A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (20 page)

It called into question one of the foundation stones of misogyny. Genesis had decreed that the subjection of women to their husbands and their suffering in childbirth were punishments
for Eve’s part in the Fall of Man. In
Two Treatises of Government
Locke adopted a common-sense approach and declared: ‘. . . there is no more law to oblige a woman to such subjection, if the circumstances either of her condition or contract with her husband should exempt her from it, than there is that she should bring forth her children in sorrow and pain if there could be found a remedy for it, which is also part of the same curse upon her . . .’ Since Locke equated good with pleasure and evil with pain, it made no sense to endure suffering if it could be avoided. He was among the first to protest against the fashion of encasing women’s bodies in tight corsets.

It is not hard to imagine how much of a challenge this was to the prevailing order where subordination of women was part of the divine plan, and a model of the very structure of the cosmos. The idea that women could escape what is deemed their biological fate remains for some an affront to what they believe is God or Allah’s grand design and has been fiercely opposed over the centuries. The churches would cry out against the use of chloroform to ease the pangs of childbirth in the nineteenth century (see
Chapter 6
); conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants would campaign sometimes with violence against contraception and abortion in the twentieth.

The implications of liberalism were impossible to avoid almost as soon as the principles from which they derived were formulated. English women did not need to wait for Locke to formulate the new philosophy with all its ramifications. In 1642, for the first time since the late Roman Republic, women took to the streets in political protest. Some 400 assembled outside the English parliament to protest their financial hardships. During the English Civil War (1642–9) women belonging to one of the more radical sects chanted:

We shall not be wives
And tie up our lives
In villainous slavery
¹⁸⁵

Within two years of Locke’s death, Mary Astell (1668–1731), often described as the first English feminist writer and the author of
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
(1694–7) and
Some Reflections Upon Marriage
(1700), posed the inevitable question: ‘If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?’

The application of liberal notions about the rights of the individual had already led to improvements in women’s status in the colonies of North America. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law forbidding husbands to beat their wives. But the influence of liberalism went much further. It helped create a whole new notion of the family as a unit based on affection as well as on authority. Locke envisioned the family as a power-sharing unit ‘in which the mother too has her share with the father’.
¹⁸⁶
This in turn revolutionized the rules regarding the role of sex between husband and wife. It also undermined the parents’ control over their children’s choice of whom to marry. As Stone has pointed out: ‘How could paternal control over the choice of marriage partner be maintained, if the pair were now to be bound by ties of love and affection?’
¹⁸⁷

The idea that husbands and wives might have intercourse for ‘mutual comfort’ as well as for procreation signalled a loosening of control of the churches and other authorities over sexual behaviour. The traditional misogyny of Christianity had tolerated sex between men and women as, regrettably, the only means that was available to human beings to reproduce. (This, fundamentally, remains the attitude of the Catholic Church to this day.) From St Paul onwards, the basic attitude of Christianity towards sex was that it was a shameful act –
more shameful if enjoyed. However, as society became more secular, so did sex. This process did not by any means move inexorably forward. Periods of sexual liberation have always been countered by periods of conservative backlash. But the development of more liberal attitudes to sex was accelerated after the failure of the Puritan Revolution in England (1647–60) when there was a moral revolt against the religious zealots who during the rule of Oliver Cromwell had shut down theatres, banned cock-fighting and closed taverns. The Puritans may have won the Civil War, but in their war against pleasure they were decisively defeated.

Prising apart sex from the Divine Plan inevitably led to an increasing emphasis on its recreative rather than its procreative function. This was made easier by the invention of the condom, which first became available in London and Paris in the seventeenth century. Though initially used as a prophylactic against venereal infection, the condom was soon functioning as a contraceptive device. The condom represented the first major step towards the transformation of sexual activity into a pursuit that was mainly, not just occasionally, recreational.
¹⁸⁸
The ability of women to protect themselves, and avoid pregnancy, challenged the biological determinism that lies behind so much misogyny. The anxiety that this creates, today as in the seventeenth century, is often disguised in moralizing that such protection makes women even more vulnerable to men’s lusts. But it cannot hide the essential fear of women controlling their reproductive fate, thus achieving the autonomy that all misogynists dread.

As the possibility of one form of autonomy began glimmering into view, science laid to rest the fantasy of another – that of the autonomous male, that lies behind the Greek myth of creation and Aristotle’s ‘scientific’ exposition of the lesser, even dispensable role women play in reproduction (see Chapter
1). For millennia both reduced the role of women to that of a pouch to nurture the all-life-giving seed. However, with the invention of the microscope a miniature world was opened up that was as fascinating as anything that the telescope had revealed. In 1672, the ovaries were discovered. It was gradually realized that a woman’s role in conception was not that of the passive incubator, with the male seed carrying all the essentials of life, including the soul, as had been propounded since Aristotle. Her eggs were shown to be essential to the creation as well as the sustenance of life. Athena might one day spring from a petri dish, but never from her father Zeus’ head.

The rise of science, the advancement of reason, the birth of democratic ideas, and the development of a philosophy centred on the individual, did not however banish misogyny, no more than the intellectual triumphs of the Greeks did 2,000 years earlier. Misogyny, like all prejudices, is often most powerfully felt as a reaction to changes that threaten its underlying assumptions. It must be remembered that the most lethal form of misogyny in history, witch-hunting, reached its peak in the seventeenth century, even as Locke was elucidating the rights of the individual and protesting against tight corsets. Every age, as the poet T. S. Eliot remarked, is an age of transition.
¹⁸⁹
But the seventeenth century was one of the most turbulent in human history, riven by moral, intellectual, social and political conflicts that have left their mark on the subsequent centuries.

In literature misogyny never went out of fashion in Europe during the period that we identify as the birth of the modern world. The sixteenth century and early seventeenth produced a rich crop of misogynistic writing. It ranged from scurrilous pamphlets, most notoriously Joseph Swetman’s ‘The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Woman’, which went through ten editions between 1616 and 1634, to the
morbid and bitter denunciations in the work of the finest of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists. Misogyny did not want for exponents.

It was not the first time that alongside lyric poetry, devoted to praising women for their beauty, there should run the sewer of misogyny, often issuing from the pen of the same poet. The French poet Clement Marot composed a poem in praise of women’s breasts that created a literary fashion:

A little ball of ivory
In the middle of which sits
A strawberry or cherry
When one sees you, many men feel
The desire within their hands
To touch you and to hold you.

Later, he composed its opposite:

Breast that is nothing but skin,
Flaccid breast, flaglike breast
Like that of a funnel,
Breast with a big, ugly black lip
Breast that’s good for nursing
Lucifer’s children in Hell.
¹⁹⁰

Many of these attacks on women are part of a rhetorical convention, and consist mostly of hoary clichés that go back to the Greek and Roman misogynistic tradition. In English, it persisted through the eighteenth century as a major literary tradition. In
Epicoene: or, The Silent Woman
by Ben Jonson (1573?–1637), a husband, Captain Otter, describes his wife in a manner that would have been understood – excepting the contemporary references – by the Roman poet Juvenal:

O most vile face! And yet she spends me forty pound a year in mercury and hogs-bones. All her teeth were made in Black-friars, both her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair in Silverstreet. Every part of the town owns a piece of her . . . She takes herself asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes; and about the next day noon, is put together again, like a great German clock.
¹⁹¹

Misogynists deploy anti-make-up propaganda in every age, with more or less the same tedious lament. But a more psychologically disturbing anxiety arises that focuses on the independence of women.
Epicoene
features a coterie of independent women known as the Collegiates, who spend their time discussing poetry, politics and philosophy. Their independence is underscored by the fact that they can afford to ride around London in their own coaches. Their masculine traits stand in contrast to the male characters, who like Captain Otter are effeminized through their failure to control their wives. Gender roles are switched, as the independent women become masculine and the weak men become effeminate. The Collegiates are accused of pursuing sex for pure pleasure, like men, and of sleeping with each other. The result is moral and social chaos and disorder.

Such women were the target of scathing satire by Jonson and his contemporaries. Of one woman called Morilla, who like the Collegiate women, dared to ride around in her own coach – one supposes it was the Elizabethan equivalent of a woman roaring around on a motorbike – the satirist William Goddard wrote:

Speak: could you judge her less than be some man?
If less then this I’m sure you’d judge at least,
She was part man, part woman; part a beast.
¹⁹²

In
The Taming of the Shrew,
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), then an up-and-coming young playwright, dealt with the prevailing anxiety over women’s domestic rebellion. The play is a perennially popular comedy, which is both raucous and erotic. It deals with the issue of sex and power, and its ending, while ostensibly representing an outright male triumph, is framed somewhat ambiguously.

No man will marry the heroine Katherine Minola of Padua, because she is in a state of permanent insurrection about the prospect of being subservient to a husband. Petruchio, desperately needing to get married for economic reasons, proves her match. Katherine’s concession speech in Act 5, Scene 2, is a plea to women to surrender and abandon their struggle with men for dominance:

Fie, fie, unknit that threat’ning, unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds . . .
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land . . .
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe . . .
¹⁹³

To the male audience, it may be gratifying to see a woman hoist the white flag so conspicuously.
The Taming of the Shrew
seems to celebrate a return to the status quo, with woman as subject and man master.

However, in the play appearance and reality are confused. It is often forgotten that this is a play within a play.
The Taming of the Shrew
is an entertainment that two noblemen stage to
dupe a hen-pecked and drunken beggar named Sly into believing that he is a lord. When it ends, they dump him on the street and he falls into an alcoholic stupor. Sly is reawakened from his dream of lordship to face the prospect of confronting a wife angry because he has been gone all night drinking. He declares: ‘I know now how to tame a shrew,’ then quickly adds, ‘I dreamt upon it all this night till now.’ The taming of the shrew is a drunken man’s dream, a mere appearance of reality, which evaporates when Sly wakes. Shakespeare leaves his audience with an uncomfortable ambiguity. Is the crushing and domestication of the rebellious woman appearance or reality?

There is much in the work of William Shakespeare that is uncomfortable and ambiguous when he deals with women and their relationship to men. But to generalize about any aspect of Shakespeare is no easy matter, since he explored a bewildering range of emotions with extraordinary complexity and depth. In doing so, he produced the greatest body of dramatic literature since the Athenian dramatists of the fifth century, and filled it with poetry that ranks with that of Homer, Virgil and Dante. So it is not surprising that misogyny is among the feelings with which he deals. In two of his greatest tragedies, it is expressed with a poetic intensity that is perhaps unrivalled, raising the question as to whether or not the world’s greatest poet carried a deep-seated contempt for women.