A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

by Holland, Jack

  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’.338 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.’339 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.340 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.341 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.342 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.343 Younger women were forced into camp brothels set up for the sexual amusement of the guards.344 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’345 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’.346 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.’347 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.348 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’349 – 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’?350 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’.351

  Needless to say, the great experiment to remodel human nature according to the dictates of Marxist social theory failed. After Mao’s death in 1976, as soon as more liberal policies began to be tolerated, beauty parlours began to appear, and Chinese women flocked to them. By the late 1990s, a sexual revolution was sweeping China in reaction to the decades of repression. Bars with lap dancers and go-go dancers began to open. The Chinese say: ‘The Cultural Revolution is the father of the sexual revolution.’352

  In China, women were often forced to have abortions in order to keep the size of their families down to prescribed limits. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, in 1936, just sixteen years after abortion had been legalized, it was banned under Joseph Stalin. To say Stalin like Hitler before him was pro-life is perhaps to miss the point. What is more important is what both have in common with the Chinese communists, and indeed with today’s so-called ‘pro-life’ movement in the United Sates: they are all anti-choice, believing that a woman’s right to control her own fertility must be subordinated to goals more important than any notions she may have of her autonomy. That in itself is a form of contempt.

  Both right wing and left-wing forms of totalitarianism are in many ways so profoundly alike that their ideological differences are mostly irrelevant. Both set out to reverse the political and moral revolution of the Enlightenment, which for the first time in history enshrined the idea of the individual’s autonomy, his right to liberty and to pursue happiness, rights that have gradually been extended also to women. The totalitarian assault on the Enlightenment is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in its utter disregard – indeed contempt – for the rights of the individual, and the horrifyingly brutal manner with which totalitarian states treat their citizens. ‘The extreme violence of totalitarian systems,’ wrote the novelist Vasily Grossman, ‘proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.’353 It might be argued, as it has been in relation to the Holocaust, that considering the horrors inflicted upon both men and women who fall foul of these regimes there is little point in distinguishing them in terms of the suffering that both endure. Inhuman acts by their very nature deny or ignore the humanity of their victims. However, there is always room for misogyny. Indeed, in such regimes cruelty against women based on misogynistic feelings is often the norm. Women are frequently punished for their femininity, and for performing their biological role as mothers. Through its systematic mistreatment of women, the totalitarian state often reveals itself at its most frightening.

  In May 2002, a group of three defectors offered us a terrifying glimpse of life inside a women’s prison in North Korea, part of a gulag of camps and jails, which currently is estimated to hold about 200,000 people. Human rights organizations believe that about 400,000 prisoners have died in custody there since 1972. The three defectors testified in May that year before the House International Relations Committee in Washington DC. They spoke about their experience as political prisoners in what is the last truly totalitarian state on earth. Created in 1948 as the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, the country has been ruled by a sort of communist dynasty under Kim Il-sung and his successors since then.

  The defectors described how it was common practice to inject pregnant women with abortion-inducing shots. Guards and prison doctors forced mothers who gave birth in custody to either kill their babies themselves or watch as others killed them.354 One of the defectors, Sun-ok Lee, a fifty-four-year-old economics researcher now living in Seoul, South Korea, has written a book about her time in prison, The Bright Eyes of the Tailless Beasts. She was held in Kaechon political prison where, she said, 80 per cent of the prisoners were housewives.355 She was one of eighty to ninety women held in a cell 19 feet long by 16 feet wide. They slept with no bedding on the floor. They were allowed to shower twice a year. They were permitted to go to the toilet twice a day, at fixed times, and in groups of ten. The special punishment cell was less than two feet wide and just over three feet high, too small to stand upright or to lie down and stretch your legs. If a woman was seen looking at her reflection in a window, she was punished for the bourgeois crime of vanity and sent to the ‘drop-out team’ for three months or one year.

  ‘Their main job is to collect dung from the prison toilet tanks and dump it into a large dung pool for supply to the farming teams working at the prison farm outside the wall,’ Mrs Lee told the committee. ‘Two women wade knee-deep at the bottom of the toilet tank to fill a 20-litre rubber bucket with dung using their bare hands. Three other women pull up the rubber bucket from above and then pour the contents into a transport tank.’ The tank was then brought and emptied into a large dun
g pool. One rainy day in 1991, a housewife from Pyongyang named Ok-tan Lee who had been on the toilet detail all day climbed on to the top of the tank when its lid became stuck. As she tried to force it open, ‘she slipped from the rain-wet surface and plunged into the ground dung-pool. It was so deep she disappeared into the dung. A guard some distance away (they always keep their distance because of the stink from the prisoners) shouted, “Stop it! Let her die there unless you want to die the same way yourself!” She was left to drown there in the dung.’

  After recovering from a bout of paratyphoid in 1989, two years after she arrived in the prison, Mrs Lee was told to report to the medical room. ‘When I arrived at the medical room, I noticed six pregnant women awaiting delivery,’ she said. ‘While I was there, three women delivered babies on the cement floor without any blankets. It was horrible to watch the prison doctor kicking the pregnant women with his boots. When a baby was born, the doctor shouted, “Kill it quickly. How can a criminal in the prison expect to have a baby? Kill it.” The women covered their faces with their hands and wept. Even though deliveries were forced by injection, the babies were still alive when born. The prisoner/nurses, with trembling hands, squeezed the babies’ necks to kill them. The babies, when killed, were wrapped in a dirty cloth, put into a bucket and taken outside through a backdoor. I was so shocked with that scene that I still see the mothers weeping for their babies in my nightmares. I saw the baby-killing twice while I was in the prison.’

  Other defectors told the HIRC that on other occasions, the mothers themselves were forced to smother their babies with pieces of plastic, after giving birth in their cells, and if they did not, the guards threatened to beat them. They said that there was special animosity towards women who had been made pregnant by Chinese men. Between March and May 2000, 8,000 North Korean defectors, most of them women, were deported from China back to their homeland as part of a crackdown on prostitution and forced marriage. Estimates are that up to one-third of them were pregnant. The vast majority of them were imprisoned on reaching North Korea. A former factory worker, identified only as Miss Lee (no relation to Mrs Lee) told the HIRC: ‘The guards would scream at us: “You are carrying Chinese sperm, from foreign countries. We Koreans are one people, how dare you bring this foreign sperm here.’”356