A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (5 page)

Solon imposed further restrictions on women: he circumscribed their appearance at funerals (where traditionally they had provided contingents of paid mourners) and at feasts, as well as limiting their public displays of wealth. In addition, they were banned from buying or selling land. Solon also enacted a law forcing a woman without brothers, on the death of her father, to marry his nearest male relative. The sons born of that marriage would inherit any land. In this way, woman became ‘the vehicle through which the property was kept within the family’.
¹⁸
Even after her marriage, an Athenian woman remained under the control of her father, who retained
the power to divorce her from her husband and wed another if he decided that it was advantageous. Another law attributed to Solon forbade any Athenian citizen from enslaving another Athenian citizen (the enslavement of non-citizens was allowed) with one notable exception: a father or head of the household had the right to sell his unmarried daughter into slavery if she lost her virginity before marriage.

Having ensured that the ‘good’ girls were safe from any taint of sexual indiscretion, it was necessary to supply the ‘bad’ girls to cater for men’s sexual appetites. Solon legalized state brothels, staffed by slaves and aliens. While the good girls composed a single category (wives cum mothers), the bad girls were graded from the high-maintenance
hetaera
– the equivalent of the mistress – to the low-end street walker, who could be picked up for a few dollars near the city dumps where people went to defecate. The whore’s sexuality was a public convenience; she was viewed in terms of a sewer that drained off men’s lust.
¹⁹

‘We have
hetaerae
for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs, and wives to give us legitimate children and look after the housekeeping,’ Demosthenes, the greatest of the Athenian orators, is reported to have said. This demarcation associating female virtue with sexlessness has been used to dehumanize women to this day.

It is not surprising, given the number of boundaries circumscribing women, that men developed something of an obsession with women as boundary-crossers. This fascination is graphically illustrated by the Greek interest in the Amazons, the legendary tribe of warrior women who invaded the most male of sanctuaries, organized warfare. The Amazons are a recurring presence in Greek history; this theme has persisted down to modern times. First mentioned by the fifth-century historian Herodotus (the ‘father’ of history), they were depicted
as dwelling on the borderlands of civilization, devoted solely to warfare; they sought men only when they needed to mate, and exposed all their male babies, rearing only the females. They are the mirror image of patriarchal Athens. With the Amazons, the fantasy of the autonomous male meets its nightmare opposite, the autonomous female.

Men’s fascination with warrior women has a long history, from Classical Athens to today’s comic book heroine Wonder Woman and professional women wrestlers. The Amazons are like these wrestlers in that their combat is fantasy. But for men the fascination, edged with anxiety, is real. Among the Athenians, it reached obsessive proportions. Representations of battles between men and Amazons are among the most popular depictions of women in Antiquity. Over 800 examples survive, the bulk of them Athenian in origin.
²⁰
They decorate everything from temples to vases and drinking bowls. Wherever a citizen looked, his eye would inevitably fall on a scene showing a man, sword or spear raised, hauling a woman by her hair off a horse; or stabbing and clubbing her to death, a javelin pointed at her nipple, as invariably her tunic slips to reveal a breast, and her short skirt rolls up to reveal her thighs. The greatest temple in Athens, the Parthenon, was erected in 437
BC
to honour Athena, the city’s ruling deity, and to celebrate the Greek victory over Persian invaders. But the battle scene chosen to decorate the shield of Athena was not based on any historical event. It was a depiction of the legendary victory of the hero Theseus, the mythological founder of the city, over an invading army of Amazons. The popularity of this scene cannot be explained merely by the fact that it was the only theme that allowed the artist to portray women naked or partially naked. (Convention in fifth-century Athens permitted only men to be depicted nude.) The scene reoccurs with the repetitiousness of pornography.
But like pornography, the repetition cannot assuage the urge and the anxiety that lies behind it.
²¹

Male anxiety about women boundary-crossers manifests itself most powerfully and memorably in Greek tragedy. All the tragedies that have survived were written by Athenian playwrights during one relatively brief period of the fifth century. Only one of them, Sophocles’
Philoctetes
, has no woman character. The titles of over half of all the tragedies include either a woman’s name or some other female reference.
²²
Women were centre-stage and in a state of ferocious rebellion.

The tragedies nearly always take their characters and much of their plotting from the epics of Homer and his Bronze Age heroes, heroines and villains. It is as if modern novelists followed a convention which obliged them to base all their characters and plots on the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Questions have therefore been raised about how much these dramas can tell us about the lives and problems of real women. However, the question is not how accurately they reflect the behaviour of real women but how truly they express society’s anxieties about relationships between men and women. No one has doubted that they do.
²³

In Euripides’
Medea
, the eponymous heroine slaughters her children to take revenge on her husband, the Greek mythological hero Jason, when he abandons her to marry another woman. In Aeschylus’
Agamemnon
, Clytemnestra takes a lover when her husband sails for Troy; she assumes state power and murders him when he returns. In Sophocles’
Electra
, Agamemnon’s daughter goads her hesitating brother Orestes into revenging their father’s death by murdering their mother Clytemnestra.
Antigone
is the story of a woman who defies her uncle Creon, the king, to bury her brother, when he has forbidden it on pain of death. She pays for her rebellion by being walled up alive. Euripides’
The Bacchae
tells how the
women worshippers of the orgiastic wine-god Dionysus are transformed into Amazons. They rampage around the countryside, sack villages for plunder, defeat a contingent of soldiers in battle, and in ecstatic frenzy, tear King Pentheus limb from limb, when he tries to spy on their activities.

The tragedy in each case results when women defy the patriarchal order, breaking temporarily free from the confinement that it imposes upon them. The women do so while asserting the claims of ‘nature’. Their rebellion is often in the name of the family, which predates, and supersedes, the demands of the state. ‘We’ll have no woman’s law here while I live,’ Creon asserts when Antigone declares that her love for her brother obliges her to bury him decently, in defiance of the law.
²⁴

In rebellion, the tragic heroines cross the boundary between what is acceptable female behaviour and what is not, thereby becoming masculine, even Amazon-like. As Antigone challenges the law, Ismene warns her defiant sister: ‘We were born women . . . we were not meant to fight with men.’
²⁵

The message is mixed, if not contradictory. While the playwrights often convey sympathy with women for the suffering and the oppression that goads them into rebellion, the resulting violence and savagery reinforces the underlying anxiety that women are wild and irrational creatures, eruptions of nature who are a threat to the civilized order created by men. This expresses itself in one of the most powerful pieces of misogyny ever penned: In Euripides’
Hippolyta
, Hippolytus declaims:

Go to hell! I’ll never have my fill of hating
Women, not if I’m said to talk without ceasing,
For women are also unceasingly wicked.
Either someone should teach them to be sensible,
Or let me trample them underfoot.
²⁶

While the injustices that women suffer are recognized, so is the necessity for maintaining the patriarchal order that perpetrates them.

The sense of woman as ‘the Other’, the antithesis of man, emerges powerfully from the dramas. This sexual dualism has been a characteristic of Western civilization ever since, partly thanks to Plato and Aristotle, who gave it philosophical and scientific expression.

Plato (429–347
BC
) has been called the most influential of all philosophers – ancient, medieval, or modern. His ideas about the nature of the world have spread wherever Western civilization and its most crusading catalyst, Christianity, have taken root, shaping the intellectual and spiritual development of continents and nations that were undiscovered or unexplored at the time those ideas were formulated. Plato’s contribution to the history of misogyny is a by-product of this extraordinary impact but it is, in some ways, a paradoxical one.

Some have hailed Plato as the first feminist because in
The Republic
, his vision of Utopia, he advocated that women receive the same education as men. At the same time, however, his dualistic vision of the world represents a turning away from the realm of ordinary, mutable existence. This existence he held was an illusion and a distraction to be scorned by the wise man. It included marriage and procreation, lowly pursuits with which he identifies women.
²⁷
He himself never married, and exalted the ‘pure’ love of men for men higher than the love of men for women, which he placed closer to animal lust. His is a familiar enough dualism – identifying man with spirituality and woman with carnal appetites. But Plato gave it a kind of philosophic fire-power never seen before.

No philosopher’s speculations take place in a vacuum; however abstract or obtuse the thought, there are circumstances, real enough, to help explain it. ‘Plato was the child of a
time that is still our own,’ wrote Karl Popper.
²⁸
His search for a higher, more perfect world beyond that of the senses took place against the background of years of starvation, plague, repression, censorship, and civil bloodshed. The events that shook the Greek world when Plato was a young man profoundly shaped him. Born into a wealthy Athenian family, he grew up during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta that lasted almost continuously from 431
BC
to 404
BC.
Few wars have had such long-term consequences. The impact of the Peloponnesian War on Greece can be compared with that of the First World War on Europe. It led to the ruin of Athens and its empire. It brought about the end of one of the most extraordinary periods of intellectual and artistic achievement that civilization has ever enjoyed. It exhausted Greece, paving the way for conquest first by the Macedonians, and then by Rome. In the turmoil and confusion that followed defeat, a vengeful democratic regime forced Plato’s beloved mentor Socrates (469–399
BC
) to commit suicide. The Peloponnesian War profoundly influenced Plato’s view of the world – this alone makes it a turning point in history. It bred in him a profound distrust, and indeed contempt, for democracy.

When Plato envisioned the first Utopia, it was as a totalitarian state, rigidly ruled by a permanent elite, the Guardians, with an underclass whose only role was to maintain society’s economic and agricultural basis. In the world of
The Republic
, frivolous pleasures such as love poetry and dancing are forbidden. The Guardians are allowed no wealth, and no form of personal adornment such as make-up. Plato, who viewed the body as essentially evil, often voices contempt for the mutable world of the senses.
²⁹
In the
Symposium
he calls personal beauty a ‘trifle’, and speaks of ‘the pollution of mortality’. ‘So when the current of a man’s desires flows towards knowledge
and the like,’ he asserts in
The Republic
, ‘his pleasure will be entirely in things of the mind, and physical pleasures will pass him by – that is, if he is a genuine philosopher and not a sham.’ Nothing must be allowed that will distract the elite from contemplating Absolute Beauty and Absolute Goodness – surely a recipe, if ever there was one, for Absolute Dullness.

All of Plato’s work takes the form of dialogues between Socrates and his pupils. In
The Republic
, Socrates advocates the integration of selected women into the ruling elite (the Guardians) with responsibilities equal to those of men, based on his claim that women and men differ only in their biological roles and physical strength. They will be trained and educated alongside their male compatriots. Men and women Guardians ‘will live and feed together, and have no private home or property’.
³⁰
Mutual attraction between men and women Guardians is inevitable but ‘it would be a sin either for mating or for anything else in our ideal society to take place without regulation. The Rulers would not allow it.’ The aim is ‘to have a real pedigree herd’ so the best must breed with the best. The offspring of their unions will be taken away from their mothers immediately upon birth and reared in a communal nursery. The mothers will be spared the time-consuming and exhausting business of breast-feeding their babies. State nurses will do that for them. ‘No parent should know his child, or child his parent.’ By eliminating private property there will be no need for the father to know his son, since there will be nothing to inherit.