A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Read Online Free PDF Page A

she snareth tall
Cities; and fire from out her eateth up
Houses. Such magic hath she, as a cup
Of death! 12
     
    Hecuba’s pleas are in vain. Menelaus both needs and desires Helen too much to punish her. He carries her back to Sparta where they resume their married life, while the other women, reduced to the status of the victors’ slaves, are left to lament their lost husbands, fathers, and sons.
    Like that of Pandora, the story of Helen is an allegory that inextricably links desire with death. In the Pandora story, her loss of virginity – the uncorking of the jar – lets death into the world, just as Paris’ desire for Helen brings war and all its horrors. Such allegories are expressions of what Sigmund Freud called ‘the eternal struggle between Eros and the destructiveor death instinct’ – Thanatos. 13 In the culture of contempt, women are made to feel overwhelming guilt because their beauty causes desire, starting the cycle of life and death.
    Other mythologies and cultures have mediated this complex dance of Eros and Thanatos but primarily as an inescapable act of life. In the mythology of the Celts, goddesses are typically identified with the principles of both life and death. These dual roles are not, however, seen dualistically; that is, as two principles of life and death, forever at war. The Celts portray their goddesses as unselfconsciously reconciling the forces of life and death in the way every mother does in reality: by bringing life into the world, she also brings death. This life/death reconciliation is, to them, simply in the nature of things, not a cause for blame or condemnation. But to the Greek dualistic mentality, nature embodies man’s limitations and weaknesses, and woman embodies nature. Woman serves as a constant and resented reminder of those limitations. This is the sin of Pandora and her daughters, for which misogyny, from its fairy tales to its philosophies, seeks to punish all women.
    ‘One constant rule of mythology,’ wrote the poet Robert Graves, ‘is that whatever happens among the gods above, reflects events on earth.’ 14 Relationships and attitudes which are given mythological sanction are usually reflected in laws and customs. During the sixth century BC , this became evident with the growth of democracy and city states such as Athens, which quickly developed restrictive codes to regulate women’s behaviour.
    To modern minds, the notion that the rise of democracy should lead to a diminishing of women’s status might seem to be something of a contradiction. But the notion of universal suffrage or even of equality, as it is understood now, did not inspire the democracies of Greece and Rome. They were slave-owning states where democratic rights were severely restrictedto adult male citizens. In a slave-owning economy, the idea that all people are born equal would have contradicted a blatant reality, one that was as self-serving as it was universal. Slavery was the ‘natural’ outcome of inherent inequalities. In a society where one form of gross inequality is institutionalized, it is easier for other forms of inequality to flourish as well.
    Laws regulating women’s behaviour and opportunities give the most graphic and pertinent examples of how Hesiod’s allegory of misogyny became a social fact. Legally speaking, Athenian women remained children, always under the guardianship of a male. A woman could not leave the house unless accompanied by a chaperone. She seldom was invited to dinner with her husband and lived in a segregated area of the house. She received no formal education: ‘Let a woman not develop her reason, for that would be a terrible thing,’ said the philosopher Democritus. Women were married when they reached puberty, often to men twice their age. Such a difference in age and maturity, as well as in education, would have enhanced the notion of women’s inferiority. The husband was warned: ‘He who teaches letters to his wife is ill advised: he’s