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

by Holland, Jack

  In England, the empiricist philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), a keen proponent of women’s rights and the author of The Subjection of Women, tried in 1867 to include a provision in a bill in the House of Commons that would grant the vote to women, though it would have been restricted by educational qualifications. It failed, as did the French Socialist Congress’s attempt to win political rights for women in 1879.

  Mill was one of the first to apply to politics and social policy the so-called Blank Slate hypothesis – the idea that ‘human nature’ as such did not exist, and that all differences between races and individuals could be explained by circumstances. He argued that the belief in innate differences, including those between men and women, was the chief obstacle to social progress.

  His opponents proved him right. As the empiricists’ argument in favour of women’s equality gathered strength, the backlash against it increasingly relied on deductions from Nature to refute such an outlandish notion. Did Nature not make women weaker than men? Did they not have smaller heads, as one Charles Darwin pointed out who argued that their brains were therefore ‘less highly evolved’? 291 Did they not have periods? The level of scientific analysis might be judged by the fact that for six months in 1878 the British Medical Journal featured a debate as to whether or not a menstruating woman could turn a ham rancid by touching it.292

  The backlash expressed itself philosophically. Misogyny has never lacked for philosophers, from Plato onwards. In the nineteenth century, among mainly German thinkers, it took the form of a reaction against empiricism, and helped create the Romantic movement, under the influence of Rousseau (see Chapter 5) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). It is somewhat ironic that the Romantics should be lined up on the side of the perpetuators of misogyny, since ‘romantic’ at least in popular thinking has an aura of being woman-friendly. But the Romantics (in poetry and philosophy) were to women’s liberation what the black and white minstrels were to the civil rights movement.

  The Kantian notion that the deepest knowledge is independent of experience (i.e. essentially intuitive) lent itself to a semi-mystical, pantheistic interpretation of the world. It became anti-rationalist, rejecting the intellect and elevating the will as a means of realizing the meaning of the world, which it saw as being composed of essences. Women were assigned certain qualities, men others. For Kant, woman was the essence of beauty and her only role in life is that of a glorified flower arranger best left undisturbed by man the thinker’s travails, of which the less she knew the better. In the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who followed Kant, she is a grown-up child, a creature of arrested development, fitted only for taking care of men. Schopenhauer, the author of The World as Will and Idea, was a Buddhist, a believer in magic and mysticism, an animal lover who never married and who was thoroughly anti-democratic. He believed that ‘women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species.’ Undoubtedly, his influence over Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was his most important contribution to the history of ideas.293

  For Nietzsche, as for Schopenhauer, the only reality was the will. He admired Napoleon and the British poet Lord Byron (1788–1824). Napoleon seems more obvious a choice than Byron, the first literary celebrity in the modern sense. But Byron embodied what Nietzsche believed was the role of the ‘Ubermensch’ – or ‘Overman’, more usually rendered into English as ‘Superman’. He trampled on convention, defied prevailing moral standards, incarnating the will to power. In Byron’s case, it was power over women – he was renowned as a living ‘Don Juan’.294

  ‘The happiness of man is: “I will.” The happiness of woman is: “He will,”’ Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And again: ‘Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution: pregnancy.’ When not bearing Superman’s babies, she dedicates herself to ‘the relaxation of the warrior’. ‘All else,’ he declares, ‘is folly.’ In The Will to Power, he wrote of women, ‘What a treat it is to meet creatures who have only dancing and nonsense and finery in their minds!’

  Nietzsche’s fantasies of power and violence are those of a sickly recluse, and his contempt for women is that of a man who fears them.295 The frivolous female simpleton he depicted as his ideal woman is the daughter of Rousseau and Schopenhauer, a combination of innocence and ignorance, who is not unrelated to the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’. But her direct descendant would be born later, in the mind of Adolf Hitler. In the twentieth century, she would take the shape of the pure-bred German maiden, the sexless mother of the master race.

  Through his impact on Hitler, Nietzsche may well have been the most influential misogynist of the nineteenth century, but he was not the most famous. That dubious distinction must go to a man whose identity still remains as much of a mystery as it was just over a hundred years ago when he earned the nickname by which he is still known – Jack the Ripper, the first modern serial killer. Murder can speak as eloquently of a society’s innermost fears, desires and preoccupations as does its poetry. In this way, there is no more chillingly eloquent expression of Victorian misogyny than the five murders Jack the Ripper carried out between August and November 1888. It was just one year after Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee. The British Empire was at its peak, and Britain was the most confident and powerful nation on earth. Yet, the sordid, vicious murders of five working-class prostitutes would shake the imperial capital by providing it with a bloody mirror in which to behold frightening reflections of society’s deep-seated hatred of women.

  Certainly, Victorians were not strangers to violence against women, though they may well have chosen to ignore it when the victims were lower class, which the great majority of them were. When the reality of violence did not suffice, pornography provided it in generous helpings to stimulate the fantasies of middle-class gentlemen. The same year as the Ripper murders, the anonymously written My Secret Life was published. Its eleven volumes are the purported sexual autobiography of a married gentleman who is addicted to prostitutes and lower-class women. After one escapade, during which he thinks he contracted syphilis, he returns home to his wife, who refuses to have sex with him.

  But I jumped into bed and forcing her on her back, drove my prick up her. It must have been stiff, and I violent, for she cried out that I hurt her. ‘Don’t do it so hard – what are you about!’ But I felt that I could murder her with my prick, and drove, and drove, and spent up her cursing. While I fucked her, I hated her – she was my spunk-emptier.296

  The contempt for women so powerfully expressed in this passage results in a kind of psychic murder, with the penis wielded as a deadly weapon. The Ripper was more literal-minded, and used a knife. But it was the way that he used it that reveals how misogyny can transform itself. This time, it changed to suit the triumph of the new scientific paradigm, which was to a growing extent replacing religion, as the arbiter of what was right and wrong in sexual behaviour. Rather than overtly moral categories, it preferred the vocabulary of medical science. Jack the Ripper applied this paradigm in the most direct and brutal way imaginable: he reduced women to specimens fit only for dissection.

  His five victims were Mary Ann Nichols, murdered on 31 August; Annie Chapman, murdered 8 September; Elizabeth Stride, murdered 30 September; Catherine Eddowes, murdered on the same date; and Mary Jane Kelly, murdered on 9 November.297 All the victims were prostitutes who worked the streets, the cheap lodging houses and the pubs of the Whitechapel area of the East End. All were alcoholics. All were separated from their husbands. All were struggling desperately to survive.

  Their murderer’s modus operandi was to strangle his victim as she lifted her skirt to get ready of sex. Laying her on her back on the ground, he sliced her throat twice and then began his real work. Usually, he is described as mutilating his victims. But what he actually did is closer to a dissection, concentrated on the woman’s pubic area. He removed the uterus, stabbed and/or removed portions of the vagina. (In the case of Stride, he was apparently interrupted and did
not get this far.) He also took out the victim’s entrails. The aim of the dissection was to expose women, from the inside out. The worst case was that of Mary Kelly who died in the dingy little room she rented. A reporter for The Pall Mall Gazette noted that her body resembled ‘one of those horrible wax anatomical specimens’.298 Being more secure from interruption than he had been on the street, the Ripper dissected her completely. According to the report of police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond,299 her breasts were removed, one being placed under her head and the other by her right foot. Her uterus was found also under her head, as were her kidneys. Her genitals were denuded of flesh, as was her right thigh. Her face was mutilated beyond recognition. The flesh from the abdomen was left on the bedside table. One of her hands had been pushed into her abdominal cavity, which was empty. She was three months pregnant but the reports do not mention the foetus. The Ripper left her with her thighs spread in what was clearly a leering sexual gesture. All his other victims were found with their skirts hoisted up, exposing their genital areas. Yet the Victorians, though they famously covered table legs because they found them sexually provocative, did not categorize the Ripper’s murders as sex crimes.

  Like the witch craze of the late medieval and early modern period, the murders of Jack the Ripper tell us a lot about what was lurking in society’s view of women. One widow of 46 wrote to a London newspaper that ‘respectable women’ like her need fear nothing because Jack ‘respects and protects respectable women’.300 Indeed, some respectable opinion in the upper class West End of the city held that the ‘bad’ women got what they deserved. The Victorian contention that good women were asexual beings and that therefore sexual desire on a woman’s part was a sign of ‘disease’, had led to the practice of genital mutilation as a cure for masturbation, hysteria, nymphomania and other ‘female’ disorders. Prostitutes were commonly referred to as ‘fallen women’ or ‘daughters of joy’ since Victorian misogyny saw their activities as a result not of economic desperation but of uncontrollable sexual desire. Jack the Ripper took this to its logical, if psychopathic extremes. Since ‘fallen women’ suffered from a sexual disease he would operate upon them, laying them bare like any other diseased specimen for the world to behold.301

  In the witch craze, misogyny had operated through a powerful institution, the Church. In the case of Jack the Ripper, it expressed itself at the level of a psychotic individual. Unfortunately, the twentieth century would provide too many opportunities for misogyny to assume both forms.

  MISOGYNY IN THE AGE OF SUPERMEN

  When what we call history is actually being lived, there is rarely a neat dividing line between one epoch and another. We decisively separate our modern world from that of the Victorians, especially in sexual matters, forgetting that it was men rooted in the Victorian Age who helped shape the twentieth century and how it would view and treat women. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) were nineteenth-century men who bequeathed us ideas the consequences of which were only fully realized in the century following it. The ideas of all three have had a (sometimes profound) bearing on the history of misogyny. With Marx and Darwin the influence is not at first immediately obvious. But with Freud it most certainly is.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideals of the Enlightenment, with their emphasis on the individual’s equality and autonomy, seemed secure throughout Western Europe, the United States and in nations that were their off-shoots. Linked to these was the idea of progress, also firmly embedded in the West. It seemed far more than merely an idea. It seemed a reality. A period of unparalleled industrial growth and economic expansion held out the promise of widespread prosperity. In Europe and North America, in states where democratic forms of government prevailed, women’s rights were firmly on the political agenda, among them the right to vote. In 1893, New Zealand had become the first nation state to grant suffrage to women. Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway followed. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia gave them that right in 1917. The next year, after a long and at times bitter campaign lasting the best part of a century, the United Kingdom granted women over 30 the right to vote and ten years later dropped the voting age to 21. The right to vote became the 19th amendment to the US constitution in August 1920. Meanwhile, women were an increasingly important part of the workforce. The public sphere was no longer an all-male preserve. Middle-class women had access to higher education and were entering professions hitherto thought of as for men only.

  Not for the first time in the history of misogyny, women’s progress provoked a reaction. It manifested itself at several different levels: scientific, philosophical and political. But if these reactions had a shared aim it was to demonstrate that men’s contempt for women was justified. The ancient prejudice had to be reconfirmed, if not reinforced, to reassure men that regardless of equality and women’s rights certain aspects in the male-female relationship would never change.

  This emerges starkly enough in the work of Freud. He has been extraordinarily influential, so much so that in the words of the English poet W. H. Auden, he became ‘a whole climate of opinion/Under whom we conduct our different lives’.302 His work represents the first extensive and detailed ‘scientific’ examination of the psychological differences between the sexes. Freud attempted to find the psychoanalytical roots in the perceived differences in the nature of men and women. In his early years, he tended to stress the parallels between the development of boys and girls rather than the differences. At one point, he even entertained the notion that boys experienced ‘womb-envy’. 303 However, as he grew older, he developed a more dualistic view. It was during this period, in the 1920s, that his more famous formulations about men and women were pronounced.

  When probed, some of these findings turn out to resemble those held by African witchdoctors. That the witchdoctor makes his pronouncements dressed up in the shiny new white coat of science cannot disguise their remarkable similarities. Witness Freud’s attack on the clitoris. In a paper written in 1925, he saw the clitoris as the ‘masculine’ element of female sexuality since it has erections, and masturbation of the clitoris as ‘a masculine activity’. He claimed, ‘The elimination of clitoridal sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity’.304 Femininity is achieved through a sort of regime change, with the clitoris handing over ‘its sensitivity, and at the same time, its importance, to the vagina’.

  The Dogon tribe of Niger, in West Africa, believes that each person is born with a male and female soul. For girls to realize their true femaleness it is necessary to remove that part of them where their male soul resides, i.e., the clitoris, just as boys must undergo circumcision to remove their female soul hiding in their foreskin.305 As we have seen, some Victorian medical experts advocated clitoridectomy to cure ‘female diseases’. What is the difference between a quaint old African myth, Victorian clitoridectomy and the assertions of Sigmund Freud, other than that Freud proposes a psychic instead of a physical mutilation of the woman? He claims that true femininity comes about when the woman foregoes the sexual pleasure derived from ‘masculine’ activity, which is identified with the clitoris because it is the source of a pure pleasure unrelated to reproduction. Such selfishness is characteristic of the male, and therefore has to be abandoned if the female is to become fully a feminine creature, since femininity implies self-abrogation and self-denial for a higher purpose, which is identified with the vagina. And what, may we ask, could possibly inspire a girl to forgo her clitoral delights? Girls, writes Freud, ‘notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of larger proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart to their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis.’306 Clearly, for Freud at least, size matters. It also determines how men see women, and offers an explanation for misogyny:

  ‘This combination of circumstances leads to two reactions, which may become fixed and will with other factors, permanen
tly determine the boy’s relations to women: horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her.’ According to Freud, this explains not only why men hold women in contempt but also why women themselves develop a contempt ‘for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect’.307 This theory therefore predicts that misogyny is not an aberration but in fact a normal, universal reaction on the part of both men and women to the ‘mutilated’ female.

  Freud’s description of female development echoes not only that of African witchdoctors but also the views of Aristotle. Some 2,200 years earlier, Aristotle also saw females as ‘mutilated’ males, creatures that failed to realize their full potential (see Chapter 1). Like Aristotle, Freud’s starting point is to assume that the male is the sexual norm against which the other is measured. This establishes a kind of duality – male-normality vs female-abnormality – that deepens in his thought as time passes. He uses it in the end to repeat many of the old misogynistic prejudices against women, except that this time they are justified in the name of science.308 His theory that femininity depended on a transfer of focus from clitoral to vaginal sex could be seen as the ‘scientific’ justification for the prejudice, expounded most vociferously in contemporary Nazi propaganda, that woman’s role should be confined to being mothers.

  By the time he had come to write one of his last works, Civilization and its Discontents, in 1929, men were equated with civilization itself and women with its opponents, a hostile, resentful and conservative force driven by penis envy. His conclusion was that female sexuality was a ‘dark continent’ – a revealing metaphor that places women alongside Africans firmly outside the realm of civilization, which is ‘the business of men’. 309