A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (33 page)

In the 1960s, the politics of the body entered the body politic.

For the last several thousand years, control of the body – that is, woman’s body – has been a central concern of many of the religious, social and political doctrines and institutions created by man. There would have been no need to write a history of misogyny if this were not the case. However, deep within the male psyche are the wellsprings of fear and fascination that contemplation of woman causes. Her dehumanization, either through elevation or denigration, was always (broadly speaking) a political matter. That is, the politics of the body was not invented in the 1960s. But it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that women themselves had the power to shape how the politics of the body would be defined. At that point, a technological breakthrough and the resurgence of feminism combined to force the issue into the public sphere as never before.

The first half of that century had seen in the Western and developed nations (outside of the totalitarian sphere) women winning political, legal and social rights. In the decades following, the struggle would shift to a far more profound arena – the right of women to control their own fertility as the technology to do so became increasingly sophisticated, reliable and available. It was a battle for the ultimate mechanism of control within a woman’s body – her reproductive cycle. For a woman, this right is the most crucial of all, and the key to achieving real autonomy. Misogyny denies her that autonomy; her subordination depends on her lack of it. As the sexual revolution unfolded in the West, misogyny was faced with its worst nightmare. It would not be found wanting in the virulence of its response to the challenge.

The idea of women having sex without risking pregnancy is deeply disturbing to the vision of woman’s role that Western civilization has inherited from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which at its heart is profoundly misogynistic. In Britain, the Anglican Church denounced it as ‘the awful heresy’.
³⁶³
As families grew smaller in the US during the early years of the twentieth century, with the average woman bearing around three children by 1900 as compared with seven in 1800, the moral reaction mounted. There was opposition from women themselves to contraception based on moral grounds. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the US to earn a medical degree, claimed that using contraceptives to ‘indulge a husband’s sensuality while counteracting Nature is on the one hand most uncertain of success and on the other hand is eminently noxious to woman’.
³⁶⁴
Theodore Roosevelt attacked the use of condoms as ‘decadent’. Anticipating the terms later used by the Nazis in their campaign to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, he declared women who used contraceptives as
‘criminals against the race . . . the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people’.
³⁶⁵

Pregnancy, with its pains and sufferings, was preordained by God as part of the punishment, along with work and death, which Eve had incurred for her wicked inquisitiveness. Without the threat of pregnancy, women would have sex for pleasure and abandon their maternal responsibilities, becoming as selfish as men or worse, since the thought that women were sexually insatiable had never gone away and remained a source of male anxiety. The family and therefore civilization would collapse. For some, it was that simple. It made the demand for effective birth control far more threatening than the demand for the vote. Without effective birth control, equality for women would always be highly qualified. Opponents to the demand in both Church and State were happy that it should remain so; they might trust woman with the vote but not with the power to decide her reproductive fate.

However, the demand for access to birth control would not become a major threat to society’s domination of women as long as birth control methods remained clumsy, unreliable, unrefined, or just too plain embarrassing to use, as they were for most of human history – until, that is, the invention of the contraceptive pill in 1955. Before, men had women more or less at their mercy in deciding whether or not to employ condoms, the most common contraceptive device. In theory, of course, a woman could refuse to have intercourse with a man unless he wore one, but in practice men bullied, coerced, blackmailed or otherwise pressurized women into taking risks for the sake of the man’s pleasure. They still do. But when the pill became widely available in the early 1960s, it meant that for the first time in human history women could choose for themselves whether or not they wanted to regulate their fertility without having to consult the man with whom they were having sexual relations.

The old system of male dominance, with its theories of misogyny, was more than just a reflection of property relationships as Marx and Engels crudely maintained. It also rested on the biological subjugation of women to men, which was maintained in the absence or refusal of birth control measures to regulate the woman’s fertility. This patriarchal system was remarkably successful (and still is in many parts of the world), and gave men the kind of sexual freedom that was denied to women. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘men, who dominated, had considerable liberty, and women, who suffered, were in such complete subjection that their unhappiness seemed not important.’
³⁶⁶
For the first time, in the 1960s, the contraceptive pill threatened this ancient hierarchy and opened a vista of sexual equality.

Traditionally, the women’s movement had shied away from arguing for sexual equality for fear of deterring support among the respectable classes. In fact, birth control advocates in the early 1900s were more concerned with population control and regulating the poor, whose increasing numbers were viewed as a threat to social stability, than they were with levelling the sexual playing field between the sexes.
³⁶⁷
If women’s rights advocates argued in favour of sexual equality between men and women, it was generally to stress the need for men to respect the morality of monogamy that they had imposed upon women. They were firmly within the Christian moral tradition, which had, 2,000 years earlier, attracted women by regarding the adulterous husband as being as much of a sinner as the adulterous wife. The notion that equality could be secured through allowing women to behave as promiscuously as men was so defiant of the traditional code, as well as of certain biological realities, that the women’s movement feared it would mark their own endeavours with the taint of bohemian radicalism. But with the advent of the pill, it now became
physically possible for women to have sexual intercourse as casually as men without the fear of pregnancy, if they so chose. The right to choose is as always the key to progress for women, as it is for men. Within fifteen years of its introduction, 20 million women were exercising that right by taking the pill and another 10 million were using the Intra Uterine Device or IUD.
³⁶⁸

Misogyny seeks to dehumanize women through restrictive definitions of what their ‘true’ role supposedly is and in making sure they are confined to it. In Western civilization, there had been no more powerful apparatus for imposing such a definition than the Christian churches. But by the middle of the twentieth century, their influence had considerably weakened in most parts of the West. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church, which perhaps has done more than any other institution in history to fashion how men viewed and treated women, went on an irreversible intellectual retreat. It had seen off the threat from the Reformation, but not the challenge of the Enlightenment and the subsequent scientific revolution. Instead of mounting a serious philosophical response to the scientific worldview, it sought refuge in saccharin simplicity. The Church’s most effective propaganda weapon in the war to keep women in their place, the Virgin Mary, suddenly began appearing before the astonished eyes of peasant girls and boys in Portugal, France and Ireland. Over two hundred such visitations occurred, beginning in the nineteenth century, of which the Church authenticated only a handful, such as that in Lourdes, southern France. It continues to draw millions of believers every year. The Virgin was supposedly distressed by the lack of faith in the modern world, and her message was that only the Rosary can save mankind. The sightings followed Pope Pius IX’s 1854 declaration of the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, hailing her as the
only human being ever conceived without Original Sin, and making this belief one of the essentials of the Catholic faith. The Church’s response to the scientific revolution was to trust in a sentimental credulity and to proclaim its dogmas to be beyond and above reason. It was from this position that it would launch its attacks on contraception and abortion.

The Church may have lost the intellectual argument with science, but it still wielded enormous moral influence over millions of believers, especially in the developing world, as it does to this day. It has used that influence to try and prevent women from gaining access to birth control measures, even in the poorest countries where such access is essential if there is to be some hope of escaping from the cycle of poverty and deprivation. ‘The unnatural practice known as birth-control is working havoc in the United States,’ wrote Fr Orville Griese in 1944, a Jesuit and an authority on canon law and married life. ‘If it continues at its present rate, the American people will not long survive. Unfortunately, most Americans are indifferent to the harmful effects of this loathsome vice. Indeed, the only organized attack on the crime of contraception is that which is being made by the Catholic Church.’
³⁶⁹
Fr Griese argued that even if it meant certain death for the woman, it is undoubtedly sinful for her to ‘perform the marriage act in a manner contrary to nature’, that is, use a contraceptive device.
³⁷⁰
In the early 1960s, in response to the call of many millions of Catholic women, especially in the US, who wanted to limit the size of their families through the use of contraception, a papal commission was set up to look at Catholic teaching on birth control in the light of current scientific knowledge. It found that there was no scriptural, theological, philosophical reason, or basis in natural law for the Church’s prohibition on birth control.
³⁷¹
Millions of Catholic couples heaved a sigh of relief in the expectation of the Church
adopting a more liberal attitude. However, in 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encyclical
Humanae Vitae.
The encyclical reaffirmed the Church’s rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God’s law. Ten years later, Pope John Paul II declared that
Humanae Vitae
was ‘a matter of fundamental Catholic belief’.
³⁷²

In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban. For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue. Unfortunately, for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is. There, the right to choose whether or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman’s prospects for freeing herself and her family from poverty. It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women. Pope John Paul II spent a considerable part of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells poor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ’s sacrifice on the cross ‘in vain’. He said: ‘No personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.’
³⁷³
Underlying this attitude is the assumption that when it comes to having a baby, a woman’s consent is not necessary and that once made pregnant, accidentally or not, her own will is rendered irrelevant. The moral implications of this are interesting when compared with those governing our attitudes to rape. All civilized societies accept that a woman’s consent is necessary in order to have intercourse with her. Not to seek that consent and to coerce her into intercourse is to commit rape, which is a serious crime. But yet according to the Church, in the vital matter of pregnancy, a woman’s consent is beside the point. She can be made pregnant against her wishes, and without her consent. The inexorable law of God overrides
her will and the fact that she is pregnant determines her fate. Her personal autonomy is denied her.

To deny the need for her consent in this the most important aspect of a woman’s life is surely the moral equivalent of justifying rape. It reminds us once more of the profound contempt that has underpinned Catholic attitudes towards women and that has been responsible for so much suffering down the centuries. Millions of women in the poorest countries, who are the most vulnerable, continue to suffer because of it. The Church discourages governments in Catholic countries from developing family planning facilities, which are desperately needed where the population growth outstrips their economic development. In 1980, the Pope visited Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic country. For years Brazil followed the Catholic doctrine and was opposed to family planning. Abortion was outlawed, with sentences ranging from six to twenty years for anyone convicted of carrying it out. As a result, millions of Brazilian women were forced to go to back street abortionists or to resort to knitting needles or coat hangers to terminate their unwanted pregnancies. It is estimated that about 50,000 women die each year there in botched efforts to end their pregnancies.
³⁷⁴
However, two years after the Pope’s visit, the government reversed its previous position and asked for help from the United Nations Population Fund, which aims to expand family planning aid to the poor nations who need it most. But abortion is still outlawed in Brazil, and still kills more Brazilian women than anything else. Of course, it is the poorest women who suffer most. Brazil’s rich elite has access to abortion without fear of arrest or social stigma. ‘Our law serves only to punish the poor,’ commented Elsimar Coutinho, the head of the Brazilian Family Planning Association.
³⁷⁵