A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (3 page)

The story of how this dual process of dehumanization – upwards and downwards – might have occurred takes us far beyond the cult of the Virgin Mary. In effect, it is the story of the oldest prejudice. It has survived in one form or another over immense periods of time, emerging seemingly unchanged from the cataclysms that have engulfed empires and cultures, and swept away their other modes of thought and feeling. It persists after philosophical and scientific revolutions have seemingly transformed permanently how we look at the world. When social and political upheavals have refashioned relationships between citizens and the state, and democracies vanquished oligarchies and driven absolute monarchs from power, it comes back to haunt our ideals of equality, with the persistence of a ghost that cannot be exorcised. It is as up to date as the latest porn website and as old as civilization itself.

For we are the inheritors of an ancient tradition, going back to the origins of the great civilizations of the past which have so profoundly shaped our consciousness, and fashioned the dualism that lies behind our efforts to dehumanize half the
human race. ‘The duality of the world is beyond comprehension,’ wrote Otto Weininger, the twentieth-century Austrian thinker, and perhaps the last Western philosopher ever to attempt to justify misogyny on philosophical grounds, ‘it is the plot of man’s fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding of eternal life in a perishable being, of the innocent in the guilty.’

Understanding the history of this ‘riddle’ may help us unravel it. But to trace its roots, it is necessary to look at what may have preceded it. If for centuries women have been an object of contempt, was there a women’s history
BC
– ‘before contempt’, before misogyny? That is the question.

It is the question at any rate that has exercised the thoughts of many, mostly feminist historians and scholars who have sought to go beyond the conventional history of women, which consists largely of the history of their relationship to men. Indeed, in scholarly terms, until very recently, women have been seen in relation to precious little else.

History has been (and to a large extent remains) ‘his story’ – the story of men’s impact upon the world around them in all its complex aspects, religious, political, militaristic, social, philosophical, economic, artistic and scientific. Many besides feminists have characterized history as, in effect, the product of a patriarchal society in which women’s roles and contributions have been discounted or ignored. Throughout that history, misogyny has manifested itself in different ways at different times. Indeed, for some, what we call history is merely the tale that patriarchy wants to tell, and misogyny is its ideology, a system of beliefs and ideas the aim of which is to explain the domination of men over women.

Many feminists, frustrated with this historical form of confinement, have turned to prehistory for relief, and constructed a remoter past in which matriarchy prevailed and the higher status it accorded to women presumably protected
them from the kind of contempt that would later blight their lives and distort how they are viewed.

In one version or another, beginning in the nineteenth century, the matriarchal model has exercised at times an intense appeal to a remarkably wide range of individuals, from Friedrich Engels and Sigmund Freud to members of the spiritualist feminist movement of the late twentieth century. It has been espoused by such serious scholars as the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and popularized in such best-selling books as
Who Cooked The Last Supper: The Women’s History of the World
by Rosalind Miles. The latter states:

For in the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman. And what a woman! . . . The power and centrality of the first woman-God is one of the best-kept secrets of history.

Miles gives a chronology of the worship of the Great Goddess (which is equated with the prevalence of matriarchal societies) and claims that ‘the sacred status of womanhood lasted for at least 25,000 years – some commentators would push it back further still, to 40,000 years or even 50,000. In fact, there never was a time at this stage of human history when woman was not special and magical.’

The problem is finding evidence for the existence of matriarchy. And even if there were proof that it existed, this would not in itself change the fact that women’s relationship to men defines their role in history: matriarchal history merely replaces a role that is subordinate with one that is dominant. For much of the time matriarchy is supposed to have prevailed, written records do not exist. Artefacts such as the so-called Venusian figurines of Palaeolithic origin, and found from southern France to Siberia, are frequently cited as proof of
the widespread worship of the Great Goddess. However, they are notoriously difficult to interpret. To some exponents of the matriarchal interpretation, they are proof of the awe and veneration accorded women at the time; but others have interpreted the figurines as grotesque, inspiring not awe and veneration but horror. However, even if it could be proved that the figurines represent a Great Goddess cult, history demonstrates that there is no necessary link between goddess worship and a high social status for women – the cult of the Virgin Mary, for instance, was in the ascendant during the witch burnings of the Middle Ages.

In Europe, it is much later than the Palaeolithic and only when we come to the Celts that we find a pre-Classical culture offering some textual basis for claims that, before the Greeks and Romans stamped their hegemony on history, a form of matriarchy prevailed. The evidence comes both in the form of the Celtic myths and sagas, and in the writings of the Greeks and Romans of the time about what seemed to them the shocking freedoms the Celts accorded their women.

The temptation to believe in an Arcadia, a lost golden age when the relations between men and women were without conflict, is very strong, but must be resisted. The most we can hope for, in Celtic society at any rate, is evidence of a more balanced relationship between the sexes.
Misogyny
will show that this balance was lost with the rise of Greece and Rome, and will examine the dualism, identified by Weininger, that those civilizations created. In this dualism, men were the thesis, and women the antithesis.

It is in the nature of dualism (unlike the dialectic) that there be no synthesis – the sexes are doomed to perpetual conflict. Women were faced with a battery of philosophical, scientific and legal arguments aimed at proving and codifying their ‘inherent inferiority’ to men. Later, Christianity added a
theological one, with such profound impact that its ramifications are with us today.

The rise of liberal democracy in the post-Enlightenment era saw the beginning of the long struggle for political and legal equality for women. But misogyny has never let progress get in its way. When political and legal equality in the West was followed by the sexual revolution, this produced a backlash from both fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics. In many Third World nations the drive for women’s rights threatened deeply held religious ideas and social customs. This culminated in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan – a state with the suppression of women as a primary aim. It legislated women out of public life, denying them basic rights – comparable to the way the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws turned German Jews into non-persons. Rarely, if ever, has the aim of misogyny, to dehumanize half the human race, been made more explicit.

The hatred of women affects us in ways that no other hatred does because it strikes at our innermost selves. It is located where the private and public worlds intersect. The history of that hatred may dwell on its public consequences, but at the same time it allows us to speculate on why, at the personal level, man’s complex relationship to woman has permitted misogyny to thrive. Ultimately, such speculation should allow us to see how equality between the sexes will eventually be able to banish misogyny and put an end to the world’s oldest prejudice.

It is hard to be precise about the origins of a prejudice. But if misogyny has a birthday, it falls sometime in the eighth century BC. If it has a cradle, it lies somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

At around that time in both Greece and Judaea, creation stories that were to acquire the power of myth arose, describing the Fall of Man, and how woman’s weakness is responsible for all subsequent human suffering, misery and death. Both myths have since flowed into the mainstream of Western civilization, carried along by two of its most powerful tributaries: In the Jewish tradition, as recounted in Genesis (which a majority of Americans still accept as true)
¹
the culprit is Eve; and in the Greek, Pandora.

The Greeks are the first colonists of our intellectual world. Their vision of a universe governed by natural laws that the human intellect can uncover and comprehend is the basis on
which our science and philosophy rest. They created the first democracy. But in the history of misogyny, the Greeks also occupy a unique place as the intellectual pioneers of a pernicious view of women that has persisted down to modern times, confounding any notion we might still have that the rise of reason and science means the decline of prejudice and hatred.

The myth of Pandora was first written down in the eighth century
BC
by Hesiod, a farmer turned poet, in two poems: ‘Theogony’ and ‘Works and Days’. In spite of Hesiod’s considerable experience as a farmer, his account of mankind’s creation ignores some of the basic facts of life. The race of men exists before the arrival of woman, in blissful autonomy, as companions to the gods, ‘apart from sorrow and from painful work/ Free from disease . . .’
²
As in the Biblical account of the creation of man, woman is an afterthought. But in the Greek version, she is also a most malicious one. Zeus, the father of the gods, seeks to punish men by keeping from them the secret of fire, so that, like the beasts, they must eat their meat raw. Prometheus, a demi-god and the creator of the first men, steals fire from heaven and brings it to earth. Furious at being deceived, Zeus devises the supreme trick in the form of a ‘gift’ to men, ‘an evil thing for their delight’, Pandora, the ‘all giver’. The Greek phrase used to describe her, ‘
kalon kakon’
, means ‘the beautiful evil’. Her beauty compares to that of the goddesses:

From her comes all the race of womankind
The deadly female race and tribe of wives
Who live with mortal men and bring them harm.
³

The gods give her ‘sly manners, and the morals of a bitch’. Pandora is presented to Epimetheus, Prometheus’ younger brother. He is enchanted by ‘this hopeless trap, deadly to men’ and marries her. Pandora brings with her a large sealed
jar, which she has been told never to open. The jar is an earthenware vessel, womb-like in shape and primarily used to store wine and olive oil. In earlier times, it was also used as a coffin.
⁴
Pandora cannot resist seeing what is inside:

But now the woman opened up the cask,
And scattered pains and evils among men.
⁵

Since then, according to Greek mythology, mankind has been doomed to labour, grow old, get sick, and die in suffering.

One of the functions of mythology is to answer the sort of questions we asked as children, such as ‘Why do the stars shine?’ and ‘Why did grandad die?’ Myths also justify the existing order of things – both natural and social – and account for traditional beliefs, rituals, and roles. One of the beliefs most central to the Greek, and later the Judaeo-Christian, traditions was that man was fashioned by the gods, or God, separately from the creation of animals. (The persistence of this belief among conservative Christians is why Darwin’s theory of evolution continues to meet with such resistance.) The possession of fire was proof that man was different from the animals, and also further up the hierarchy of species. But fire’s acquisition brought man too close to the gods for their comfort. Woman, it was said, is his punishment for this hubris, a reminder that man, regardless of his origins and aspirations, comes into the world as does a lowly beast. Today, some have turned this attitude of contempt on its head, celebrating woman because of what they see as her closer links to nature. But to the Greeks, nature was a threat and a challenge to man’s higher self, and woman was nature’s most powerful (because most alluring) embodiment. It was necessary to dehumanize her, even though she made it possible for the human race to continue. Contempt was her due for exciting the lust that leads
us into the cycle of birth and death, from which we can never break free.

As well as burdening Pandora with responsibility for the mortal lot of man, the Greeks created a vision of woman as ‘the Other’, the antithesis to the male thesis, who needed boundaries to contain her. Most crucially, Greece laid the philosophical-scientific foundations for a dualistic view of reality in which women were forever doomed to embody this mutable, and essentially contemptible world. Any history of the attempt to dehumanize half the human race is confronted by this paradox, that some of the values we cherish most were forged in a society that devalued, denigrated and despised women. ‘Sex roles that will be familiar to the modern reader were firmly established in the Dark Ages in Athens,’ wrote the historian Sarah Pomeroy.
⁶
That is, along with Plato and the Parthenon, Greece gave us some of the cheapest sexual dichotomies of all, including that of ‘good girl versus bad girl’.