement in his epistle to the Galatians :

For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (3:27–8)

Whatever its other implications, it is the most radical statement of equality – of a kind – between men and women since Plato’s championship of women guardians in his ideal state 400 years before (see
Chapter 1
). But in fact St Paul is merely making explicit the implications of Jesus’ attitude towards
women. He was to Christianity what Lenin was to Marxism – bent on spreading the new faith and preparing Christians to be ready for the coming of the kingdom of heaven where men and women would be united in Christ, and all worldly distinctions would vanish.

But how often did this spiritual equality for women translate into social reality? It is relatively easy to claim that men and women are equal in the eyes of the Lord, but did early Christianity encourage them to see themselves as equals in each other’s eyes? St Paul is cited frequently by both those who argue that it did, and those who hold that it did not. Like Plato, he is hailed by some as a misogynist and by others as a feminist. What remains undeniable is that the moral teachings on adultery, the banning of abortion and infanticide, and the easing of pressure on women to marry would have directly raised the status of women by eradicating some of the practices that were prejudicial to them. But it was not equality as understood in a modern liberal democracy.

There is a further similarity between St Paul and Plato. The equality they offered men and women could only come about through the eradication of the sexual differences between them. Plato’s female guardians must become honorary men, so that their sexuality is obliterated. In the Kingdom of Heaven, according to St Paul, sexual differences disappear. Both thinkers see the sacrifice of a vital aspect of our human nature as the necessary cost of equality between the sexes. In the meantime, however, certain patriarchal traditions must continue. In 1 Corinthians, 11:3–16, the Apostle sets down a series of formulations concerning the relationship between men and women and the Church. He reiterates the Biblical tradition of male dominance for ‘the head of the woman is the man’ and restates the creation myth of the primacy of man: ‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.
Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.’ It is also here that he ordains that women must cover their hair when in church. However, he goes on to recognize our mutual interdependence: ‘Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God.’

One could parse this, as does the Jewish feminist Pamela Eisenbaum, as a simple recognition that man depends on woman as much as woman depends on man.
⁸⁵
If one accepts this interpretation, St Paul here rules out that hoary old misogynist fantasy, beloved of the Greeks and of the Old Testament, the myth of autonomous man. That surely is progress. However, while undermining one of misogyny’s pretensions, St Paul went on to supply it with one of its most powerful weapons, one that would change forever how a whole civilization would think about the body.

At first sight, apparently, St Paul was an unimpressive and unattractive little man, with a ‘big bold head’, crooked legs, dark thick eyebrows that grew together and a large nose; hardly, one would think, a man to foment one of the great upheavals in the human psyche.
⁸⁶
But the letters of St Paul represent the beginning of a revolution in human sensibility of seismic proportions. In Romans (7:18–25) he writes about his body:

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not . . . For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:

But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?

I thank God through Jesus Christ Our lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.

This is a declaration of war on the human body. And when a man declares war on himself, the first casualty is woman. It is a war that is still being fought.

Many thinkers in Classical Antiquity, such as Plato, were dualists, aspiring to greater knowledge of the world by attempting to apprehend what they believed was the perfection of its underlying principles. As a result, they rejected everyday reality, including that of the body and its needs and desires, as woefully inadequate, indeed a hindrance. But they did not reject it as inherently evil as does St Paul. His anguished cry of near despair at his rebellious body had not been heard before. Plato may have regarded the body as an unfortunate inconvenience that a philosopher somehow had to by-pass on his road to the truth. But to St Paul the body represented a rejection of the Divine, an insurrection against the supreme truth for which the Son of God had died on the cross. Inevitably, women would carry the cross as the chief instigators of this rebellion of the flesh.

In the epistle to the Corinthians, written to advise Christians who were debating whether or not to become celibate, St Paul tells them (7:1–9):

It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband . . . I say therefore to the unmarried and the widows, It is good for them if they abide as I.

But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

Thus marriage became a ‘defence against desire’.
⁸⁷
Though St Paul did not advocate that all Christians remain celibate, realizing that such a condition would have been incompatible with his ambitions to broaden the new faith’s appeal, his bleak view of human sexuality as a necessary evil provided one justification for the Church’s increasingly misogynistic vision. Sanctity was identified more and more with virginity. The rebellious body had to be put down, and like an enemy citadel, it was laid siege to with fasts, deprivations, and other punishments including, most importantly, abstinence from sex. The Greeks and Romans were taught it was necessary to master passions. But according to the Christian teacher Clement of Alexandria (circa
AD
150–215) ‘our ideal is not to experience desire at all.’
⁸⁸
By the end of the second century
AD
, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the early Church, Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, better known as Tertullian (
AD
160–220), could write: ‘Think of how a man feels in himself when he abstains from a woman. He thinks spiritual thoughts. If he prays to the Lord, he is next door to heaven; if he turns to the Scriptures, he is all of him present to them . . .’
⁸⁹

In theory at least, it is easier for a man to abstain from having thoughts about having sex with a woman if she dresses modestly. According to Tertullian, ‘salvation – and not the salvation of women only, but of men – consists in the exhibition principally of modesty.’
⁹⁰
Women were already expected to wear veils while attending Christian services. It was Tertullian who had women barred from holding ministries in the Church because of their power to distract the pious. In the Christian male’s war with his body, an attractively dressed
woman was his rebellious member’s greatest ally. So Tertullian devotes a whole treatise ‘On Female Dress’ to neutralizing this powerful force. In it, he asserts that women originally learned the art of decorating their bodies and wearing make-up from the angels expelled from heaven with whom they coupled. The fallen angels conferred ‘peculiarly upon women that instrumental means of ostentation, the radiance of jewels wherewith necklaces are variegated, and the circlets of gold wherewith the arms are compressed, and the medicaments of orchid with which wools are coloured, and that black powder itself where-with the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent.’ St Paul had introduced the notion of the body as ‘the temple of the living God’.
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Women’s love of ostentation and make-up pollutes that temple, forcing God to forsake it: