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Medieval mindset is the mother of all misogyny
I am starting to write this on the 11th of the 11th 2018 as I witness the great and the good engage in some highly orchestrated pageantry to mark the end of a needless war that criminally cut short millions of lives. The big boys, and cousins to boot, were in a race to see who had the most powerful killing machines in sufficient quantities, to increase their presence on the global stage. The planning and stage management of this immoral war was a completely male affair. It would be laughable if it was not so tragic.
And yet, if gender equality existed then and now, in politics and leadership, the world would doubtless be a different place. In a chapter titled Women Actually do Govern Differently, in Wolf Whistle: The New Misogyny in America Today, Claire Miller draws on a variety of research that shows “women interrupt less (but are interrupted more), pay closer attention to other people’s nonverbal cues, and use a more democratic leadership style. The result is that women build coalitions and reach consensus more quickly…” What a lovely war they would have managed.
It has all being going on for rather a long time, and I for one am completely fed up. Whether you get your Book of Genesis from the Old Testament or from Milton’s Paradise Lost, the message has been ingrained in the human psyche since the dawn of human activity. In Paradise Lost, the bold Adam laments his folly: ‘Oh why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven / With spirits masculine, create at last / This novelty on earth, this fair defect / Of nature, and not fill the world at once / With men as angels without feminine;’ Just before leaving the Garden of Eden, the archangel Michael reassures Adam that he has relegated the sleeping and unsuspecting Eve to the fourth division: ‘all her spirits composed / To meek submission.’ Adam is now in charge, and with divine permission, he can drip feed Eve any knowledge and information as he sees fit. The rest, as they say, is history.
But where to begin? Professor Mary Beard, in her manifesto, Women and Power, brings us back to the classical worlds of ancient Greece and Rome as part of the “long back-story” of misogyny, or silencing of women. When you consider that education throughout the centuries was a male preserve and that the main facet of that education was a thorough grounding in the classics, it is not surprising that the privileged boys who grew into manly decision makers found it a challenge to think outside the classical model. Professor Beard recounts the tale of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, who orders his mother back to her quarters when she asks the bard to sing a happier tune. The son advises the mother to “take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.” It seems to me that Telemachus would find plenty of households in, for example, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he could seamlessly pick up where he left off thousands of years ago.
Professor Beard further reminds us of the importance attached to the deep male voice throughout ancient literature; “a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice.” On a more troubling and persistent note though, she insists that we have still, directly or indirectly, inherited this tradition of gendered speaking. It is a well-known fact that Margaret Thatcher took voice training to change a more high-pitched voice into a lower one with apparently more authority. While you ruminate on the wisdom or otherwise of Thatcher’s decision, I will explain why I am sorry that I gave Henry James the time of day when I was in university. I belatedly discovered that he was not a fan of the female voice. He worried that American women’s voices would turn language into a “generalised mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine”; something closer to “the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog.” I am very glad I never read a Henry James novel since I left university. My retrospective disgust at the nineteenth century novelist gathered momentum when I discovered that even Charles Dickens was an incorrigible misogynist. Could that explain the bloody and unnecessary demise of the blameless Nancy in Oliver Twist? He was involved with the Urania Cottage for the Redemption of Women – how philanthropic – which he believed would encourage “order and punctuality, cleanliness, and the whole routine of household duties – washing, mending, cooking…” I feel like tossing every novel penned by Henry James and Charles Dickens onto a large bonfire in the back garden, along with Paradise Lost.
After reading Professor Beard’s Women and Power, I turn to Mondays at Gaj’s: The Story of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement by Anne Stopper. In her research, Stopper unearthed some quotes from twentieth century Irish men that would have resonated in authoritative mellifluous baritone in your ancient forum or senate. One infamous example happened on a kamikaze live radio interview in the run up to the 1990 Irish presidential election, when Fianna Fail minister Padraig Flynn said of the candidate who would go on to win that she had “the new interest in family, being a mother and all that kind of thing. But none of us who knew Mary Robinson very well in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother.” Mention the name Mary Robinson in any social gathering today and a lively conversation will ensue; mention Padraig Flynn and everyone will say, “Padraig who?” I rest my case.
Remember, it was only in December 1975 that jury service in Ireland became open to anyone over eighteen who was on the register of electors. Up until then, Irish law had been in breach of the United Nations’ 1954 International Convention on the Political Rights of Women, a convention, incidentally, that Ireland had ratified in 1968. Maddeningly, women had been excluded from jury service by an Act of the Free State in 1927 whereby a woman could apply to be on jury service if she was a property owner. The road to 1975 was not without its throwbacks to less enlightened times. One male dissenter observed that “If a married woman returns to her home at seven o’clock in the evening and finds an irate husband and three hungry children waiting for her, we think it unlikely that they will accept the importance of jury service as a convincing excuse.” I close my eyes and picture that poor man, sitting on his hands, rocking back and forth, crying at the injustice of the equality of it all.
The Irish Women’s Liberation charter was called Chains or Change, and it is described by Stopper as “truly a milestone in the history of the women’s movement in Ireland.” For the first time a comprehensive compilation of the injustices the church, state and social code perpetuated against women was published. Let’s put it in perspective. When I was in sixth class in primary school in 1972, women couldn’t sit on juries, they couldn’t leave the country, collect the children’s allowance or open a bank account without a signature of permission from their husbands. They had no access to contraception or family planning services – hence no bodily autonomy over their reproductive organs, they were paid less than their male colleagues for doing the same work, they had to leave their jobs when they got married – and all of these gross injustices were created by and upheld by men in legal, medical, religious and political spheres.
In The War on Women: And the Brave Ones Who Fight Back, the late Sue-Lloyd Roberts reminds us that the belief that woman’s sexuality has to be controlled “is deeply entrenched in the history of mankind.” Even Charles Darwin, who apparently understood a thing or two about evolution, seemed to regress when it came to gender equality. In listing the advantages for a man of having a wife, he describes the unfortunate woman as “a constant companion (friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, an object to be beloved and played with – better than a dog anyhow – and someone to take care of the house.” French anthropologist, Gustave Le Bon, advised against providing the same education for girls and boys, and yes, you guessed correctly, the girls pulled the pedagogically short straw. In agreement with men across all of the professions in the nineteenth century, and of course all of the male run religions, he affirmed that women “excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.” His theory doubtless received uncritical acceptance in the male echo chamber that was nineteenth century academia.
But change was coming, albeit slowly. Emily Gibson is one of the intellectual women discussed in Knowing Their Place: The Intellectual Life of Women in the 19th Century, edited by Brendan Walsh. Gibson was one of the first Irish women to attend Girton College in Cambridge in 1869. I mention her specifically because she recorded in her diary that she was determined to avoid a “life of long, listless, idleness,” one step up from Darwin’s pampered dog, perhaps. Almost one hundred and fifty years later women in Saudi Arabia are still being sentenced to this trap, succinctly described by Sue-Lloyd Roberts. “The average Saudi male argues that a woman is ‘more comfortable’ and ‘privileged’ sitting in her luxurious home waited on by the Filipina maid and driven to the shopping mall by the Pakistani chauffeur.” Wahhabism, the dominant, ultra conservative sect in Saudi Arabia, she says, “treats women as perpetual minors and as mentally defective.”
Also, on this auspicious date I learn that the Irish Government is to fund dozens of women-only professorships over the next three years to help “eradicate gender inequality” in higher education institutions. Higher Education Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor wants 40% of professors to be female by 2024. Under her plan, up to 30 women-only professorships will be created at a cost of approximately €6 million over the next three years. Of course, there are the usual knee-jerk reactions on radio talk shows, the kind of reactions that are best ignored than responded to. In the history of humankind, mankind has held the power, called the shots, ‘managed’ things. The fact that equality is still being discussed is both astounding and disappointing.
If half of the population of a country are not allowed to grow and develop into fully functioning adults that means that your country can only do half as well as it could do. Most men Saudi Arabia would not countenance a female relative holding down a job. On the positive side, Saudi women are now allowed to drive. Again, Lloyd-Roberts reminds us that ever since the Virgin Mary set impossibly high standards (more accurately, twisted and unrealistic) men have been obsessed with the notion of fallen women, and I guess, with how to deal with said fallen women. In the fourth century, one of the early Church Fathers, St. Jerome, (who mysteriously only ever met exemplary men) wrote, “Woman is the root of all evil,” and indeed the idea of incarcerating ‘wayward’ or ‘fallen’ women would become enshrined in canon law in the thirteenth century, suggesting they should be “placed in convents with religious women, so that there they may perform perpetual penance.” As we all know, such incarcerations were institutionalised in Irish society in one of the most shameful episodes in Irish history – the pernicious Magdalene laundries, the last of which closed in 1996.
Misogyny is one of the most constantly repeated mistakes in history, a mistake made by generations of men who abused their positions of power. Even to this day, some employ the lame excuses of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ to explain away some medieval practices or mindsets. Female genital mutilation, genocide, infanticide, sororicide, rape, forced marriage, honour killings, official derogation in the form of denial of basic rights are all forms of control exerted over women and girls throughout history, and appallingly, this war of subordination and control is still being waged against women in some countries around the world, even in countries that describe themselves as democracies. While in the West it might be more a case of unconscious bias (not an excuse) in other parts of the world it is state sanctioned brutality to keep one gender in control.
If this piques your interest, you might also want to read:
The Glass Menagerie that Limits Womens' Career Prospects in the Groves of Academe
Paradise re-visited
© Berni Dwan 2018
Medieval mindset is the mother of all misogyny
I am starting to write this on the 11th of the 11th 2018 as I witness the great and the good engage in some highly orchestrated pageantry to mark the end of a needless war that criminally cut short millions of lives. The big boys, and cousins to boot, were in a race to see who had the most powerful killing machines in sufficient quantities, to increase their presence on the global stage. The planning and stage management of this immoral war was a completely male affair. It would be laughable if it was not so tragic.
And yet, if gender equality existed then and now, in politics and leadership, the world would doubtless be a different place. In a chapter titled Women Actually do Govern Differently, in Wolf Whistle: The New Misogyny in America Today, Claire Miller draws on a variety of research that shows “women interrupt less (but are interrupted more), pay closer attention to other people’s nonverbal cues, and use a more democratic leadership style. The result is that women build coalitions and reach consensus more quickly…” What a lovely war they would have managed.
It has all being going on for rather a long time, and I for one am completely fed up. Whether you get your Book of Genesis from the Old Testament or from Milton’s Paradise Lost, the message has been ingrained in the human psyche since the dawn of human activity. In Paradise Lost, the bold Adam laments his folly: ‘Oh why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven / With spirits masculine, create at last / This novelty on earth, this fair defect / Of nature, and not fill the world at once / With men as angels without feminine;’ Just before leaving the Garden of Eden, the archangel Michael reassures Adam that he has relegated the sleeping and unsuspecting Eve to the fourth division: ‘all her spirits composed / To meek submission.’ Adam is now in charge, and with divine permission, he can drip feed Eve any knowledge and information as he sees fit. The rest, as they say, is history.
But where to begin? Professor Mary Beard, in her manifesto, Women and Power, brings us back to the classical worlds of ancient Greece and Rome as part of the “long back-story” of misogyny, or silencing of women. When you consider that education throughout the centuries was a male preserve and that the main facet of that education was a thorough grounding in the classics, it is not surprising that the privileged boys who grew into manly decision makers found it a challenge to think outside the classical model. Professor Beard recounts the tale of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, who orders his mother back to her quarters when she asks the bard to sing a happier tune. The son advises the mother to “take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.” It seems to me that Telemachus would find plenty of households in, for example, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he could seamlessly pick up where he left off thousands of years ago.
Professor Beard further reminds us of the importance attached to the deep male voice throughout ancient literature; “a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice.” On a more troubling and persistent note though, she insists that we have still, directly or indirectly, inherited this tradition of gendered speaking. It is a well-known fact that Margaret Thatcher took voice training to change a more high-pitched voice into a lower one with apparently more authority. While you ruminate on the wisdom or otherwise of Thatcher’s decision, I will explain why I am sorry that I gave Henry James the time of day when I was in university. I belatedly discovered that he was not a fan of the female voice. He worried that American women’s voices would turn language into a “generalised mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine”; something closer to “the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog.” I am very glad I never read a Henry James novel since I left university. My retrospective disgust at the nineteenth century novelist gathered momentum when I discovered that even Charles Dickens was an incorrigible misogynist. Could that explain the bloody and unnecessary demise of the blameless Nancy in Oliver Twist? He was involved with the Urania Cottage for the Redemption of Women – how philanthropic – which he believed would encourage “order and punctuality, cleanliness, and the whole routine of household duties – washing, mending, cooking…” I feel like tossing every novel penned by Henry James and Charles Dickens onto a large bonfire in the back garden, along with Paradise Lost.
After reading Professor Beard’s Women and Power, I turn to Mondays at Gaj’s: The Story of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement by Anne Stopper. In her research, Stopper unearthed some quotes from twentieth century Irish men that would have resonated in authoritative mellifluous baritone in your ancient forum or senate. One infamous example happened on a kamikaze live radio interview in the run up to the 1990 Irish presidential election, when Fianna Fail minister Padraig Flynn said of the candidate who would go on to win that she had “the new interest in family, being a mother and all that kind of thing. But none of us who knew Mary Robinson very well in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother.” Mention the name Mary Robinson in any social gathering today and a lively conversation will ensue; mention Padraig Flynn and everyone will say, “Padraig who?” I rest my case.
Remember, it was only in December 1975 that jury service in Ireland became open to anyone over eighteen who was on the register of electors. Up until then, Irish law had been in breach of the United Nations’ 1954 International Convention on the Political Rights of Women, a convention, incidentally, that Ireland had ratified in 1968. Maddeningly, women had been excluded from jury service by an Act of the Free State in 1927 whereby a woman could apply to be on jury service if she was a property owner. The road to 1975 was not without its throwbacks to less enlightened times. One male dissenter observed that “If a married woman returns to her home at seven o’clock in the evening and finds an irate husband and three hungry children waiting for her, we think it unlikely that they will accept the importance of jury service as a convincing excuse.” I close my eyes and picture that poor man, sitting on his hands, rocking back and forth, crying at the injustice of the equality of it all.
The Irish Women’s Liberation charter was called Chains or Change, and it is described by Stopper as “truly a milestone in the history of the women’s movement in Ireland.” For the first time a comprehensive compilation of the injustices the church, state and social code perpetuated against women was published. Let’s put it in perspective. When I was in sixth class in primary school in 1972, women couldn’t sit on juries, they couldn’t leave the country, collect the children’s allowance or open a bank account without a signature of permission from their husbands. They had no access to contraception or family planning services – hence no bodily autonomy over their reproductive organs, they were paid less than their male colleagues for doing the same work, they had to leave their jobs when they got married – and all of these gross injustices were created by and upheld by men in legal, medical, religious and political spheres.
In The War on Women: And the Brave Ones Who Fight Back, the late Sue-Lloyd Roberts reminds us that the belief that woman’s sexuality has to be controlled “is deeply entrenched in the history of mankind.” Even Charles Darwin, who apparently understood a thing or two about evolution, seemed to regress when it came to gender equality. In listing the advantages for a man of having a wife, he describes the unfortunate woman as “a constant companion (friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, an object to be beloved and played with – better than a dog anyhow – and someone to take care of the house.” French anthropologist, Gustave Le Bon, advised against providing the same education for girls and boys, and yes, you guessed correctly, the girls pulled the pedagogically short straw. In agreement with men across all of the professions in the nineteenth century, and of course all of the male run religions, he affirmed that women “excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.” His theory doubtless received uncritical acceptance in the male echo chamber that was nineteenth century academia.
But change was coming, albeit slowly. Emily Gibson is one of the intellectual women discussed in Knowing Their Place: The Intellectual Life of Women in the 19th Century, edited by Brendan Walsh. Gibson was one of the first Irish women to attend Girton College in Cambridge in 1869. I mention her specifically because she recorded in her diary that she was determined to avoid a “life of long, listless, idleness,” one step up from Darwin’s pampered dog, perhaps. Almost one hundred and fifty years later women in Saudi Arabia are still being sentenced to this trap, succinctly described by Sue-Lloyd Roberts. “The average Saudi male argues that a woman is ‘more comfortable’ and ‘privileged’ sitting in her luxurious home waited on by the Filipina maid and driven to the shopping mall by the Pakistani chauffeur.” Wahhabism, the dominant, ultra conservative sect in Saudi Arabia, she says, “treats women as perpetual minors and as mentally defective.”
Also, on this auspicious date I learn that the Irish Government is to fund dozens of women-only professorships over the next three years to help “eradicate gender inequality” in higher education institutions. Higher Education Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor wants 40% of professors to be female by 2024. Under her plan, up to 30 women-only professorships will be created at a cost of approximately €6 million over the next three years. Of course, there are the usual knee-jerk reactions on radio talk shows, the kind of reactions that are best ignored than responded to. In the history of humankind, mankind has held the power, called the shots, ‘managed’ things. The fact that equality is still being discussed is both astounding and disappointing.
If half of the population of a country are not allowed to grow and develop into fully functioning adults that means that your country can only do half as well as it could do. Most men Saudi Arabia would not countenance a female relative holding down a job. On the positive side, Saudi women are now allowed to drive. Again, Lloyd-Roberts reminds us that ever since the Virgin Mary set impossibly high standards (more accurately, twisted and unrealistic) men have been obsessed with the notion of fallen women, and I guess, with how to deal with said fallen women. In the fourth century, one of the early Church Fathers, St. Jerome, (who mysteriously only ever met exemplary men) wrote, “Woman is the root of all evil,” and indeed the idea of incarcerating ‘wayward’ or ‘fallen’ women would become enshrined in canon law in the thirteenth century, suggesting they should be “placed in convents with religious women, so that there they may perform perpetual penance.” As we all know, such incarcerations were institutionalised in Irish society in one of the most shameful episodes in Irish history – the pernicious Magdalene laundries, the last of which closed in 1996.
Misogyny is one of the most constantly repeated mistakes in history, a mistake made by generations of men who abused their positions of power. Even to this day, some employ the lame excuses of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ to explain away some medieval practices or mindsets. Female genital mutilation, genocide, infanticide, sororicide, rape, forced marriage, honour killings, official derogation in the form of denial of basic rights are all forms of control exerted over women and girls throughout history, and appallingly, this war of subordination and control is still being waged against women in some countries around the world, even in countries that describe themselves as democracies. While in the West it might be more a case of unconscious bias (not an excuse) in other parts of the world it is state sanctioned brutality to keep one gender in control.
If this piques your interest, you might also want to read:
The Glass Menagerie that Limits Womens' Career Prospects in the Groves of Academe
Paradise re-visited
© Berni Dwan 2018
