A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (43 page)

256
.   In an unpublished 1998 thesis for Trinity College, Dublin, Jenny E. Holland has argued that this tale of man creating life is an allegorical critique of science’s takeover of the role of the midwife, which occurred during the nineteenth century with the rapid expansion of medical science.

257
.   Tannahill, op. cit.

258
.   Ibid.

259
.   
Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism, 1850–70,
edited with an introduction and notes by David Pascoe, Penguin Classics, 1997.

260
.   Hippolyte Taine, quoted in
The Worm in the Bud: The world of Victorian sexuality,
by Ronald Pearsall, Pelican Books, 1969.

261
.   
The People of the Abyss,
by Jack London, with an introduction by Brigitte Koenig, Pluto Press, 2002.

262
.   Ibid.

263
.   Mrs Elizabeth Fry, quoted by Pearsall, op. cit.

264
.   Ibid.

265
.   Ibid.

266
.   
Nymphomania: A History,
by Carol Groneman, Norton, 2001.

267
.   Quoted by Professor John Duffy, Tulane University School of Medicine, in ‘Masturbation and Clitoridectomy’,
Journal of the American Medical Association,
19 October 1963.

268
.   The case is quoted in Groneman, op. cit.

269
.   Described in ‘Women at our Mercy’, by Peter Stothard,
The Times,
27 March 1999. Brown later denied he had met with a reporter or made claims that surgery could cure mental illness. But the newspaper stood by its story. The
British Medical Journal
later produced female mental patients who had been operated upon by Brown. He lost his membership of the Royal College and left England to pursue his career in the United States.

270
.   Duffy, op. cit.

271
.   Quoted in Pearsall, op. cit. Ms Greenaway was also a huge success in France and Germany.

272
.   Ibid.

273
.   Dickens’ work remains in stark contrast to that of his near-contemporary Emile Zola in France, whose novels abound with vivid portrayals of sexually mature women but who fails to give convincing depictions of children. His
La Terre
(‘The Earth’) was censored as obscene in England in 1888 when it became the topic of debate in the House of Commons. One outraged Member of Parliament declared that the moral fibre of England was being ‘eaten out’ by ‘literature of this kind’. The English publisher went to jail for three months.

274
.   Rich, op. cit.

275
.   
The Lancet,
quoted by Pearsall, op. cit.

276
.   Miles, op. cit. According to Miles, the code allowed the husband to compel his wife to reside or move to any place he dictated, to acquire her property and earnings on divorce, to send her to jail for up to two years for adultery, while he was not liable to prosecution, and to deprive her children of all rights. She concludes ‘French-women had been better off in the Dark Ages . . .’

277
.   Pearsall, op. cit.

278
.   Quoted in ibid.

279
.   Herbert Spencer, quoted in Miles, op. cit.

280
.   
Saturday Review,
February 1868, quoted by Pearsall, op. cit.

281
.   Tannahill, op. cit.

282
.   Quoted in Pearsall, op. cit.

283
.   Quoted in
Witches of the Atlantic World: A historical reader and primary source book,
edited by Elaine G. Breslaw, New York University Press, 2000.

284
.   Ibid.

285
.   De Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
Everyman’s Library, 1972.

286
.   Ibid.

287
.   
Shades of Freedom: Racial politics and presumptions of the American legal process,
by A. Leon Higginbotham, Oxford University Press, 1996.

288
.   Quoted in an interview on the
Essence Magazine
website. Sheftall is the author along with Johnetta B. Cole of
Gender Talks: The struggle for women’s equality in African American communities,
Ballantine Books, 1999.

289
.   Miles, op. cit.

290
.   Even at the time, there was much speculation as to why the lawless frontier land of the far west should take such a progressive step. The cowboys and gunslingers seem to have concluded that Wyoming’s image would benefit, since women represented all that was respectable and moral in the eyes of most Americans. Women also won the right to serve on juries. Chief Justice Hoyt who had opposed the move later concluded that ‘these women acquitted themselves with such dignity, decorum, propriety of conduct and intelligence as to win the admiration of every fair-minded citizen of Wyoming’. See Tannahill, op. cit.

291
.   Miles, op. cit.

292
.   Tannahill, op. cit.

293
.   Russell, op. cit.

294
.   But Nietzsche misunderstood Byron as disastrously as he misunderstood women. Far from being like the Don Juan of legend, the heartless seducer, intent only on robbing women of their virtue, Byron was himself more often than not the seduced rather than the seducer. His greatest poem, the comic epic
Don Juan,
tells of a rather gentle, dreamy and good-natured young man, who finds it hard to say no to beautiful women.

295
.   Nietzsche’s notions of power resemble in some ways those of Sade. But the ‘Divine Marquis’ would have regarded as ridiculous and infantile Nietzsche’s view of woman. As Sade saw it, since women were human they were capable of inhumanity to the same degree as men, as he makes clear in
Juliette.

296
.   Quoted by Pearsall, op. cit.

297
.   Jack the Ripper experts debate whether the number of murders attributed to the Ripper should be larger or smaller. There are as many as ten other killings, some before the first and some after the last generally accepted Ripper murder, which have been considered from time to time as the Ripper’s work. But like so much else concerned with Jack the Ripper, the vast majority of the alleged links to him are based on pure speculation.

298
.   Quoted in
The Complete Jack the Ripper,
by Donald Rumbelow,
with an introduction by Colin Wilson, the New York Graphic Society, 1975.

299
.   His report is quoted on the
Casebook: Jack the Ripper
website, one of 178,000 entries relating to the Ripper murders as hosted by the Google search engine.

300
.   Rumbelow, op. cit.

301
.   Jack the Ripper’s identity is puzzled over to this day. There have been about fifteen major suspects, ranging from the Duke of Clarence, a grandson of Queen Victoria, to a Polish barber. Several witnesses reported a ‘shabby-genteel’ man who looked ‘foreign’, speaking with several of the victims shortly before their deaths. Whitechapel was a Jewish area and police feared that such rumours would provoke anti-Semitic riots. For this reason they destroyed what may have been one of their few real clues. Shortly after the fourth murder, not far away a police constable came across graffiti that read: ‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing’. It was fresh, and may have been the murderer’s attempt to stir up feelings against the local Jewish population. Freud would later speculate on the relationship between misogyny and anti-Semitism,

302
.   
Collected Poems,
edited by Edward Mendelson, Random House, 1976.

303
.   
The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s writings,
by Sarah Kofman, translated from the French by Catherine Porter, Cornell University Press, 1985.

304
.   
Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Differences Between the Sexes,
The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, W. W. Norton and Company, 1989.

305
.   Bishop and Osthelder, op. cit.

306
.   Gay, op.cit.

307
.   Ibid.

308
.   Kofman, ibid.

309
.   
Civilization and Its Discontents,
Sigmund Freud, Dover Publications, 1994.

310
.   Quoted by Betty Friedan in
The Feminine Mystique,
Norton 1963.

311
.   
Eve’s Seed: Biology, the sexes and the course of history,
Robert S. McElvaine, McGraw-Hill, 2001.

312
.   Much of the information on Weininger was taken from the website
www.theabsolute.net/ottow/ottoinfo
, 5 November 2003. In turn, this material derives from
Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna,
a doctoral dissertation by Chandak Sengoopta, John Hopkins University, 1996.

313
.   
Sex and Character,
by Otto Weininger,
feastofhateandfear
website, 11 November 2003.

314
.   Ibid.

315
.   Ibid.

316
.   
www.theabsolute.net/ottow/ottoinfo
.

317
.   Ibid.

318
.   Freud theorized on an unconscious link between misogyny and anti-Semitism, at least as they manifested themselves in Western civilization. He speculated that they both sprang from a fear of castration. Circumcision inspired the same fear as the sight of female genitalia (see
Chapter 9
).

319
.   
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris,
by Ian Kershaw, W. W. Norton, 1998.

320
.   Weininger, op. cit.

321
.   
The Face of the Third Reich,
by Joachim C. Fest, Pelican Books, 1972.

322
.   Kershaw, op.cit.

323
.   Ibid.

324
.   Ibid.

325
.   Ibid.

326
.   Ibid.

327
.   Fest, op. cit.

328
.   Ibid.

329
.   Ibid.

330
.   Kershaw, op. cit.

331
.   
The Third Reich: A New History,
by Michael Burleigh, Pan Books, 2001.

332
.   Ibid.

333
.   From the website
Truth at Last Archives,
11 November 2003. Streicher was tried and executed by the Allies in October 1946.

334
.   Burleigh, op. cit.

335
.   Ibid.

336
.   
Mein Kampf,
quoted by Fest, op. cit.

337
.   Quoted by Fest, ibid.

338
.   Ibid.

339
.   Ibid.

340
.   
Women Writing the Holocaust,
website, 17 November 2003.

341
.   
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,
by Daniel Goldhagen, Vintage Books, 1997.

342
.   The pictures are reproduced in Goldhagen, ibid.

343
.   
The Nazi Doctors,
by Rover Jay Lifton, quoted in the
New York Times,
19 November 2003.

344
.   
Women in Concentration Camps
website, 17 November 2003.

345
.   
The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,
by Friedrich Engels, with an introduction by Michael Barrett, Penguin Classics, 1985.

346
.   Rosalind Delmar, quoted by Michael Barrett, ibid.

347
.   
The Woman Question: Selections from the writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin,
International Publishers, 1951.

348
.   Ibid. Lenin was following Engels who in
Origins
(Engels, op. cit.) had asserted that the liberation of the ‘whole female sex’ could only come about through integration in the general economy.