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

  JACK HOLLAND was a highly respected author and journalist known particularly for his commentary about Northern Irish politics. He grew up in Belfast (where he was taught by Seamus Heaney), and worked with Jeremy Paxman and other outstanding journalists at BBC Belfast, during a period of seminal current affairs programming. Jack published four novels and seven works of non-fiction, most of the latter relating to politics and terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the bestselling Phoenix: Policing the Shadows.

  Sadly, Jack died of cancer in 2004, just after finishing the manuscript of Misogyny. On his death, his family received letters of respect from statesmen including Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, who had come to rely on his balanced analysis of Irish politics.

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  A BRIEF HISTORY OF

  MISOGYNY

  The world’s oldest prejudice

  JACK HOLLAND

  ROBINSON

  London

  Constable & Robinson

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  This edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2006

  Copyright © Jack Holland 2006

  The right of Jack Holland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84529-371-0

  ISBN-10: 1-84529-371-1

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-884-2

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This book is dedicated to the memory of its author.

  It is also dedicated to the women who raised him – his mother, Elizabeth Rodgers Holland, his grandmother Kate Murphy Holland and his aunt ‘Cissy’ Martha Holland, as well as to his sisters – Katherine, Elizabeth and Eileen.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 Pandora’s Daughters

  2 Women at the Gates: Misogyny in Ancient Rome

  3 Divine Intervention: Misogyny and the Rise of Christianity

  4 From Queen of Heaven to Devil Woman

  5 O Brave New World: Literature, Misogyny and the Rise of Modernity

  6 Victorians’ Secrets

  7 Misogyny in the Age of Supermen

  8 Body Politics

  9 In Conclusion: Making Sense of Misogyny

  Further Reading

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks are due to a number of people in our quest to get this book published posthumously. For their moral and/or practical support, we would like to thank Stephen Davis, Don Gilbert, Susan Phoenix, Marcia Rock and Michelle Stoddard. We are particularly grateful to Brad Henslee, David Goodine and Mike Myles for creating, developing and maintaining www.jackholland.net.

  We especially wish to thank Sappho Clissitt, our London literary agent, who had the courage and foresight to take on this project, when many other agents would not.

  They all have our heartfelt thanks.

  Mary Hudson and Jenny Holland

  FOREWORD

  My father loved history and he loved women. These are the two factors that brought him to the topic of misogyny, one substantially different from the Northern Irish political matters on which he had built a career.

  He began work on Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice in 2002. The topic was quite a conversation starter. A common response from other men, when my father told them what he was working on, was an assumption that he was writing some sort of defence of misogyny, a reaction he found startling. Another common response was surprise that such a book should be written by a man. To this, his answer was simple. ‘Why not?’ he would say. ‘It was invented by men.’

  While he was writing, he became consumed by the astonishing list of crimes committed against women by their husbands, fathers, neighbours and rulers. My mother and I would shudder as he recounted them: from the mind-boggling torture of suspected witches in early modern Europe, to the horrendous cruelty suffered by women in North Korean prisons. He clipped newspaper articles; he read myriad histories; he turned to poetry and plays in an attempt to find cultural explanations.

  My father felt that this was his most important work. In it, he turned his journalist’s eye to a daunting question: how do you explain the oppression and brutalization of half the world’s population by the other half, throughout history?

  The tools he used in tackling that question were the same ones he employed to make other more contemporary conflicts tangible to his readers – his ability to condense difficult, inaccessible material; his considerable knowledge of Western culture and history; his sympathy for the oppressed; and his lyrical prose style. With these at his disposal, he created a history which, despite its often brutal subject matter, is remarkably pleasurable to read.

  In March 2004, a month after he finished Misogyny, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He died that May of NK/T cell lymphoma, an extremely rare form of cancer that
is almost always fatal. Although weakened by illness and treatment, he remained absorbed by the project, and continued working on the final edits while in his hospital bed.

  The father-daughter relationship occupies an important place in this book, for it is in this most intimate of connections that misogyny’s pernicious effects are carried forward, or broken. It is also a central relationship in any girl’s life – and as a father, mine approached his parental role with lightness, admiring without fawning, accepting the arrival of my womanhood with grace and tactful approval. Most of all he always asked me for my thoughts. He encouraged me to be argumentative, to challenge him. Occasionally, he would chuckle and poke fun at my youthful convictions; other times our debates would become quite heated. I knew from what he said that he prized my intelligence. I knew from the soft look in his eyes that he cherished my womanliness.

  It is difficult to measure the importance of that acceptance, especially now that it is gone. As I read what my father wrote about the treatment that so many women have endured, for centuries and across continents, I become aware of an irony. I was spared the effects of misogyny. Exceptionally, I was able to live, at least at home, free from its shackles.

  My most tender memory of my father, out of a lifetime of tender memories, is from three days before he died. He and I were sitting alone in one of the patient lounges of a Manhattan hospital, going through the manuscript together. I read aloud, and he wanted to know if I had any suggested changes. I was flattered that he – professional author, expert, adult, father – was asking me – newbie reporter, expert on nothing, young woman, daughter – for my opinion.

  It was a golden moment, now burnished by recollection. It felt as though the quiet task we were engaged in was greater than his illness. In the sun-drenched room where we sat overlooking the Hudson River, for a brief moment, we were keeping at bay the suffering and fear that surrounded us in that cancer ward.

  We were not long at our task when I realized that my father’s doctor, a kind, soft-spoken man who barely two weeks earlier had informed my mother and me that my father’s death was imminent, was standing by watching us, clearly moved. His expression told me that he did not see scenes like this very often.

  Jack grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and came of age in the socially and politically turbulent 1960s. From early on, he was surrounded by capable women. He was raised primarily by his grandmother Kate Murphy Holland, a formidable matriarch from the wilds of County Down, and his aunt ‘Cissy’ Martha Holland, a woman of considerable beauty who never married and worked in one of Belfast’s many linen mills. His own mother, Elizabeth Rodgers Holland, grew up so poor that she could afford to attend school only sporadically. She would serve as an inspiration to him throughout his career. He used to say that his aim as a writer was to give people like her, uneducated but endowed with intelligence, access to complex ideas.

  He was always concerned with the female experience. When he came to write his first non-fiction account of the Troubles, then at their height, he mined the letters and stories of his mother and aunt and used them to great effect in Too Long a Sacrifice: Life and Death in Northern Ireland Since 1969, published in 1981. His first novel, The Prisoner’s Wife (1982), explored the suffering endured by women when men engage in war.

  The most important woman in my father’s life was my mother, Mary Hudson, a formidable intellect in her own right, and a gifted linguist and teacher. They enjoyed a productive and happy thirty-year marriage, invaluable to each other both personally and professionally. Growing up, I was privy to countless discussions at the dinner table about how to develop this or that aspect of whatever book he was writing at the time. Misogyny, as well as most of his other books, was improved by her editing.

  Without her perseverance over the last two years, this book would have never seen the light of day. The US publisher with whom my father had a contract, and with whom he had closely collaborated throughout the writing process, oddly claimed after his death that the manuscript was not publishable. My mother knew this was untrue, and was determined that a home for the book should be found, because it was a story that had to be told. It is because of her resilience that this important and thought-provoking work will now reach its audience.

  We now live in an age that is relatively enlightened, when finally the phenomenon of misogyny has been identified not only as a source of oppression and injustice, but also as an obstacle to human development, and to social and economic progress. Yet on the whole women continue to be paid less than their male counterparts, and in the United States reproductive rights won decades ago are being eroded. True sexual equality still eludes us. And in many parts of the world, where issues of gender are compounded by poverty, ignorance, fundamentalism and disease, women’s lot has scarcely improved over the centuries.

  Jack Holland, my father, was acutely aware that such problems could not be solved by a single book, or indeed by many. But this book, his last, shall stand as an important tool in the struggle against the world’s oldest prejudice.

  INTRODUCTION

  her shaved head

  like a stubble of black corn

  her blindfold a bandage

  her noose a ring

  Seamus Heaney,

  ‘Punishment’ from

  North (1975)

  On 22 June 2002, in a remote area of the Punjab, a Pakistani woman named Mukhtaran Bibi was sentenced on the orders of a tribal council to be gang raped because allegedly her brother had been seen in the company of a higher-caste woman. Four men dragged her into a hut ignoring her pleas for mercy.

  ‘They raped me for one hour, and afterwards I was unable to move,’ she told reporters. Hundreds witnessed the sentencing but none offered to help.

  On 2 May 2002, Lee Sun-Ok, a defector from North Korea, testified before the House International Relations Committee in Washington DC about conditions in the Kaechon Women’s Prison in North Korea where some 80 per cent of the prisoners are housewives. She witnessed three women giving birth on a cement floor. ‘It was horrible to watch the prison doctor kicking the pregnant women with his boots. When a baby was born, the doctor shouted, “Kill it quickly. How can a criminal in the prison expect to have a baby?”’

  Nigeria, 2002. Amina Lawal was sentenced to death by stoning for having a child out of wedlock. She was sentenced to be buried up to her neck and rocks thrown at her head until her skull was crushed.

  Fayetteville, North Carolina. In Fort Bragg army base, over a period of just six weeks in the summer of 2003, four women died at the hands of their enraged husbands. One was stabbed more than fifty times by the man who once claimed he loved her.

  East Africa. In an area stretching from Egypt to Somalia, it is estimated that between 80 per cent and 100 per cent of all women have suffered genital mutilation. Some have fled to the United States seeking asylum. The women have argued that they are entitled to the same protection as refugees escaping political oppression. But the struggle in which they are engaged is far older than any campaign for national, political or civil rights.

  I grew up in Northern Ireland, a world away from the Punjab, North Korea and East Africa. But it was a place where the word ‘cunt’ expressed the worst form of contempt one person could feel for another. If you loathed or despised a person, ‘cunt’ said it all.

  The word was scrawled on the walls of rubbish-strewn back alleyways or in public toilets reeking of urine and faeces. Nothing was worse than being treated like a ‘cunt’ or nothing so stupid as a ‘stupid cunt’.

  Belfast, Northern Ireland, the city where I grew up, had its own peculiar hatreds. Its sectarian animosities over the years have made it a byword for violence and bloodshed. But there was one thing on which the warring communities of Catholics and Protestants could agree: the contemptible status of cunt.

  Belfast was little different in this way from other poor, industrialized parts of Britain where a mundane form of contempt for women, wife beating, was a fairly regular occurrence. Men would
step in to defend a dog from being kicked around by another man, but felt no obligation to do the same when faced with brutality being inflicted on a wife by her husband. Ironically, this was because of the ‘sacred’ status of the relationship between man and wife, which barred intervention.

  When political violence broke out in the late 1960s, misogynistic behaviour expressed itself more publicly. Catholic girls who dated British soldiers were dragged into the street, bound and held down (often by other women), while the men hacked and shaved off their hair, before pouring hot tar over them and sprinkling them with feathers. They were then tied to a lamp post to be gaped at by the nervous onlookers, with a sign hung around their necks on which was scrawled another sexual insult: ‘whore’.

  Perhaps we were imitating the French, to whom the English-speaking nations usually defer in matters sexual, having seen those news pictures as France was liberated of what befell women found guilty of going out with German soldiers. But we were also following the inner logic of our own powerful feelings, the same rage which we articulated with monosyllabic concision in the word ‘cunt’.

  It was a logic that had been articulated some 1,800 years earlier by Tertullian (AD 160–220), one of the founding fathers of the Catholic Church, who wrote:

  You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of Divine law. You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man.