A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (31 page)

Hitler saw the problem of women’s position in modern society as a direct result of the ‘stupid’ notion of the equality of the sexes. Modern women were held to be responsible for ‘the twilight of the family’. They were guilty of ‘treason against nature’ for not having children. ‘But German men want German women again,’ declared a National Socialist pamphlet. ‘Not a frivolous plaything who is superficial and only out for pleasure, who decks herself with tawdry finery and is like a glittering exterior that is hollow and drab within. Our opponents sought to bend women to their dark purposes by painting frivolous life in the most glowing colours and portraying the true profession allotted to women by nature as slavery.’
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The true German woman rejected lipstick, high heels, and nail varnish in favour of becoming a sort of primordial milkmaid, according to the ideal of party experts. They held that women will only be happy again when the natural differences between men and women are reinstated. Alfred Rosenberg, the party ‘philosopher’, claimed that women think ‘lyrically’ not ‘systematically’ as men do. One Nazi slogan declared, ‘Women must be emancipated from women’s emancipation.’

Hitler promised to ‘do away with the idea that what he does with his own body is each individual’s own business’.
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It was the state’s business, and the state knew what it wanted to do with German women’s bodies. Hitler declared:

If in the past the liberal-intellectual women’s movements contained in their programs many, many points arising out of the so-called ‘mind’, then the program of our National Socialist women’s movement really only contains one single point and that point is: the child.
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His words echo Nietzsche’s proclamation that the answer to the riddle of woman is pregnancy. Hitler reflects the mother-fixation of those mystical misogynists, Schopenhauer and Weininger. One of the practical consequences of this for German women was that in 1938, childlessness was restored in law as grounds for divorce. Abortion and contraceptives were also banned. In this case at least, Hitler was on the pro-life side of the argument.

The state awarded women a decoration, the ‘Motherhood Cross Award’, mimicking those given to men for courage in battle, according to ‘their child-bearing achievements’.
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Hitler’s vision of a post-war world included a law that would force every woman single or married under the age of thirty-four who had not already borne at least four children to mate with a purebred German male. If he was already married, he would be set free for the purpose. According to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the elite SS Troop, ‘Nietzsche’s Superman could be attained by means of breeding.’
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Thus did the Nazis envision Germany’s future as one vast stud farm that would supply Hitler’s divisions with fresh canon fodder. The racially pure studs were to be called ‘conception assistants’. But misogyny under the Nazis was unfortunately not confined to the familiar obsessions with German woman’s virtue or to perpetuating sentimental though self-serving illusions about motherhood. No more horrifying contrast with these cloying fantasies could be found than in the murderous brutality meted out to Jewish women during the reign of the Third Reich.

The Nazis placed all Jews outside any normal ethical code in their pursuit of the genocidal solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. Some scholars have objected that anti-Semitism did not distinguish its victims on gender lines. ‘The Holocaust happened to victims who were not seen as men, women and children, but as Jews,’ wrote Cynthia Ozick.
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But as is nearly always the case, when persecution is inflicted upon any hated group, the women of that group are singled out for particular humiliations and cruelties. When racial or religious hatreds are let loose, the underlying misogyny is usually given free reign.

When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, and the German army marched in, a series of brutal attacks were unleashed upon Austrian Jews. In a wealthy suburb of Vienna called Wahring, the Nazis ordered Jewish women to dress in their fur coats. They gave them small brushes and forced them to scrub the streets. As a joke, acid was often put in the pails of water. Then as the women knelt on the pavement, to the cheers and jeers of the large crowds of onlookers, Nazi soldiers urinated on their heads.
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It is somehow grotesquely appropriate that the city, which had a few years earlier produced a Weininger, who denied women their very existence, and had nourished the virulent misogyny and anti-Semitism of Hitler himself, should have witnessed the disgusting reality behind those fantasies. Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ was revealed as bigoted, beer-hall bully.

When the Nazi war machine swept through Poland and the Soviet Union three years later, genocidal acts became the norm. Huge numbers of Jewish men, women and children were rounded up and massacred. During the purges of the ghettos, before being massacred Jewish men were usually stripped to the waist, left with what little dignity a pair of pants affords a man. Not so the Jewish women. They were more often than not stripped naked before being driven like cattle into the streets to be mocked and humiliated. We know this, because German
soldiers frequently took snapshots of these events, sometimes to send them to the folks back home, sometimes for the historical record. Two grey, grainy pictures from the Polish ghetto of Mizoc taken on 14 October 1942 show a line of sixteen naked women huddled together, supervised by two soldiers. Heaps of clothes are piled or scattered on the short grass around them. There are three children among them – one a baby in its mother’s arms, the other two, little girls, holding on to older women, probably their mothers or sisters. At a guess, the women range in age from their late twenties to their early forties. Many cover their breasts in a futile attempt at protecting their modesty. They are obviously cold. They are being shunted down the line to death. The next grainy shot, taken minutes later, reveals a promiscuous pile of white bodies, and one woman, still alive, her back to the camera, raising herself up on her elbows next to the corpse of a little girl, while a German soldier stands over her, taking aim with a rifle, ready to finish her off.
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Such scenes were replayed again and again wherever the Nazis took power in the east. They were regarded as so normal that the soldiers involved in the killings felt happy to record them to share with their families, wives and girlfriends, as if they were vacation snaps.

Even in the midst of the horrors of the concentration camps, Jewish women were frequently singled out for special treatment and subjected to grotesque ‘gynaecological’ experiments. In the concentration camp at Ravensbruck, Germany, Professor Carl Clauber carried out sterilization experiments on women. Using hundreds of Jewish and Gypsy women as guinea pigs, the notorious Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele, injected chemicals into the uterus to block their fallopian tubes.
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Younger women were forced into camp brothels set up for the sexual amusement of the guards.
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Public nakedness was used as a tool for their constant sexual humiliation. It was also used as a tool of
elimination. In the death camp at Auschwitz, among new arrivals women seen to be pregnant were directed to the left as they entered, and shunted into the gas chambers. For Jewish women, the bearing of life had become a death sentence. To the very end, in the Nazi scheme of inhumanity, where for the first time in history, murder became an industrial process, misogyny still found a place.

Unlike Nazism and other forms of fascism, socialism and the ideology that developed out of the ideas of Karl Marx were from the beginning very much on the side of women’s emancipation. The goal of the Marxists was to eradicate differences whereas the Nazis saw them as essential. Marxism’s relation to misogyny is therefore a more complex one.

In the nineteenth century, early socialists firmly supported women’s rights. Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) produced scorching critiques of the position of women, which they saw as stemming directly from the development of a property-owning society. Patriarchy and women’s oppression in this analysis is a direct result of property relationships. According to Engels, ‘monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of one sex by the other’
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and the relationship between man and woman provides a prototype for the class struggle, which Marxists saw as the driving force behind historical change. Woman’s full emancipation could only come about when the property relations that underlay her subjugation were abolished. This, in turn, would only be achieved with a socialist revolution, the overthrow of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and the triumph of the proletariat. It was another dualistic ideology, in which – at least in the more simplistic versions that prevailed – the bourgeoisie represented corruption, greed, and decadence, and the proletariat, progress, freedom, and decency. History teaches us that women generally do not do well under dualistic ideologies in
which the world is viewed as the battleground for two conflicting forces or principles.

The philosophical framework for Marxist thought owes much to that of the eighteenth century empiricists. It shared their belief that social conditioning explains differences in people’s characters and talents, including those found between classes, races and genders. Woman’s oppression was ‘a problem of history, rather than of biology, a problem which it should be the concern of historical materialism to analyse and revolutionary politics to solve’.
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It accepted the ‘blank slate’ hypothesis that consciousness was determined by social being. Marxists were confident that given the right economic circumstances upon that slate they could draw a portrait of the new, Communist Man and Woman, in whom the old divisions that so troubled human relationships over the centuries would no longer be evident. But where that left sexual differences was to prove problematic, especially if it were argued (as it would be) that social circumstances produced such differences and not nature. Nature had become a ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’ concept, one that was identified with those who wished to keep women enslaved.

The opportunity to apply these beliefs first came in 1917 in Russia, when a demonstration during International Woman’s Day sparked off a series of political upheavals that within six months had led to the overthrow of the Tsar and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). Lenin declared: ‘The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves the complete freedom for women.’
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The new government moved quickly on women’s issues and within months of taking power passed legislation declaring the absolute equality of men and women. Women were granted the vote. They were given the right to divorce their husbands. In 1920, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, as the new
state was called, legalized abortion – the first modern state to do so. By then, the Bolsheviks had become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the belief that the only way woman would achieve freedom from what Lenin described as ‘her daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities’ was for her to be ‘liberated’ from the home and drafted into the ‘large-scale socialist economy’ as a member of the proletariat.
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Since the home was identified with woman’s ‘slavery’, it would be abolished. Large public dining halls, crèches, communal kitchens and laundries were established to integrate the private world of the family into the world of the new social order. The despised bourgeoisie was identified with selfishness, luxury and love of decoration. As usual in dualistic ideologies, anything associated with artifice – such as make-up – becomes demonized. In the new world order of communism, it was a symbol of what Lenin called the ‘old bourgeois humiliation of women’
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– a symbol of their sexual and domestic slavery from which Marxism had rescued them. In some ways, the Leninist Utopia is similar to that of Plato’s Republic (see
Chapter 1
) in which women were integrated into the ruling community as Guardians only at the cost of denying important aspects of human sexuality, such as the love of beauty.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Soviet troops imposed the political, social and economic model established in the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe. Mao Zedong (1893–1976) followed that model when the communists fought their way to power in China in 1949. Similar systems were established in North Korea and North Vietnam. Hundreds of millions of men and women effectively became the guinea pigs in the greatest experiment in social engineering of all time.

Ironically, the egalitarian promise contained in communism, and expressed in the term ‘comrade’ that was theoretically applied to all, regardless of rank, became instead an ideological
steamroller that attempted to reduce individuals to products of social engineering, in which human nature played no role. Had Marx not declared that, ‘The real nature of man is the totality of social relations’?
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Hitler had declared that the age of the individual was over. On this the communists, his main ideological enemies, agreed with him.

Of course, as in Plato’s Republic, males and females had different biological functions and therefore anatomical differences but these were regarded as relatively unimportant in terms of behaviour and psychology. Any attempt on the part of women to highlight or draw attention to sexual differences was at best frowned upon, and at worst among the more fanatical regimes punished as evidence of possessing vicious bourgeois tendencies. In Maoist China, during the Cultural Revolution (1962–76 or so), women were forbidden to wear skirts, which were a sign of their sexual slavery, and forced into the same uniform-style clothing as men – a sort of boiler suit with a peaked cap. Make-up was strictly forbidden. Neighbourhood committees (set up by the local communist party) policed their periods to make sure they were not trying to violate the strict limits placed on the size of their families, which allowed only one child per couple. Experimental drugs were used on female comrades to control their fertility in the name of ‘revolutionary science’.
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