A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (42 page)

168
.   
The Weaker Vessel: Women in 17
^th
century England,
by Antonia Fraser, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

169
.   
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800,
by Lawrence Stone, Pelican Books, 1979.

170
.   Quoted by Stone, ibid.

171
.   Ibid.

172
.   William Blackstone, Oxford Professor of Law, quoted in
A Vindication of the Rights Of Woman,
by Mary Wollstonecraft, with an Introduction by Miriam Brody, Penguin Classics, 1992.

173
.   Stone, op. cit.

174
.   Quoted in
Who Cooked the Last Supper: The women’s history of the world,
by Rosalind Miles, Three Rivers Press, 2001.

175
.   Anderson and Zinsser, ibid.

176
.   Stone, op. cit.

177
.   Fraser, op. cit.

178
.   Ibid.

179
.   Stone, op. cit.

180
.   Ibid.

181
.   Russell, op. cit.

182
.   The fall myths of the Greeks and Jews had been predicated upon a concept of specifically male autonomy – the idea that men had been created before women, and had lived happily and autonomously without them, enjoying a privileged relationship with the deity or deities.

183
.   Quoted by Russell, op. cit.

184
.   This remains the dominant view of social scientists, though it is now being challenged by the findings of evolutionary biology.

185
.   Stone, op. cit.

186
.   Locke, op. cit.

187
.   Ibid.

188
.   The second step would have to wait for another three centuries, until the contraceptive pill became widely available in the 1960s.

189
.   ‘The Poetry of the 18
^th
Century’, by T. S. Eliot,
The Pelican Guide to English Literature,
volume 4:
From Dryden to Johnson,
edited by Boris Ford, Pelican Books, 1973.

190
.   Quoted in
A History of the Breast,
by Marilyn Yalom, Ballantine Books, 1997.

191
.   
Ben Jonson’s Plays,
vol. 1, with an introduction by Felix Schelling, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1960.

192
.   Quoted in
Before Pornography: Erotic writing in early modern England,
by Ian Frederick Moulton, Oxford University Press, 2000.

193
.   
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works,
General Editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford, 1988.

194
.   
Misogyny: The male malady,
by David Gilmore, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

195
.   
Selected Essays by T.S. Eliot,
Faber and Faber, 1969.

196
.   Ibid.

197
.   Othello makes the same lament about his wife Desdemona: as his jealousy deepens, he remarks
(Othello
Act 3, Scene 3):

O curse of marriage,
That we call these delicate creatures ours,
But not their appetites!

198
.   Either that or, as T. S. Eliot has suggested, Shakespeare has simply failed in Gertrude to create a character capable of justifying her son’s ferocious anger against her. It is another one of the many puzzles of the play.

199
.   
Shakespeare: A Life,
by Park Honan, Oxford University Press, 1998.

200
.   
The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
edited with an introduction by David M. Vieth, Yale University Press, 1968. This was the first complete uncensored edition of Rochester’s poetry to appear. In another poem, personal hygiene seems to supplant misogyny as the theme as the poet pleads with his mistress

Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind
And all my joys restore
By using paper still behind
The sponges for before.

Rochester was in this case simply reflecting the fact that English men and women of the period – of all classes – were notoriously dirty and lacking in personal hygiene, a reminder that in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, its wonderful public baths, its system of aqueducts, and constant running water to flush the gutters of the streets, was lost and Europe endured more than a
thousand years of squalor. Personal hygiene in seventeenth-century London usually consisted of washing only the hands and face. The diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), who kept a famous account of his everyday life which included explicit descriptions of his multitudinous sexual encounters, had a sexual stand-off with his wife Elizabeth, after she had gone to a bath house (for the first time in her life) and then had refused to allow him to sleep with her until he did so too. After three days, his hostility to having a bath was overcome by his need for sex and he consented. But usually women were deemed to be the greater offenders.

201
.   Quoted in
Rochester’s Poetry,
by David Farler-Hills, Rowman and Littlefield, 1978.

202
.   The resulting anxiety found an outlet in a stream of witty poetry. Among the most famous is Rochester’s ‘Signior Dildo’.

203
.   
The Secret Museum: Pornography in modern culture,
by Walter Kendrick, University of California Press, 1987.

204
.   
The Rise of the Novel,
by Ian Watt, University of California Press, 1957.

205
.   The other two are generally reckoned to be
Robinson Crusoe
(1719) and
A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722).

206
.   Stone, op. cit.

207
.   Defoe, ‘Conjugal Lewdness’, 1727.

208
.   
Roxana: The fortunate mistress,
by Daniel Defoe, edited with an introduction by David Blewett, Penguin Classics, 1982.

209
.   Ibid.

210
.   Another curious feature of
Roxana
is that it is a story about a whore but tells the reader almost nothing about her sex life. The only erotic scene in the book is in fact between Roxana and her devoted maid Amy. Roxana’s lover has his eye on Amy, who returns his looks but is too coy and ‘feminine’ to take any initiative. Roxana invites Amy to go to bed with him and when Amy pulls back, insists upon it. When Amy still proves coy, Roxana begins to strip her. At first Amy resists, but after a tussle, she surrenders to Roxana who reports, ‘she let me do what I would’, using the phrase commonly employed when a woman surrenders to a man. Roxana then thrusts her naked into bed with her lover and watches while the two make love. The scene’s purpose is to establish the heroine’s ability to act decisively, in a way that defies the feminine stereotype of coyness. She masters Amy as decisively as would a man, just as she masters her money and her men, turning them to her own purpose.

211
.   It is interesting to compare these stale misogynistic stereotypes going back to Juvenal to Defoe’s rich and original portrait of Roxana. The poetic outpourings about women of those such as Pope, who disdained the novel as literature for scullery maids, now seem pathetic, predictable, and outmoded.

212
.   
Pamela,
by Samuel Richardson, vol. 1, with an introduction by George Saintsbury, Everyman’s Library, 1960.

213
.   The novelist Henry Fielding had no doubt as to what the answer was. In a pamphlet entitled ‘Shamela’ he attacked Richardson as a hypocrite. Fielding’s first novel,
Joseph Andrews,
was a parody of
Pamela,
in which a handsome young footman is preyed on by a lascivious Lady Booby. Fielding thought it ridiculous to suppose that it is only men who lust and explored the same theme in his greatest work,
Tom Jones.

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