A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (19 page)

In recent years, many crimes perpetrated by states and other organizations – including those against women – have been acknowledged, and those responsible for them have in some cases apologized to the descendants of their victims. For example, in 1431, a nineteen-year-old French peasant girl called Joan, who had heard God’s voice instructing her to lead the armies of France against the English, which she did with remarkable success, was condemned and burned as a heretic. To her English captors, the voice she had heard was not God’s but Satan’s. She was also condemned as an ‘enchantress’ – that is, a witch. Joan of Arc is the only witch that the Church has rehabilitated and made into a saint.
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The Church has since apologized, through the Pope, to the Jews, for its anti-Semitism, and just a few years ago, to Galileo the astronomer for persecuting him because of his assertion that Copernicus was right in arguing that it is the sun, not the earth, which is at the centre of the solar system.

‘Great evils form the groundwork of history,’ wrote the medievalist Huizinga.
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Is it not time for the Pope to set an example for other Christians and acknowledge the great evil of the witch-hunts, the awful wrongs inflicted upon thousands of innocent women, recognize their innocence and apologize for their horrendous deaths?

Even as the pall of smoke still hung over Europe from the raging fires of the witch-hunts, a new world began to emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dimly perceived at first. It would not be a world free from misogyny. In fact, the term itself would be first used in 1656.
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But it was a world that challenged the authorities on whose dogmas and doctrines misogyny rested.

Between 1500 and 1800 occurred a series of revolutions, intellectual, social, economic and political, that would transform not only Europe but eventually the entire world. Never before had authority come under such scrutiny. What was regarded as sacred was challenged. Many of the old certainties collapsed. Out of the rubble emerged the modern world.

This was neither a straightforward nor a consistent process.
Nor at times did it seem to have anything to do with the status of women. When Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) climbed the steep stone stairs of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice in 1609 and pointed a crude optical instrument called a telescope at the night sky, how would what he saw challenge a civilization’s view of women? What he saw through his telescope was a universe on the move, not the fixed, unchanging spheres of an earth-centred cosmos, as had been taught for more than 2,000 years. His observations (which, he believed, supported the theory of the sun-centred solar system of Copernicus) challenged the teachings of the Church, the Bible and Aristotle, the main pillars of authority on which the medieval view of the world and women had rested. If Galileo’s discoveries showed that the ancient authorities, including even the Bible, could get the nature of the cosmos wrong, how reliable were they on other matters, including the nature and status of women? But it would prove easier to gain credence that the earth moves round the sun than it would to shift traditional misogynistic prejudices and practices.

As of 1600, in England, socially and intellectually among the more progressive countries in Europe, legally a woman had no rights at all, other than those recognized by local custom. Her father had charge of her until she was married, when she came under the authority of her husband, who took absolute control of all her personal property. As the law of the time stated: ‘That which a man hath is his own. That which the wife hath is the husband’s.’
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Women could become queens in the sixteenth century, and like Elizabeth I command and inspire fear and respect, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century their status had if anything declined. Contemporary Platonists debated whether or not women had souls.
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At the level of dress, always an indication of women’s status, their suffering was taken for granted. The late seventeenth century fashion was to
encase women’s bodies in tight corsets. At the autopsy of one young woman who died at age 20 it was found that ‘her ribs had grown into her liver, and that her other entrails were much hurt by being crushed together with her stays, which her mother had ordered to be twitched so straight that it often brought tears into her eyes whilst the maid was dressing her’.
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Young women were also constantly subjected to purges and enemas to ‘maintain a fashionably pallid complexion’.
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Men who murdered their wives were hanged, but women who murdered their husbands suffered the same terrible fate as traitors and were burned at the stake. By the end of the eighteenth century, by which time most educated people accepted the theory of a sun-centred solar system, the struggle for legal reforms to marriage in favour of women was as yet in its infancy. Marriage still ‘suspended’ a woman’s legal existence, incorporating it into that of her husband ‘under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything’.
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However, changes as a result of the religious, social and political revolutions beginning with the Reformation, would challenge misogyny as never before. While the legal situation of women within marriage remained oppressive, the Reformation caused the status of marriage itself to undergo a dramatic change, affecting the relationship between husband and wife. It also cast the issue of women’s education into a new light.

The reformers’ rejection of priestly celibacy was at the heart of their revolt against the Catholic Church. By allowing clergy to marry, they raised the status of marriage, which the Catholic Church had viewed as very much an inferior state. This put husbands and wives on a more equal footing than was common before.

Women had taken a prominent role in the religious upheavals following Martin Luther’s declaration of the ninety-five articles, which provoked an irreparable break with Catholicism
in 1517. However, the convulsions that pitched women into active and public roles, even allowing a few of them to command the pulpit, inevitably created great unease. As the new Protestant faith stabilized, and the revolutionary fervour abated, so did the willingness of the reformers to grant women equality. In 1558, the founder of Scottish Protestantism John Knox published a pamphlet entitled ‘The First Blast Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’, attacking the more prominent role women were taking in the new faith. The patriarchal family was if anything reinforced: now father not only knew best, but he knew better than the priest, whose role he adopted, to the extent of leading the family in daily prayers and in conducting readings from the Bible. Woman’s subordinate role was reaffirmed, as summed up in the words of the great English Puritan poet John Milton (1608–74): ‘He for God only, she for God in him.’

According to Lawrence Stone:

The ideal woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was weak, submissive, charitable, virtuous and modest, like the wife of the Massachusetts minister in the 1630s, whom he publicly praised for her ‘incomparable meekness of spirit, towards myself especially’.
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But it was not that simple! Relations within marriage had been set on a course towards greater conjugal intimacy from which they would not be deflected until they produced the nuclear family.

Just as, with the astronomical revolution started by Copernicus, the wrecking ball of science was delivering its first major blow against the authority of the Bible, the Reformation was declaring Biblical authority as essential to faith. Ironically, however, that declaration was good for women because reliance
on Scripture implied that it was important for all Protestants – male and female – to be able to read, thus raising the vital matter of women’s education. There had been earlier advocates of education for women. In the fifteenth century, the poet and scholar Christine de Pisa had written: ‘If it were customary to send little girls to school and to teach them the same subjects as are taught boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.’
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In 1552, a pamphlet published in England argued that women’s disabilities were a result not of nature but of ‘the bringing up and training of women’s life’.
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There was something of a movement in favour of the education of women, among whose exponents was the philosopher St Thomas More, the author of
Utopia,
the most influential vision of an ideal society since Plato’s
The Republic.
‘I do not see why learning . . . may not equally agree with both sexes,’ he wrote.
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But the following century, the idea was still deeply opposed, often at the highest levels. King James I denounced the notion. ‘To make women learned and foxes tame had the same effect: to make them more cunning,’ he said, expressing the misogynistic prejudice of the centuries – though it is worthwhile to note that it was a slight against the character of women not their intelligence.
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King James’ opinion prevailed – for a time. It is estimated that as of 1600 in London – the London of Shakespeare – only 10 per cent of women could read. Within forty years, it had risen to 20 per cent.
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Outside of the city, the situation was worse. As of 1754 only one woman out of three in England could sign her name in the registry of marriages, compared to slightly less than two-thirds of men.
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By that date the total population of England was around 6,000,000. Ironically, considering his opposition to women’s education, it was under King James that the first great translation of the Bible into
English was undertaken, creating an incentive for English Protestants to teach their daughters to read in order to acquaint them first hand with the word of God, a vital defence against the blandishments of the still powerful Catholic Church.

‘In Nature we have as clear an understanding as men, if we were bred in schools to mature our brains,’ wrote Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle.
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But upper-class and well-educated women like the Duchess of Newcastle were mercilessly derided and satirized on the stage for their ability to read Greek and Latin. The ‘Plato in petticoats’ became a standard figure of fun, for daring to defy male notions of women’s intellectual capacities. However, the broader benefits of educating women were gradually gaining acceptance.

With the rise of the middle class from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, another important incentive to educate women came into play – the development of the notion of marriage as companionship and the subsequent need for a wife to be a fitting companion for her husband, someone with whom he might hold an intelligent conversation. By 1697, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), one of the most influential writers of his time, was a strong advocate for women’s education. Defoe had good cause to champion the education of women – as one of the first novelists, he knew that women were a growing part of his readership. These developments were the manifestation of a much deeper social transformation that would have a major impact on women’s status.

According to Bertrand Russell: ‘The modern world, so far as mental outlook is concerned, begins in the seventeenth century.’
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An essential part of that outlook took root in Holland, England and the North American colonies. It was defined by revolutionary notions concerning the importance of the individual, stressing equality and the pursuit of happiness. The concept of individual autonomy as it emerged in the early
modern period involved a redefinition of the relationship between men, their government and society, and the responsibilities that each bore to each.
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Making the individual, not God, central to the scheme of things was a shift of emphasis that would have revolutionary consequences for the status of women.

All these ideas were central to the thinking of the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who laid the foundations for the philosophy of liberalism. Locke attacked the notion that the structure of the family must reflect the patriarchal structure of society, where the king as the head of state was a model for the rule of the father over his household. He offered a more fluid theory of family, state, and the individual’s relationship to the state. Linked to his concept of autonomy were ideas of equality, and the right of the individual to pursue happiness. Locke declared that ‘all men by nature are born equal,’ and that ‘the necessity of pursuing true happiness is the foundation of all liberty.’
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Perhaps as importantly, Locke was an empiricist who argued that all human beings are at birth a blank slate on which circumstances, especially upbringing and education, inscribe the thing we call ‘human nature’. The blank-slate hypothesis located the causes of human behaviour not in the brain but primarily in the world outside. Eventually, the blank-slate hypothesis would replace that of Original Sin as the primal state of being for us all. For women the implications of this were profound. If, like a man, a woman was a blank slate at birth, then her ‘inferiority’ was not inherent to her nature or predetermined by it but was a product of her upbringing and education.
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