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

by Holland, Jack

  66. Ibid.

  67. Agrippina: Sex, power and politics in the early Roman Empire, by Anthony A. Barrett, Yale University Press, 1996.

  68. Tacitus, op. cit.

  69. Bauman, op. cit.

  70. Agrippina wrote an autobiography, detailing her life and the misfortunes of her family, probably just a few years before her death. Unfortunately, we only know about this unique document from a few references in Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, both of whom used it as a source. We glean from this that Nero was a breach birth, probably the reason why his mother had no more children.

  71. Juvenal, op. cit .

  72. Apulieus, The Golden Ass, A New Translation, by E. J. Kennedy, Penguin Classics, 1998. The jackass, who is the human hero metamorphosed, afraid that once he has finished with the woman, he too will be eaten by the lions, decides to escape before he has to perform.

  73. This comes from a Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiastes, discovered in the twentieth century, and quoted by Russell, op. cit.

  74. A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, Simon and Schuster, 1976.

  75. There is some evidence that Pythagoras and the schools that he set up permitted women entrants.

  76. Quoted by Pinker, in Pinker, op. cit.

  77. Quoted in Body and Society: Men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, by Peter Brown, Columbia University Press, 1988.

  78. Tacitus, The Annals. The accusation was investigated by her husband and she was acquitted.

  79. A male relative of the emperor Domitian (AD 81–96) was a Christian who had worked alongside St Paul when the apostle came to Rome. According to legend, the beautiful church of San Clemente in Rome stands on the site of his family’s villa.

  80. The argument and evidence cited here is based on The Rise of Christianity: A sociologist reconsiders history, by Rodney Stark, Princeton University Press, 1996.

  81. Women first took doses of various poisons to cause a miscarriage. If that failed, surgery followed, involving the use of blades, spikes, and hooks, to slice up and wrench out the foetus bit by bit. More often than not women were compelled to have abortions by lovers and husbands. The emperor Domitian’s niece died following an abortion he forced her to have after impregnating her.

  82. Stark, op.cit.

  83. Guttentag and Secord, op. cit.

  84. Stark, op. cit. He cites arguments that the infamous reference to women keeping quiet in church in Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians (14:34–6) is not Paul speaking but quoting a claim from an opponent that he is trying to refute.

  85. ‘Is Paul the Father of Misogyny and Anti-Semitism?’ by Pamela Eisenbaum, Cross Currents, Winter 2000–2001. She argues forcefully that St Paul is neither.

  86. This description taken from the apocryphal Acts of St Paul, is quoted by Johnson, op. cit.

  87. Brown, op. cit.

  88. Ibid.

  89. De Ieuinion 5.1, Corpus Christianorum 2:1261.

  90. ‘On Female Dress’, from The Writings of Tertullian, Volume I, translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall, Edinburgh, 1869.

  91. 2 Corinthians, 6:16.

  92. Ibid.

  93. Quoted by Brown, op. cit.

  94. Tertullian, op. cit.

  95. This compares with fifteen in the first 130 years of imperial rule.

  96. They were constructed during the reign of Aurelian (AD 270–275). It is still a prominent feature of Rome to this day.

  97. The emperor Valerian, defeated by Shapur I in AD 260.

  98. The first lasted from AD 165–180, and the second struck in AD 251.

  99. Stark, op. cit.

  100. In a particularly painful illustration of the dangers of literalism, Origen interpreted literally Matthew’s words ‘There be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.’ (19:12)

  101. The Gospel of St Thomas quoted in Brown, op. cit.

  102. Quoted in A History of their Own, Volume I, by Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, Oxford, 2000.

  103. Brown, op. cit.

  104. Ibid.

  105. Ibid.

  106. From a talk given by Fr Paul Surlis, 2002.

  107. Brown, op. cit.

  108. When Roman officials wanted to bring prosecutions for the attack on the Jews, Ambrose the Bishop of Milan and the man who was to inspire St Augustine, intervened to protect the anti-Semitic thugs on the grounds that they were good Christians

  109. The doctrines of Mani were deeply dualistic, and held that all matter was inherently evil. His followers therefore regarded reproduction as a perpetuation of evil, so forbade it, and rejected the idea that God could have possibly allowed his Son to enter the material universe. Instead, they taught that Jesus was a phantasm. Mani was executed by the Persians in AD 276.

  110. Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick, Oxford University Press, 1991. All further citations come from this text.

  111. The City of God, translated by Gerald G. Walsh, S. J., Demetrius B. Zema, S. J., Grace Monahan, O. S. U., Daniel J. Honan, Image Books, 1958. Further citations come from this text.

  112. Russell, op. cit.

  113. Walsh et al., op. cit.

  114. In their compilation of inscriptions, letters and texts, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, the editors Lefkowitz and Fant include two, Hipparchia and Appolonia, from the third and second centuries AD respectively.

  115. From Socrates Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History.

  116. Damascius’ Life of Isidore, translated by Jeremiah Reedy, Phanes Press, 1993.

  117. From the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu.

  118. Ibid.

  119. Socrates Scholasticus, op. cit.

  120. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, Penguin Classics, 2000.

  121. There is some debate as to whether or not Moses might be there in body. Other Old Testament prophets Enoch and Elijah are also thought to have taken the direct route to Heaven, by-passing the long wait for the Resurrection.

  122. Quoted in Alone of All her Sex: The myth and the cult of the Virgin Mary, by Marina Warner, Vintage Books, 1983.

  123. The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, by Friedrich Heer, Welcome Rain, 1998.

  124. Anderson and Zinsser, op. cit.

  125. Quoted in The Perfect Heresy: The revolutionary life and death of the medieval Cathars, by Stephen O’Shea, Walker and Company, 2000.

  126. Anderson and Zinsser, op. cit.

  127. Heer, op. cit.

  128. Ibid.

  129. Ibid.

  130. Warner, op. cit.

  131. Attacks on the opulence of the Church and its growing distance from the faithful had formed the basis of other heretical movements, such as that inspired by Peter Waldo who preached a return to the poverty of Jesus.

  132. O’Shea, op. cit.

  133. Warner, op. cit.

  134. Ibid.

  135. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, rendered into modern English by Nevill Coghill, Penguin Books, 1951.

  136. Ibid.

  137. Quoted in Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, by Howard Bloch, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

  138. In third-century Rome, execution by burning was prescribed for a witch who had caused the death of someone through magic. In the sixth century, Queen Fredegond of the Franks burned several women as witches after accusations were brought against them that they had caused the death of two of her young sons. The accused were tortured into confessing before being burned. The use of torture and the fact that it was a woman who accused other women of killing her children would become characteristic of the later witch-burning craze.

  139. When in 1080 women were accused of being witches and blamed for causing storms and crop failures and put to death, Pope Gregory VIII complained to the Danish king forbidding such treatment. However, popular superstition persisted, often with cruel consequences. A mob burned three women to death in Bavaria in 1090. Ninety years later, a woman suspected of wit
chcraft was disembowelled on the orders of the local burghers and forced to walk through the streets of Ghent carrying her own intestines.

  140. The Waning of the Middle Ages, by J. Huizinga, Peregrine Books, 1965.

  141. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, sex and the crisis of belief, by Walter Stephens, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

  142. Later, there would be considerable learned speculation as to how and when this extraction occurred, and whether or not semen from ‘nocturnal pollutions’ or wet dreams could be used.

  143. Stephens, op. cit.

  144. Quoted by Stephens, ibid.

  145. Even at the height of the witch-hunts, Ireland was largely unaffected. As has been noted before, Irish Celtic traditions lack many of the misogynistic elements common in Classical, Jewish and Christian worldviews.

  146. Europe’s Inner Demons, by Norman Cohn, University of Chicago Press, 2000.

  147. Ibid. From the 1600s onwards, demonic possession became more common, frequently affecting large numbers of women at once. The most famous cases are the nuns of Loudun and the women of Salem. As with this Bohemian priest, possession often took the form of a revulsion towards attending religious ceremonies.

  148. Malleus Maleficarum, by Henricus Institoris, translated with an introduction, bibliography and notes by the Rev. Montague Summers, John Rodker, 1928. This quotation is from Summers’ introduction. All quotations from Malleus that follow are from Summers’ translation, unless otherwise indicated.

  149. Accusations that witches steal penises still occur in Africa. In November 2001, the BBC reported that mobs in Cotonuo, Benin, attacked and killed five people, four of whom were burned to death, after men had reported that their penises had disappeared. It is believed that a man’s penis can be made to disappear by a handshake or an incantation.

  150. Stephens, op. cit.

  151. Ibid.

  152. Materials Towards a History of Witchcraft, Volume Two, by Henry Lea, arranged and edited by Arthur Howland, Thomas Yoseloff, 1957.

  153. O’Shea, op. cit.

  154. Summers, op. cit.

  155. The Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Rossell Hope Robbins, Crown, 1959.

  156. Lea, op. cit.

  157. Jean Bodin, quoted in Lea, ibid.

  158. Stephens, op. cit.

  159. Cohn, op. cit.

  160. The European Witch Craze of the 17th Century, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Penguin Books, 1966.

  161. Lea, op. cit.

  162. Sleep deprivation became the torture of choice during Stalin’s purges of the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s. In the show trials, leading party intellectuals confessed, like the witches three centuries earlier, to creeping about the countryside poisoning wells and killing cattle. The British in Northern Ireland used it in a modified form against suspected IRA activists in 1971.

  163. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in colonial New England, by Carol Karlsen, Vintage Books, 1989.

  164. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, Everyman’s Library, 1994.

  165. When she was canonized in 1920 it was because of her virtuous life, not her successful military career, according to the historians Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser, op. cit.

  166. Ibid.

  167. In the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘misogyny’ first appears in a glossary in 1656 and is defined as hatred or contempt of women. ‘Misogynist’ had appeared in 1630 in a pamphlet entitled ‘Swetman Arraigned’. Swetman was the author of a notorious tract attacking women (see below): ‘Swetman’s name will be more terrible in women’s eares/than euer yet Misogynists hath beene.’

  168. The Weaker Vessel: Women in 17th century England, by Antonia Fraser, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

  169. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, by Lawrence Stone, Pelican Books, 1979.

  170. Quoted by Stone, ibid.

  171. Ibid.

  172. William Blackstone, Oxford Professor of Law, quoted in A Vindication of the Rights Of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft, with an Introduction by Miriam Brody, Penguin Classics, 1992.

  173. Stone, op. cit.

  174. Quoted in Who Cooked the Last Supper: The women’s history of the world, by Rosalind Miles, Three Rivers Press, 2001.

  175. Anderson and Zinsser, ibid.

  176. Stone, op. cit.

  177. Fraser, op. cit.

  178. Ibid.

  179. Stone, op. cit.

  180. Ibid.

  181. Russell, op. cit.

  182. The fall myths of the Greeks and Jews had been predicated upon a concept of specifically male autonomy – the idea that men had been created before women, and had lived happily and autonomously without them, enjoying a privileged relationship with the deity or deities.

  183. Quoted by Russell, op. cit.

  184. This remains the dominant view of social scientists, though it is now being challenged by the findings of evolutionary biology.

  185. Stone, op. cit.

  186. Locke, op. cit.

  187. Ibid.

  188. The second step would have to wait for another three centuries, until the contraceptive pill became widely available in the 1960s.

  189. ‘The Poetry of the 18th Century’, by T. S. Eliot, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, volume 4: From Dryden to Johnson, edited by Boris Ford, Pelican Books, 1973.

  190. Quoted in A History of the Breast, by Marilyn Yalom, Ballantine Books, 1997.

  191. Ben Jonson’s Plays, vol. 1, with an introduction by Felix Schelling, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1960.

  192. Quoted in Before Pornography: Erotic writing in early modern England, by Ian Frederick Moulton, Oxford University Press, 2000.

  193. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, General Editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford, 1988.

  194. Misogyny: The male malady, by David Gilmore, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

  195. Selected Essays by T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, 1969.

  196. Ibid.

  197. Othello makes the same lament about his wife Desdemona: as his jealousy deepens, he remarks (Othello Act 3, Scene 3):

  O curse of marriage,

  That we call these delicate creatures ours,

  But not their appetites!

  198. Either that or, as T. S. Eliot has suggested, Shakespeare has simply failed in Gertrude to create a character capable of justifying her son’s ferocious anger against her. It is another one of the many puzzles of the play.

  199. Shakespeare: A Life, by Park Honan, Oxford University Press, 1998.

  200. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited with an introduction by David M. Vieth, Yale University Press, 1968. This was the first complete uncensored edition of Rochester’s poetry to appear. In another poem, personal hygiene seems to supplant misogyny as the theme as the poet pleads with his mistress

  Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind

  And all my joys restore

  By using paper still behind

  The sponges for before.

  Rochester was in this case simply reflecting the fact that English men and women of the period – of all classes – were notoriously dirty and lacking in personal hygiene, a reminder that in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, its wonderful public baths, its system of aqueducts, and constant running water to flush the gutters of the streets, was lost and Europe endured more than a thousand years of squalor. Personal hygiene in seventeenth-century London usually consisted of washing only the hands and face. The diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), who kept a famous account of his everyday life which included explicit descriptions of his multitudinous sexual encounters, had a sexual stand-off with his wife Elizabeth, after she had gone to a bath house (for the first time in her life) and then had refused to allow him to sleep with her until he did so too. After three days, his hostility to having a bath was overcome by his need for sex and he consented. But usually women were deemed to be the greater offenders.

  201. Quoted in Rochester’s Poetry, by David
Farler-Hills, Rowman and Littlefield, 1978.

  202. The resulting anxiety found an outlet in a stream of witty poetry. Among the most famous is Rochester’s ‘Signior Dildo’.

  203. The Secret Museum: Pornography in modern culture, by Walter Kendrick, University of California Press, 1987.

  204. The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, University of California Press, 1957.

  205. The other two are generally reckoned to be Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

  206. Stone, op. cit.

  207. Defoe, ‘Conjugal Lewdness’, 1727.

  208. Roxana: The fortunate mistress, by Daniel Defoe, edited with an introduction by David Blewett, Penguin Classics, 1982.

  209. Ibid.

  210. Another curious feature of Roxana is that it is a story about a whore but tells the reader almost nothing about her sex life. The only erotic scene in the book is in fact between Roxana and her devoted maid Amy. Roxana’s lover has his eye on Amy, who returns his looks but is too coy and ‘feminine’ to take any initiative. Roxana invites Amy to go to bed with him and when Amy pulls back, insists upon it. When Amy still proves coy, Roxana begins to strip her. At first Amy resists, but after a tussle, she surrenders to Roxana who reports, ‘she let me do what I would’, using the phrase commonly employed when a woman surrenders to a man. Roxana then thrusts her naked into bed with her lover and watches while the two make love. The scene’s purpose is to establish the heroine’s ability to act decisively, in a way that defies the feminine stereotype of coyness. She masters Amy as decisively as would a man, just as she masters her money and her men, turning them to her own purpose.

  211. It is interesting to compare these stale misogynistic stereotypes going back to Juvenal to Defoe’s rich and original portrait of Roxana. The poetic outpourings about women of those such as Pope, who disdained the novel as literature for scullery maids, now seem pathetic, predictable, and outmoded.

  212. Pamela, by Samuel Richardson, vol. 1, with an introduction by George Saintsbury, Everyman’s Library, 1960.

  213. The novelist Henry Fielding had no doubt as to what the answer was. In a pamphlet entitled ‘Shamela’ he attacked Richardson as a hypocrite. Fielding’s first novel, Joseph Andrews, was a parody of Pamela, in which a handsome young footman is preyed on by a lascivious Lady Booby. Fielding thought it ridiculous to suppose that it is only men who lust and explored the same theme in his greatest work, Tom Jones.