A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (28 page)

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 . . .’
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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.’
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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’.
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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.’
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Since in slavery, people were held as the property of others, African women were often used as breeders to produce 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.’
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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.
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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.
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It would take another fifty years for the 19
^th
Amendment to the US Constitution to pass, extending the vote to women in every state.

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’?
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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‘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.
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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.
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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.
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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.