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

giving additional poison to a snake.’ 15
    A husband’s adultery was not considered grounds for divorce. (This view prevailed in England up until 1923, a reflection of how deeply the classics permeated upper-class English culture.) But if a woman committed adultery or was raped, her husband was obliged to divorce her or lose his citizenship. With these threats, women in the world’s first democracy were worse off than in the autocracy of ancient Babylon. There, under the laws of King Hammurabi compiled in 1750 BC , the husband of a woman convicted of adultery at least had the power to pardon her.
    Having consensual sex with another man’s wife in ancient Greece was regarded as a more serious offence than raping her.During the trial of a husband accused of murdering his wife’s lover, the clerk of the court reads from the laws of Solon (the great Athenian lawgiver of the sixth century BC ) regarding rape:
     
Thus, members of the jury, the lawgiver considered violators deserving of a lesser penalty than seducers: for the latter he provided the death penalty; for the former, the doubled fine. His idea was that those who use force are loathed by the persons violated, whereas those who have got their way by persuasion corrupt women’s minds, in such a way as to make other men’s wives more attached to themselves than to their husbands, so that the whole house is in their power, and it is uncertain who is the children’s father, the husband or the lover. 16
     
    The defence of the husband was that he had the right to kill his wife’s lover because he had caught them
in flagrante.
A raped woman suffered the same penalties as one accused of adultery, and was forbidden to take part in public ceremonies or to wear jewellery. As in many conservative Moslem societies today, the rape victim was regarded as responsible for her own violation. She became a social outcast, a terrible fate in the small, close-knit community of the city state. 17
    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 retainedthe 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