A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice
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Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of the period – and arguably the greatest in English literature – did not succeed, over the course of some fifteen novels and many short stories, in creating a portrait of a sexually mature woman. In David Copperfield, perhaps Dickens’ greatest, and certainly his most autobiographical work, the child-like nature Victorians sought in their women is realized most fully in his portrait of Dora, the hero’s first wife. Copperfield makes the mistake of marrying her because she so closely resembles his mother, Clara, who was also weak, ineffective and immature. The novel exposes the cruel reality behind the ideal of girlish innocence, which generates nothing but contempt for the woman and unhappiness for both her and her mate.273
Victorian misogyny created not only the childish woman – it also offered for our admiration the noble woman, driven only by her altruism. In the classic Victorian text, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the only vocation open to the heroine is self-sacrifice, usually to foster her husband’s well-being or further his career. Her role is to act as a kind of spiritual helpmate to the male. She, through the example of her purity, can elevate his coarser, more physical nature, so he can appreciate the higher sentiments. This was the white woman’s burden, to be shouldered at the cost of denying her a vital part of her human nature – her sexuality. When passionate desire is depicted, as that between Heathcliff and Catherine in Emily Brontë’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights, it is demonic and its consequences are disastrous.
Banished from respectable literature, the depiction of sexual relations and sexual desire went underground to supply a flourishing trade in risqué novels and explicitly illustrated men’s magazines. In 1857, a word was invented to describe this material – ‘pornography’, literally, writing about prostitutes or prostitution. But sex also enlivened the stage of the working class music halls, where the never-ending struggle between men and women continued to be celebrated in sentimental, comic and bawdy songs, sketches and recitals.
While Victorian women were expected to be above certain aspects of nature, they were also expected to submit to nature in ways deemed an essential part of a woman’s lot. The pangs of childbirth were one. Christians had long taught that such suffering was the punishment visited upon all women because of Eve’s sin. Two hundred and fifty years earlier, when James VI (1566–1625) was king, one Euphanie McCalyane, unable to bear the pain of labour, asked a midwife Agnes Simpson to give her something to relieve her suffering. The king was outraged and had her burned alive. Had he not authorized the English translation of the Bible so that the word of God would be clear to everyone, including women? And in the book of Genesis it was spelt out plainly when God said to Eve: ‘Unto the woman . . . I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children . . .’ (3:16). Just in case it was not clear, it was repeated in Isaiah (26:17): ‘Like a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain and crieth out in her pangs . . .’
God had spoken. So when a Scottish doctor called James Young Simpson (1811–70) came along with a proposal that promised to end what God ordained, there was something of an uproar. As a child Simpson had listened to a vivid description of how his own mother almost died giving birth to him. Later, working as an obstetrician, he saw the suffering of women in labour for himself, and began to search for a remedy to alleviate it. In 1847, he administered ether to a woman with a contracted pelvis to ease her labour. He demonstrated that even when she was unconscious, the woman’s uterus still went through contractions. Later, he discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform, and began using it on women giving birth.
Simpson was denounced from the pulpit. Chloroform was called ‘a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble for help.’ The Calvinist Church of Scotland circulated pamphlets to doctors’ offices in Edinburgh warning that Simpson’s work would destroy people’s fear of the Lord and bring about a complete collapse of society.274
The attacks, which also came from his medical colleagues, many of whom argued that you should not interfere with ‘the providentially arranged process of healthy labour’,275 had little long-term effect on his popularity. When he died, more than 30,000 people came to his funeral, a large number of them women. By that time, Queen Victoria herself had been put under, during the births of her last two children, which silenced the critics. It earns that fierce defender of the status quo a place in the struggle to improve women’s lot.
Misogynistic arguments based on what God wants, or what nature dictates, would be deployed with increasing frequency as the nineteenth century progressed and the status of women became a legal, political, as well as scientific battleground in Western Europe and North America. The century had begun in France where a legislative package was passed that curbed women’s rights with a repressive thoroughness hardly equalled until the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In 1804, Le Code Napoléon rolled back the advances that women had made during the revolution, which had passed legislation giving them the right to divorce. According to Napoleon ‘the husband must possess the absolute power and right to say to his wife, “Madam, you shall not go to the theatre, you shall not receive such and such a person, for the children you shall bear shall be mine.”’276 It gave legal force to his view that ‘women should stick to knitting,’ leaving him free to soak the battlefields of Europe in blood. However, on this battlefield, the great general would be comprehensively defeated.
Just over fifty years after the passing of Le Code Napoléon, in 1857, English women finally won the right to file for divorce from their husbands. It was a limited victory – a man merely had to prove that his wife had committed adultery, but aggrieved wives had to show that their husbands were guilty of ‘incestuous adultery, or of bigamy with adultery, or of rape, or of sodomy or bestiality, or of adultery coupled with such cruelty as without adultery would have entitled her to a divorce . . .’ But over the course of the next three decades, further legislation was enacted that gave judges the power to grant separation to a woman if her husband assaulted her, and forced husbands who deserted their wives to pay maintenance. The Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870 strengthened a wife’s financial independence against the objections of Lord Shaftesbury who lamented that it ‘jars with poetical notions of wedlock’.277 However, among the very poorest of women the situation improved much more slowly. As Jack London observed in the East End slums, wives who were brutalized would not report their husbands to the police because they were financially dependent on them and could not survive without their income if they were sent to prison.
Reform of the laws on divorce in favour of women was viewed by many as much of a threat to civilization as was female masturbation. It challenged the misogynistic belief in the ‘natural’ inequality between men and women. According to the influential Saturday Review, ‘the adultery of the wife is, and always will be, a more serious matter than the infidelity of the husband.’278 The natural differences between men and women justified and explained differences in their treatment and responsibilities. This argument was gradually replacing that based on divine authority as Christianity beat an intellectual retreat in the face of scientific advances. It was monotonously repeated, with one or two variations, to refute campaigns for women’s education and the right to the vote.
In this view of things, women’s ‘natural frailty’ made them unfit for the rigours of an intellectual education. One contemporary philosopher warned that if girls’ brains were over-exercised they would become flat-chested and unable to bear ‘a well-developed infant’.279 Was not Eve punished for knowing too much? Education might bring with it too much knowledge of the ‘mass of meanness and wickedness and misery that is loose in the world. She could not learn it without losing the bloom and freshness which it is her mission in life to preserve.’280 Clearly, the author had not visited
the East End to witness how woman’s bloom and freshness fared under the hobnail boots of her husband – less well, it is certain, than if she were reading Shakespeare or Plato.
Traditional misogynists were not alone in advancing the argument that nature, or God, made women different from men. Advocates for women’s rights used the same reasoning. But they, of course, argued from the premise that women’s nature made them superior, not inferior, to men. Both those who opposed extending the franchise to women, and those who advocated its extension, used the belief in the ‘Otherness’ of the female’s nature to advance their cause. In Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98) opposed suffrage because to involve women in politics would be, he said, ‘to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of their nature’. At the same time, reformers argued that by extending voting rights to more men, the government was ‘enfranchising the vast proportion of crime, intemperance, immorality and dishonesty’ because ‘the worst elements,’ i.e. men, ‘had been put into the ballot box, and the best elements,’ i.e. women, ‘kept out’. 281
The struggle for the vote was complicated. It revealed, very starkly, that not only did some feminists’ disapproval of men mirror misogynists’ contempt for women, but also that some women’s contempt for women echoed that of men. It was a woman, Queen Victoria, who led the charge against the women’s rights brigade. In a letter to the biographer of her husband Prince Albert she wrote:
The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write or join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.282
She said that one Lady Amberley, who dared present a paper arguing in favour of votes for women at the Mechanic’s Institute in Stroud, should be given a good whipping. Many women from the Queen down opposed change, highlighting the fact that the status quo did not seem as oppressive to some women as it did to others. This would be a continuing difficulty that campaigners for women’s rights would face in the years that followed when among their most vociferous opponents were women themselves.
The age of revolution, however, had created a new nation in North America, where the idea of progress was an economic, social and cultural imperative that threatened to undermine many of the assumptions on which traditional misogyny had rested. The first European colonists in the northeast brought with them the Christian tradition in which woman was viewed as the source of temptation and sin. At the same time the Protestant Reformation had fostered a view of her as a valuable and respected helpmate. The harsh conditions of the early colonies might be imagined by recalling the fact that of the eighteen wives the Pilgrim Fathers took with them, only five survived the first winter in the New World. Women were an essential resource on the frontier, working alongside their men. Sexual transgressions were severely punished, often by flogging and branding, but penalties were inflicted on male transgressors as well as on female. It has already been noted that in New England, in the late seventeenth century, the witch craze ran its course very rapidly, and the belief in witchcraft was quickly discredited. The result was that even relative to the small population, a lot fewer women were condemned and punished as witches in New England than in Europe during the same decades (see Chapter 4).
Puritan hostility to the body manifested itself with the traditional misogynistic attacks on women for decorating themselves. Most influential among a series of early tracts on this old familiar subject was that of the Rev. Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who was pastor for the North Church in Boston for more than forty years. (He was also one of those who vigorously argued in favour of the belief in witches.) Entitled The Character Of A Virtuous Woman, this revisits the usual cliché, which equates love of adornment with sin or moral laxity: ‘The Beauty whereof a virtuous woman hath a remarkable dislike is that which hath artificial painting in it.’ Virtuous women kept their whole bodies covered except their face and hands, for to do otherwise ‘would enkindle a foul fire in the male spectators for which cause even popish writers would have no less righteously than severely lashed them.’283
However, Mather is careful to temper his admonitions and warnings with praise of women. He denounces as ‘perverse and morose men’ those who have subjected women to a catalogue of ‘indignities’. Only bad men would claim ‘femina nulla bona’ (‘no woman is good’). ‘If any men are so wicked . . . as to deny your being rational creatures, the best means to confute them, will be by proving your selves religious ones . . .’284 He seems at times equally ashamed of men for attacking women as he is at women for putting on make-up. His strong advocacy of education for women also shows that in the New World, they were already held in higher esteem than was traditionally the case in Europe.
During the American Revolution, Tom Paine advocated rights for women (see above). The tradition was carried on by Abigail Adams (1744–1818), the wife of the second president of the United States, John Adams (1735–1826, president 1797–1801). She declared in 1777 that women ‘will not be bound by any laws in which we have no voice’.
The eighteenth-century doctrines of equality and the right to pursue happiness were enshrined in the American constitution. They provided a crucial reference point for those who wanted to wage war against the political and social discrimination to which women were still subjected. Thus, the traditional misogynistic beliefs that lay at the root of such discrimination were inevitably brought into question. Misogyny was put on the defensive, intellectually, politically and socially.
Even before women’s rights were achieved, the beneficial influence of American democracy on the status of women was obvious to visitors such as Alexis de Tocqueville, the liberal French aristocrat who visited the United States for eight months between 1831 and 1832. In 1835, he published his masterpiece Democracy in America. De Tocqueville notes that American women are better educated and more independent-minded, sometimes startlingly so, than their French and English counterparts. ‘I have been frequently surprised and almost frightened,’ he writes, ‘at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to arrange their thoughts and their language amid all the difficulties of free conversation.’285
In Europe, he says, men flatter women more, but betray an underlying contempt, whereas in the United States, ‘men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them.’ In America, he observes, rape is still a capital offence, and ‘a young unmarried woman may alone and without fear undertake a long journey.’ De Tocqueville’s experience in America prompts him to ask the most important question of all concerning the relationship between men and women. Will democracy ‘ultimately affect the great inequality between man and woman which has seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature?’ It is a question that at the beginning of a new millennium is reverberating around the developing world, as the West exports its political and social model into cultures still hostile to notions of equality between the sexes. In 1835, de Tocqueville predicted confidently what the answer would be. Democracy he believed ‘will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man’.286
De Tocqueville had spent most of his time in the northeastern United States, and comparatively little in the slave-owning southern states where the prospect of equality between men and women would have seemed as improbable as that between African Americans and their white masters. Slavery, like poverty, while not creating misogyny, certainly provides it with the opportunity to thrive. Crucially, it removes any legal barrier to the sexual exploitation of women. ‘From the time the first African American was raped by her American master,’ wrote the legal scholar Leon Higginbotham, ‘the message was even clearer – in the eyes of the law, an African-American slave woman was not regarded as a human being and had no rights to control even her own body.’287 Since in slavery, people were held as the property of others, African women were often used as breeders to produ
ce more property.
According to the historian Beverly Guy-Sheftall: ‘The sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery was as devastating as the emasculation of the Black male slaves.’288 Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became active in the early women’s rights movement, had thirteen children, and testified that most of them were sold off as slaves.289
Early feminists saw a parallel between slavery and misogyny in that, like slaves, women were seen as property. Indeed, it was when Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), the Quaker abolitionist, was excluded from speaking at an abolitionist meeting in London in 1840 because she was a woman that she decided to organize for women’s rights. Eight years later, in Seneca Falls, upstate New York, the first women’s rights convention took place, organized by Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902). They declared, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.’ The following year, 1849, the first women doctors were licensed to practise in the United States. Twenty years later, Wyoming territory made political, social and gender history by becoming the first modern political entity to give women the right to vote.290 It would take another fifty years for the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution to pass, extending the vote to women in every state.