A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (29 page)

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’.
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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,
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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’.
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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.
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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.

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 19
^th
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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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, permanently 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’.
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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.
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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’.
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Freud admitted in
Some Psychical Consequences
that his theories of female sexuality were based ‘on a handful of cases’. Erecting big theories on small data is not good scientific practice. Science is one of those areas where size (of the sample of facts upon which theories are based) does matter. Freud’s willingness to advance his views despite lack of sufficient evidence says more about the size of his own ego than about the nature of female sexuality.

‘I always find it uncanny,’ he wrote, ‘when I can’t understand someone in terms of myself.’
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Remarks like this have led some to put him in the tradition of the ‘supermen’ of Nietzsche, those self-reverential monsters before whose great male egos all else pales into insignificance.
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Certainly, Freud’s dualistic view of the sexes fits very well into that tradition though it is not derived from the same irrational, romantic tenets. Nietzsche saw woman as the enemy of truth, whereas Freud saw her as the enemy of civilization.

The Nietzschean tradition of the essential dualism of male
and female provided one of the chief bases for the philosophical, and later the political, backlash against women in the twentieth century. In the autumn of 1901, Freud made the acquaintance of one of its lesser known, but nonetheless significant exponents. A twenty-one-year-old graduate from the University of Vienna called Otto Weininger approached him with the outline of a book he planned to write entitled
Sex and Character.
Freud read the outline and was unimpressed, remarking – ironically enough considering his own habit of making do with small data – ‘The world wants evidence, not thoughts.’ He told the young man to spend ten years gathering evidence for his theories. Such an undertaking was alien to Weininger’s nature. In any case, he did not have that long left to live.
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Otto Weininger (1880–1903) was by all accounts a brilliant student who by the age of eighteen could speak eight languages. He was deeply influenced in his thinking by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. That is, he inherited a tradition deeply hostile to women, and brought it to its philosophical climax in
Sex and Character,
published in 1903. In it, his misogynistic dualism takes on an almost mystical quality. Every positive achievement in civilization is associated with men – Aryan men. Women are its negation. Weininger goes to the extreme of denying women their humanity and reduces them to nonentities: ‘Women have no existence and no essence; they are not, they are nothing.’
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He invokes the Platonic distinction between matter and form, between the mutable, transient world of the senses and the ideal. Woman is matter, and man is form. Claiming that woman has no ‘essence’ means that she does not exist at the highest level of pure form, and therefore, for Weininger, her actual material existence is of no consequence.