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

by Holland, Jack

  214. Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Barbara Foxley, Everyman Library, 1911.

  215. Women in Western Political Thought, by Susan Moller Orkin, Princeton University Press, 1979.

  216. Rousseau, op. cit.

  217. ibid.

  218. Russell, op. cit.

  219. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the origins of modernity 1500–1800, edited with an introduction by Lynn Hunt, Zone Books, 1993.

  220. Kathryn Norberg, quoted in ibid.

  221. Justine: or, Good Conduct Well Chastised and The History of Juliette: or, The Fortunes of Vice were banned in 1814 and 1815 respectively. They did not become widely available in English until 1965.

  222. The History of Juliette: or, The Fortunes of Vice, Grove Press, 1968.

  223. The Golden Bough: The roots of religion and folklore, by Sir James Frazer, Avenel Books, 1981.

  224. Sexual Life in Ancient India: A study in the comparative history of Indian culture, by Johann Jakob Meyer, Barnes and Noble, 1953. Meyer’s analysis is based on the old Indian epic poem The Mahabharata.

  225. Similar figurines have been found throughout Western Europe and have been used as evidence for the existence of a matriarchal civilization predating recorded history – that is roughly between 8000 and 3000 BC. However, it is notoriously difficult to draw conclusions about social relations from artifacts. If all we knew about the Middle Ages were the portraits of the Virgin Mary, we might conclude that Catholic Europe was a matriarchy.

  226. Quoted in Sexualia: From prehistory to cyberspace, edited by Clifford Bishop and Xenia Osthelder, Koneman, 2001.

  227. Conjunctions and Disjunctions, by Octavio Paz, translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane, Seaver Books, 1982.

  228. Erotic Art of the East, by Philip Rawson, quoted by Paz, ibid.

  229. Paz, ibid.

  230. Quoted in Sex and History, by Reay Tannahill, Abacus, 1981.

  231. Ibid.

  232. Ibid.

  233. Paz, op. cit.

  234. Ibid.

  235. Bishop and Osthelder, op. cit.

  236. Quoted in Tannahill, op. cit.

  237. Reported in the New York Times, 20 July 2003.

  238. Quoted in Bishop and Osthelder, op. cit.

  239. Meyer, op. cit.

  240. Reported by the Associated Press, 10 November 2002.

  241. Quoted in Bishop and Osthelder, op. cit. It is to be hoped that the Abbé’s indignation was also directed at the fact that the vast majority of the women of Western Europe were similarly barred from educational equality with men.

  242. Ibid.

  243. Ibid.

  244. Meyer, op. cit.

  245. Tannahill, op. cit.

  246. Meyer, op. cit.

  247. Tannahill, op. cit.

  248. From ‘An Occasional Letter to the Female Sex’, quoted in Editor’s Introduction to Common Sense, edited by Isaac Kramnick, the Penguin American Library, 1976.

  249. From the Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft, edited with an introduction by Miriam Brody, Penguin Books, 1992.

  250. Brody, Introduction, ibid.

  251. Brody, Introduction, ibid.

  252. Brody, Introduction, ibid.

  253. Ibid.

  254. Russell, op. cit.

  255. Quoted in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as experience and institution, Adrienne Rich, W. W. Norton, 1986

  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 himsel
f 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.

  349. Ibid.

  350. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Anchor Books, 1989.

  351. Adrienne Rich, op. cit.

  352. The People’s Daily Online, 12 November 2003.

  353. From Life and Fate, quoted in The Fall of Berlin, by Antony Beevor, Viking, 2002.

  354. The North Korean government has called their allegations a ‘whopping lie’. But credible human rights organizations substantiate the defectors’ testimonies.

  355. All following quotes and references to Mrs Lee come from the transcript of her testimony before HIRC.

  356. New York Times, 3 May 2002.

  357. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, quoted in War’s Dirty Little Secret: Rape, prostitution and other crimes against women, Anne Llewellyn, editor, The Pilgrim Press, 2000.

  358. Beevor, op. cit.

  359. Quoted in Llewellyn, op. cit.

  360. Ibid.

  361. Ibid.

  362. One of the few instances of soldiers being punished for rape occurred during Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia in 334 BC. He ordered two soldiers executed for raping the wives of two Persians. Alexander compared them to ‘brute beasts out to destroy mankind’. See Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, translated by Thomas North, Southern Illinois Press, 1963.

  363. Pearsall, op. cit.

  364. Ibid.

  365. Tannahill, op. cit.

  366. Why I am not a Christian: And other essays on religion and related subjects, by Bertrand Russell, Simon and Schuster, 1950.

  367. There were exceptions, such as the nineteenth-century birth control advocate and libertine Annie Besant who once declared: ‘If the Bible and religion stood in the way of women’s rights, then the Bible and religion must go.’ See Pearsall, op. cit.

  368. Miles, op. cit.

  369. The ‘Rhythm’ in Marriage and Christian Morality, by Fr Orville Griese, Newman Bookshop, 1944.

  370. Ibid.

  371. God’s Politician: John Paul at the Vatican, by David Willey, Faber and Faber, 1992.

  372. Ibid.

  373. Ibid.

  374. Ibid.

  375. Quoted in Willey, ibid.

  376. Joan Didion, review of Armageddon: The cosmic battle of the ages, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, New York Review of Books, 17 November 2003.

  377. BBC News World Edition website, 28 June 2003.

  378. Fortunately for Irish women, England is only a short boat tri
p away. Thousands of Irish women go there every year to have the abortions denied to them at home. It allows succeeding Irish governments to be sanctimonious about their ‘pro-life’ credentials without having to face the consequences of their policies.

  379. Bishop and Osthelder, op. cit.

  380. Dr Jacques Leclercq, quoted in Griese, op. cit.

  381. Ibid.

  382. In 1981, according to a report in the New York Times of 20 January 2003, it reached just over 29 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. As of 2003, it stood at 21.3.

  383. New York Times, 4 September 2003.

  384. Ibid.

  385. New York Times, 10 May 2003.

  386. Ibid.

  387. New York Times, 2 June 2003.

  388. Dallas Morning News, 9 August 1996.

  389. Ibid.

  390. Quoted in The Dallas Morning News, op. cit.

  391. The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi, translated by Sir Richard Burton, edited with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Hull Walton, Gramercy Publishing Company, 1964.

  392. Ibid.

  393. Women and Gender in Islam, by Leila Ahmed, Yale University Press, 1992.

  394. Tannahill, op.cit.

  395. Ahmed, op. cit.

  396. Ibid. Ahmed points out that Lord Cromer, the British Consul General in Egypt, campaigned against the veil while at home he formed an organization that was opposed to women’s suffrage.

  397. Haleh Afshar, quoted by Ahmed, ibid.

  398. Ibid.

  399. New York Times, 17 May 2002.

  400. Ibid.

  401. Ibid.

  402. New York Times, 2 July 2002.

  403. New York Times, 6 July 2002.

  404. My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban, a young woman’s story, by Latifa, written with the collaboration of Shekeba Hacchemi, translated by Linda Coverdale, preface by Karenna Gore Schifff, Hyperion, 2001.

  405. Soldiers of God: With Islamic warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Robert D. Kaplan, Vintage, 2001.

  406. Latifa, op. cit. There is a further irony in the fact that the British during their occupation of India encouraged Deobandism to offset the threat from Hindu nationalists.

  407. Ibid.

  408. Ibid.

  409. Ibid.

  410. Ibid.