A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (26 page)

In the eighteenth century, there was a change in the intellectual and political outlook of Western Europe and North America; in the nineteenth, the physical environment of these areas was transformed. The impact on women’s lives would be unlike anything experienced before. The conquests of science, especially in biology and chemistry, and the industrial revolution represented considerable intellectual and technical progress. But as the story of misogyny makes plain, progress in other areas of human endeavour does not necessarily mean progress for women.

The industrial revolution sucked the population from rural areas into the expanding cities to feed the factories with cheap labour, destroying the old cottage industries which had employed women’s skills in spinning, weaving, brewing, baking, butter-making and other traditional crafts, allowing them to clothe and feed their families. In the overcrowded slums, a new
class was created – the working class. It was underpaid and usually underfed. By 1861, in England and Wales – the boiler room of the industrial revolution – almost 3,000,000 women over the age of fifteen, representing 26 per cent of the female population, were working. Of them, only 279 had clerical jobs. The vast majority of the rest were employed in factories or as maids.
²⁵⁷
Like the men, women had become wage-slaves, their subordinate position emphasized by the fact that on average they were paid around half of what men earned for performing the same work. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a male spinner in England earned between 14 and 22 shillings a week, a female around 5; in the United States, a male worker in the cotton industry was paid $1.67 per week, a female employee $1.05. A French male printer’s wage was two francs a day, a female’s one franc.
²⁵⁸

Added to the misery of the working conditions was the fact that women workers had to continue to carry the burden of their biological role, enduring multiple pregnancies in horrendous conditions. Working-class women were, in the words of the Irish revolutionary socialist, James Connolly, ‘the slaves of the slaves’. Though advances were being made in the manufacture of condoms, the vast majority of working-class women did not have access to them. Contraception was still left in the hands of men, which often meant that even when it was available it was not used.

Rarely, in history, have men and women suffered the kind of degradation that was found in the vast slums of nineteenth-century England’s cities and industrial towns. The poor were seen as a separate race, and venturing into their districts was akin to exploring ‘darkest Africa’. The novelist Charles Dickens (1812–70) penetrated one slum in 1851 that lay within a few hundred yards of the British Museum and found: ‘Ten, twenty, thirty, who can count them! Men, women, children,
for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese!’
²⁵⁹
Twenty years later, a French visitor to the London poor reported:

Three times in ten minutes I saw crowds collect around doorways, attracted by fights, especially between women. One of them, her face covered with blood, tears in her eyes, drunk, was trying to fly at a man while the mob watched and laughed. And as if the uproar were a signal, the population of neighbouring ‘lanes’ came pouring into the street, children in rags, paupers, street women, as if a human sewer were suddenly clearing itself.
²⁶⁰

Perhaps poverty does not create misogyny, but experience suggests that it tends to reinforce it. As ‘the slaves of the slaves’, women bore the brunt of men’s anger and frustration when they lashed out because they lost their jobs, or failed to provide for their large families, or suffered some other daily humiliation. Those middle-class observers such as Henry Mayhew, the author of the celebrated
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851–62) who ventured into the slums to see for themselves reported that wife beating and rape were so common as to go unnoticed. These conditions prevailed into the twentieth century. In 1902, the American writer Jack London (1876–1916) penetrated the East End of London, then a vast slum of some 1,000,000 souls, disguised as a working man and reported:

Wife-beating is the masculine prerogative of matrimony. They wear remarkable boots of brass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their children with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to trample her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake . . . The men are economically dependent on their masters, and the women are
economically dependent on the men. The result is the women get the beating the man should give the master, and she can do nothing.
²⁶¹

Unless murder was involved, such crimes rarely came to the attention of the authorities. In the overcrowded conditions people slept promiscuously, sometimes four or five or six to a bed, sometimes more, usually regardless of sex or age or relationship.

The women of the slums frequently turned to prostitution to make ends meet. In 1841, there were an estimated 50,000 prostitutes in London, out of a population of 2 million. Most were horribly disfigured by venereal disease. One survey in 1866 found that over 76 per cent of those examined were infected, and all suffered from some debilitating disease, most often small pox.
²⁶²
The more fortunate women were those who found a place in a brothel, where they could at least expect to be fed and clothed. One madam of a London brothel, known as Mother Willit, boasted that she always ‘turned her gals out with a clean arse and a good tog [clothes]; and as she turned ’em out, she didn’t care who turned ’em up, ’cause ’em vos as clean as a smelt and as fresh as a daisy.’ The law treated such women with the utmost contempt. A visitor to Newgate Prison reported in horror: ‘Nearly three hundred women, every gradation of crime, 120 in ward, no matting, nearly naked, all drunk . . . her ears were offended by the most terrible imprecations.’
²⁶³

Middle-class missionaries strove hard to rescue the ‘fallen women’. It is estimated that by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the Religious Tract Society had already issued 500,000,000 pamphlets trying to win over prostitutes and convince them to abandon their ways. In the decades that followed, the flood of such tracts increased, but without
noticeable effect.
²⁶⁴
Poverty motivated most of the women, and the profound moral dichotomy of Victorianism in relation to sex provided them with a steady clientele of men for whom ‘respectable women’ – that is, the women who became their wives – were effectively neutered. Sex was for ‘fallen women’ or the women of the promiscuous poor, who were regarded as somewhat less than human. Sexual desire was an unfortunate urge that mainly afflicted men – one that occasionally their wives were obliged to relieve. This was the age when middle-class wives lay on their backs and thought of England – or the United States, depending on where they were. The misogynistic vision took on its usual dual, and contradictory, aspect, denigrating the women of the slums as less than human because of their sexual promiscuity, while at the same time elevating the middle-class woman to the more-than-human status of ‘Angel in the House’, thanks to her innate asexuality. According to one of the most prominent medical experts of his day, Dr William Acton, the good wife ‘submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him, and were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved of his attentions’. This is because, according to Acton, ‘the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.’ Taking pleasure in sex led to cancer of the womb or insanity, he warned.
²⁶⁵

While the majority of medical authorities recognized that women experienced some sexual pleasure during intercourse, they regarded any sign of excitement or loss of control as a worrying indication of moral degeneracy or mental imbalance, which could lead to madness and disease. Both in Britain and the United States at this time, sexual behaviour was coming under ‘scientific’ study, and being categorized into acceptable and unacceptable types. Science provided an objective way of looking at the world, including the human body and human
behaviour. But behind the new, supposedly scientific categories of ‘diseases’ there often lurked a familiar morality. Preferring to make love with a member of your own sex became a disease called homosexuality. In the area of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, the notion of ‘disease’ often carried with it strong moral disapproval. For instance, women who enjoyed sex too much were liable to be categorized as nymphomaniacs and listed as ‘dangerous, unnatural and sexually out of control’.
²⁶⁶
In both Classical Greece and Ancient Rome, women were traditionally believed to have stronger sexual desires than men, and their carnality had to be watched as it could easily get out of control. Witness the fate of Messalina, the emperor Claudius’ young wife whose lust for sex led her to pose as a prostitute in a brothel, according to the ancient (and hostile) sources (see
Chapter 2
). But from the late eighteenth century onwards ‘excessive’ sexual desire in women began to be considered primarily as a physical not a moral disorder. By Victorian times, it had reached the status of full-blown disease, with various and frequently contradictory symptoms.

A sure indication of trouble ahead for a girl was masturbation, a Victorian obsession that persisted in the United States well into the 1950s. Masturbation among males was bad enough, but female masturbation shook the very foundations of society if left unchecked. After all, by concentrating on her clitoris, a woman was ignoring her vagina and in effect rebelling against her biological and predetermined role as the bearer of children. It was seen as a disturbing sign of ‘masculine’ tendencies, which among other baleful consequences, could lead to lesbianism, nymphomania, and a host of horrific diseases, including uterine haemorrhage, falling of the womb, spinal irritation, convulsions, haggard features, emaciation, and functional disorders of the heart. In 1894,
the
New Orleans Medical Journal
concluded that ‘neither the plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils have resulted more disastrously for humanity, than the habit of masturbation: it is the destroying element of civilization.’
²⁶⁷
Clearly, drastic action was often prescribed, and the sooner the better.

As an example of what might be done, the
New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal
also reported the case of a nine-year-old girl suspected of masturbating by her mother. A gynaecologist, A. J. Block, examined her. He touched her vagina and labia minor, but the child did not respond. He reports: ‘As soon as I reached the clitoris the legs were thrown widely open, the face became pale, the breathing short and rapid, the body twitched from excitement, slight groans came from the patient.’ The prescription: a clitoridectomy.
²⁶⁸

In 1867, the
British Medical Journal
described how a Victorian gynaecologist Mr Isaac Baker Brown performed the operation.

Two instruments were used: the pair of hooked forceps which Mr Brown always uses in clitoridectomy, and a cautery iron as he uses in dividing the pedicle in ovariotomy . . . The clitoris was seized by the forceps in the usual manner. The thin edge of the red-hot iron was then passed around its base until the organ was removed, the nymphae on each side were severed in a similar way by a sawing motion of the hot iron. After the clitoris and nymphae were got rid of, the operation was brought to a close by taking the back of the iron and sawing the surfaces of the labia and other parts of the vulva which had escaped the cautery, and the instrument was rubbed down backwards and forwards till the parts were more effectually destroyed than when Mr Brown uses the scissors to effect the same result.

Brown was an enthusiast of clitoridectomy, which he claimed he had used to cure masturbation-induced ‘women’s diseases’ such as melancholia, hysteria, and nymphomania. In December 1866, he received a glowing endorsement from
The Times
for his work.
²⁶⁹
The Times’
report sparked a controversy in the medical world. Many in the medical profession were merely upset that so distasteful a topic had been aired in the press in the first place. Other medical colleagues accused Brown, a fellow of the Royal College, of being a quack. But the Church sprang to his defence. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, and the Archbishop of York praised his work.

Though clitoridectomy was eventually frowned upon in the West, female masturbation did not lose its power to frighten the medical profession. Dr Block, who mutilated the nine-year-old girl, called it a ‘moral leprosy’. Fortunately, he was among the last American doctors to carry out such operations.
²⁷⁰
However, to this day the genital mutilation of girls and women remains common, even routine, in certain mainly Moslem parts of Africa and is also practised in the Arabian Peninsula and in areas of Asia (see
Chapter 8
).

It is not surprising that a culture that at one level worshipped woman as a neutered ‘angel’ should actually denature her, nor that it developed a cult of the little girl. Nothing could be less sexually threatening to a Victorian gentleman than a pretty female child frolicking among the meadow flowers, the picture of innocence. Among the period’s most successful painters was Kate Greenaway, described as a ‘gentle, bespectacled, middle-aged lady garbed in black’,
²⁷¹
who devoted her life to painting cloyingly sweet watercolours of coy little girls sniffing flowers or staring longingly out of nursery windows. Misogyny has rarely manifested itself in such a sinister form, representing as it does the complete inability of men to relate to
adult women. Inevitably, such a profound sexual disjunction found another outlet: the obverse to the worship of female innocence has always been the degradation and humiliation of women. The number of child brothels in London indicated that Victorian gentlemen were not content to swoon over sentimental portrayals of little girls. A reporter for the French newspaper
Le Figaro
on a single evening counted 500 girls aged between five and fifteen parading as prostitutes between Piccadilly Circus and Waterloo Place in the city’s fashionable West End district. One madam advertised her brothel as a place where ‘you can gloat over the cries of the girls with the certainty that no one will hear them besides yourself.’
²⁷²