A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (25 page)

These prostitutes are the only females in India who may learn to sing, to read and to dance. Such accomplishments belong to them exclusively, and are, for that reason, held by the rest of the sex in such abhorrence, that every virtuous woman would consider the mention of them an affront.
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The great temple of Rajarajeshvara in Tanjore is said to have housed some 400 sacred prostitutes.
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The association between prostitution and education remained a bar to making progress for women in that field until the late nineteenth century. In spite of laws imposed by the British against soliciting and using premises for the purposes of prostitution, the custom persisted through to independence, when local authorities attempted crackdowns.
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The Mahabharata
makes clear that traditionally Hinduism was especially fierce in its taboos against menstruating women. In some cases, a woman was whipped if she even touched a man while she was having her period. A Brahmin could not eat food that had been looked at by a menstruating woman.
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From the medieval period onwards, there was a growth in the preference for child-brides, which meant an increase in the fatalities these young wives suffered giving birth. As for the fate of widows, it was not an enviable one. Usually, they were not allowed to remarry (though
The Mahabharata
describes exceptions), and they were expected to live a life of frugality in perpetual mourning, sleeping on the ground and eating one meal a day. As one historian put it, ‘the widow was the spectre at the feast.’
²⁴⁵
The Mahabharata
recounts tales of heroic women leaping into their dead husbands’ funeral pyres, choosing to die rather than face life without them, in a custom known as suttee or sati, which means ‘the virtuous woman’. However, widows who were not so eager were sometimes forced to burn. In one case, in 1780, the sixty-four wives of the
Raja of Marwar were consumed on his funeral pyre along with his corpse.

Underlying such contempt would appear to dwell the dualism, so well known in the Western and Moslem civilizations, of woman as nature and man as spirit or soul.

. . . let man know that women are the continuers of the web of the Samsara [the world of the senses]. They are the ploughed field of nature, of matter . . . men manifest themselves as the soul; therefore let the man before all things leave them behind him, one and all.
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But while this may seem familiar, resembling a Platonic divide between form or idea and the mutable world of the senses, it does not imply a contempt for women because they are the representatives of matter. The corporality and sensuality of Buddhism is fully realized in men and women, and is allowed to transfigure them both into a higher state of being. The body is not rejected but through eroticism it is seen as one of the paths to enlightenment.

The paradox of India perplexed Europeans, particularly the English, who had the longest and most intimate engagement with its culture. They were appalled at the blatant celebration of women’s sensuality, and at the same time, shocked at the more extreme examples of the contempt and disdain in which women were held at a social level. By the nineteenth century, female infanticide had been outlawed, and steps were taken to try and stop the custom of sati, even when the widow was willing to enter the flames to follow her husband into death. In the twelfth century, after the Moslem invasion of India, the practice had also been outlawed as against the laws of Islam – to no avail. Under the British, the law did not completely succeed and the custom did not die out. The last reported
incident of sati occurred in August 2002, when a sixty-five-year-old widow burned to death in the province of Madhya Pradesh. Nor did the Widow Remarriage Act passed in 1856 uproot the deeply held tradition forbidding remarriage. Education for women did not make much progress either under British rule: as of 1939, only 2 per cent of Indian women were attending school.
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The traditional Indian view of women, with all its seeming contradictions, stood in complete contrast to how women were being viewed in Victorian England and in the United States. Whereas in India there was a celebration of female sexuality, coexisting alongside women’s social denigration, in the West the steady improvement in women’s social and political status was accompanied by the increasing denial of their sexuality. This reached a point in mid-Victorian times when medical experts could confidently declare that women had no sexual desires at all. No doubt this would have seemed preposterous to a Hindu, just as a Victorian gentleman would have deemed the idea of copulating one’s way to salvation as the very height of impropriety.

In Europe and North America, the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the eighteenth century had completely transformed political and social relations. Yet, neither the new republic of the United States nor the National Assembly set up by the revolution in France extended the rights of man to women, who were still denied the suffrage that in the following century was increasingly extended to males regardless of their economic status. But woman could not be forever regarded as the eternal exception to the granting of political and social rights. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), whose
Common Sense
pamphlet did so much to galvanize the struggle of the colonists against Britain, had pleaded for women’s rights. In 1775, the year before he wrote
Common Sense,
he lamented:

Even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy [women are] constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods; robbed of freedom and will by the laws; slaves of opinion which rules over them with absolute sway and construes the slightest appearances into guilt; surrounded on all sides by judges who are at once tyrants and their seducers . . . for even with the changes in attitudes and laws, deeply en-grained and oppressing social prejudices remain which confront women minute by minute, day by day.
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In Paris, in 1792, in the National Assembly, of which Paine was a member, he argued for a woman’s right to vote, without success. That same year, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) published
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
a book that some have hailed as ‘the feminist declaration of independence’ and ‘the first sustained argument for female emancipation based on a cogent ethical system’.
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When
A Vindication
was published, its author was described as a ‘hyena in petticoats’ and her support of the French Revolution – Wollstonecraft moved to Paris temporarily in 1792 – was looked on in England with either great suspicion or outright hostility. She was called one of ‘the impious amazons of Republican France’
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Her basic argument was simple: the rights of man imply the rights of woman. Other women in England, such as Mary Astell had, a hundred years earlier, argued for women’s emancipation inspired by Enlightenment philosophical thought (see
Chapter 5
). But the French Revolution took abstract principles of freedom and tried to give them concrete political expression, inspiring many in Wollstonecraft’s generation with the hope that their notions of equality and universal brotherhood might now in fact be realized.

Wollstonecraft was one of six children, the daughter of a sometimes tyrannical father who was a farmer, and a mother
whom she described as ‘vague and weak’, who doted exceedingly on her oldest son. After working unhappily as a governess, she published a treatise
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
(1787), and then a novel,
Mary, A Fiction
(1788), moved to London to pursue a career as a writer, and mixed in radical circles where she met Thomas Paine, the poet William Blake, the political philosopher William Godwin and the chemist Joseph Priestly. Her experience as a governess had made her fiercely hostile to the life-style of upper-class women, who spent their days preening themselves, and in what she regarded as other utterly frivolous pursuits. She took the opposite course and became, in fact, the archetypal bohemian feminist, not caring for her appearance, wearing her hair unkempt and dressing in black worsted stockings, which disgusted one of her friends who called her a ‘philosophical sloven’.
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Wollstonecraft’s hostility to women who spent what she believed was too much time before the mirror is a major theme of
A Vindication.
It set the tone for a lot of later feminist writing. Indeed, her contempt for what she saw as female frivolousness, especially women’s devotion to beautification, is as thoroughgoing as anything ever written by a male misogynist. ‘Pleasure,’ she writes, ‘is the business of women’s life, according to the present modification of society; and while it continues to be, little can be expected from such weak beings.’ She paraphrases Hamlet’s diatribe again women, with approval. Her complaints about women echo those found in the works of traditional misogynists and she is so vitriolic that a recent authority upon her work has had to defend her from being misconstrued ‘as unsympathetic to women’.
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Wollstonecraft, in fact, accepts the dualistic notion that devotion to the body is a sign of mental and moral inferiority. She asserts that as long as women are guilty of this, they will be perceived
as inferior – and, according to Wollstonecraft, deservedly so. She warns ‘if then, women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty – they will prove that they have less mind than man.’
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The old mind/body dualism had taken on a new philosophical force thanks to the work of Rene Descartes (1596–1650), in which the very the proof of existence was contingent upon thinking, as he stated cogently in his renowned maxim: ‘I think therefore I am.’ Wollstonecraft took this to mean that body is non-rational and therefore inferior to mind – a dichotomy familiar since Plato and a favourite among misogynists who identify women as body. It followed that women who fuss too much over their make-up and dress must be inferior to those who spend their hours reading philosophical works.

Throughout
A Vindication
she stresses the importance of reason. It is reason that makes us human and establishes ‘man’s pre-eminence over brute creation’. Therefore, she argues, if women are to rise above their lowly status, it is vital that they receive an education that will train them to be rational beings rather than the mere playthings of men and slaves of fashion. Reason will redeem them from their vanities and their sins. A woman of reason will abhor vice, folly and even obscene witticisms. She will be chaste, and modest, avoiding even familiarities with other women, which Wollstonecraft describes as ‘gross’. In her priggishness, the woman of reason is beginning to resemble the woman of purity, who would become the female stereotype of the Victorian epoch, except that she will be better educated.

Was then, ‘the first major feminist’ also a misogynist? While her criticisms of women echo those of traditional misogynists, Wollstonecraft’s rationale is different. In the conclusion to
A Vindication,
she asserts: ‘There are many follies in some degree peculiar to women – sins against reason of commission as well as of omission – but all flowing from ignorance or prejudice.’ These follies ‘men have endeavoured, impelled by various
motives, to perpetuate . . .’ But unlike misogynists, Wollstonecraft believes such female follies are not based on the inherent nature of women but on their education, or lack of it. Following Locke, she believes that we are almost entirely the product of the social forces that shape us. Remove the forces that inculcate ignorance and prejudice, and you will make women ‘rational creatures and free citizens’. Or as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.’
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The same applies to women.

In the end, most of the ideals Wollstonecraft believed in failed her, or she failed them. The bloody turn taken by the French Revolution horrified her. She fell madly in love with an American, Gilbert Imlay, exactly the kind of man she warned women against. The passions she despised in
A Vindication
as proof of women’s weakness consumed her, driving her to attempt suicide when her lover abandoned her and their infant daughter. Later, she married her old friend William Godwin, with whom she had a happy and productive relationship. But tragically, and ironically, she died in agony from septicaemia, giving birth to a second daughter, also named Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851). A clergyman callously commented that her death was a useful lesson to women because it ‘strongly marked the distinction of the sexes by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are peculiarly liable’.
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Her daughter would later marry the poet and radical Percy Bysshe Shelley and write
Frankenstein.
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She lived to see the first women’s rights convention in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, which launched the campaign for women’s suffrage and for many of the reforms proposed by her mother over fifty years earlier. Within a century of Mary Shelley’s death, women had gained entry into medical schools and universities in the United States and to Cambridge University in England.

However, that Mary Wollstonecraft should figure in a history of misogyny at all says something about the paradoxical nature of her legacy. While forcefully proclaiming the need for women’s emancipation, she argued that it was incompatible with those things, such as passion and beauty, with which women were traditionally associated. In doing so, she perpetuated the old mind/body dualism that in many ways has been so detrimental to women. Unfortunately, this aspect of her thinking was taken up by later generations of feminists in Britain and the United States, who believed that advocating women’s political and social rights meant disdaining or denying altogether the more erotic aspects of women’s nature, which they claimed, were male inventions, aimed at manipulating women for their own pleasure. The bra burners of the early 1970s are in this way her direct descendants. Unfortunately, it was a position that alienated a lot of women from the women’s movement.