Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.—Albert Einstein
Forty years ago when I was in college, I read a feminist history called The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971). Davis’s goal was to take another look at history and put a feminist spin on humanity’s past. Her most infamous theory is that of prehistoric matriarchies, but Gould also describes many prehistoric and historic events retold from a what-if-women-were-really-there perspective. Early on in her book, as I recall, Davis announces that she’s not going to be “fair” in her review of the role of women in history and prehistory. After all, she argued, for her whole life the past has been reported through the biased eyes of men. It was about time to hear another bias. That sounded fair to me at the time, and gave me the freedom to accept, question, or discard Davis’s interpretations as seemed reasonable to me.
At the same time I was taking Art History and Architecture classes, Physical Anthropology, and cultural Anthropology classes from male instructors. In a (terrible) physical Anthro class, the instructor (a grad student whose thesis concerned the dental patterns of chimps) was talking about early man. He began a statement with: “When these ancient men went off to hunt and the women stayed by the campfire to tend the children…”
I interrupted. “How do you know the women stayed home and only men hunted?”
For a moment he was nonplussed—perhaps because he didn’t think a student should question him, perhaps because he’d never considered the accuracy of this particular scenario. Finally he answered: “Look at primitive cultures today.”
“You are saying that societies have remained stable through tens of thousands of years?” And further, while few cave paintings show human figures at all, some showing people hunting clearly indicate that some of the hunters are male, some female.
This man constructed a scenario based on common sense about how men and women “naturally” act, are capable of acting, and have acted throughout time. Collectively, that’s a stretch.
I’m reading Jack Holland’s nonfiction work called Misogyny, which presents its own assumptions about the behavior of men and women. Holland complains twice—in the introduction and again in the last chapter—that people assume, as a man, that he is writing to justify misogyny. He is not. He documents the long history of hatred of women in the west—rape, torture, systematic disenfranchisement of women from human rights—the infamous “whore-madonna” complex of regarding women as either sexual vessels lacking humanity or as sexless icons of purity. He blames the Greeks and the Catholic church and later Christians for this pattern. From the first page it’s pretty distressing material and Holland is as horrified as his readers.
Holland was dying while he finished the book and his wife and daughter were the ones to complete the final edit and fight for publication. It’s an important book and many of the stories will be new to most readers. How we treat half the world’s population matters, how we handle our power, how we exploit the less powerful, how we overcome prejudice and hatred—these are all important issues. I say Holland’s task matters because while football coaches routinely insult their players by calling them girls and most of my colleagues assume that men are stronger, smarter, more aggressive, and naturally in charge, my students are mostly unaware that the term “misogyny” exists. They should know how women have been treated. It should sicken and anger them all, whether they are boys or girls.
Still, I find this book disappointing in a few details and maybe that’s because I am teaching the persuasive essay this term and I want to send him back to revise for balance. I’m interested in his thesis, but I want him to acknowledge that the world is not so simple, not so black and white. Women have been treated as more than streetwalkers or virgins. Women have managed, despite the odds to contribute to the world, not merely suffer through life. Holland cherry-picks (forgive the pun) the examples that support his theory that misogyny has always been with us, pervasively poisoning the minds of men. He must know nastier men than I do. He also, at times, seems to know less. And one quarrel I have is his use of the classics.
For example, in discussing the classic Greek plays he sets the comedies aside and focuses on the tragedies. Women have no role in them. Or, wait, there is Antigone, featuring, well, Antigone, a daughter of the dead Oedipus. Holland dismisses her as the hero of her tale by using the words of her uncle King Creon that do sound like what Holland is talking about—women’s concerns are denigrated and demeaned. Trouble is, the play isn’t about misogyny and it isn’t misogynistic. Antigone is jealous of her virtue, but hers is a play about destiny, honor, and dilemma. It’s not about choosing between some female notion of how to behave toward relatives as opposed to how men behave responsibly toward the state, but about unjust laws, about choosing whether to honor unjust laws of the State or natural law. Creon is the arrogant fool here and realizes at the end, “I am the guilty cause” of the continuation of the curse upon his family. Antigone chooses to defy an unjust law and follow God’s, and most analysts assume that hers is the morally correct choice. She’s going to suffer either way, however she chooses, of course—either in life for failing to bury her brother or after death for failing in her duty to family—because this is Greek tragedy we’re talking about, not some simple modern choice with a happy ending.
In another Greek example, Holland’s version of the Sabine women leaves out the most interesting details. The early Romans were short of women and the neighboring Sabines refused to allow intermarriage. In the ancient version of the story, Romans abduct (the meaning of the Latin verb raptio) Sabine women, offering them marriage and a share of property, civil rights, and freedom for their children. The women choose to stay, or perhaps not. In any event, while the Sabine men do attempt to recover or rescue their women, this is many years later. Whether they had any choice at the beginning, the Sabine women had by then become partners and parents. They are no longer Sabine women, but Romans. Ultimately, when Sabine soldiers attack their Roman men, these women tear hair and clothing and stand before the Romans who are their sons and husbands and defy the Sabines to harm their countrymen. It is a story of a bargain on the part of the Romans, neglect and vengeance on the part of the Sabines, and absolute courage and dignity on the part of the “raped” Sabine women. As a woman I appreciate the complete story.
I’m all in favor of recording injustice in the past. It’s a necessary step in righting injustice in the present, but so far, what I see is a man trying to prove that women have been victims for the past few thousand years and I guess after spending my life as a feminist, I’m tired of hearing about abuses. Some men don’t actually like women, some women don’t like women. Some men are misogynists and some women are victims. I already know this. I’m more interested in hearing about people who don’t view being female as a disease or a fate worse than death. I’m more interesting in the exceptions. I wish he’d talked about the Minoan empire, which is still largely a mystery, but has left behind the ruins of palaces and artifacts that suggest a seafaring and trading culture with little history of warfare, goddess images, and surviving images of acrobatics involving bulls and athletes who are both men and women. I had an architecture professor who delighted in showing the views from the ruins of these palaces—always a nearby rounded hill with a distant twin-peaked mountain, the belly and breast of a woman—powerful female symbols. Over a dozen ruins. Three twin-pointed peaks. Is this proof of a time when women’s interests had sway? Maybe not, but it’s a welcome relief from the nonstop news of the torture, rape, and brutality many women suffered.
When my older son was in Fourth Grade, his entire class went on a lengthy overnight fieldtrip to explore historical locations of Oregon. One stop was the interpretive center at Champoeg Park, near Silverton, Oregon, which was a pre-contact trading center and then, in the 1840s, an American fort and trading center for whites. The ranger delivered his spiel and it was obvious that the man had had training about acknowledging the contributions of Indians to the history of the site.
One little girl in the class tugged my sleeve. “Why isn’t he talking about the women?” she asked. “You ask,” I told her. And she did.
His answer: “We have no evidence that there were any women here at that time.”
Oh my, after all that training about racial sensitivity he failed to recognize that he should have said “white women,” and he still would have been wrong, since there had been Indian women here for at least 14,000 years, and white women had arrived by the early 1800s. The next day outside Bend we read photocopies of letters written to and from white women who settled in Oregon at about that time.
Although white women were not evenly represented among the early American settlers in Oregon, by all reports they were treated with respect by men of all races. Oregon became the seventh U.S. state to grant women suffrage in 1912. From the beginning, women ranched, rodeoed, farmed, ran businesses, and even performed legal abortions until well into the twentieth century. To judge by Holland’s book this freedom to pursue an active and safe, not to mention equitable life in the West should have been nearly impossible.
Sometimes the woman-as-victim is a matter of perspective and assumption. To some extent, Holland is inadvertently reinforcing stereotypes and failing to offer anything new. In his conclusion he makes a remark illustrating what I'm writing about.
“Long before men invented the wheel, they invented misogyny” (270). Holland knows that it was men who invented the wheel? Can he document this?
Eli Whitney is still getting credit for inventing the cotton gin in 1794. Maybe he didn’t do it alone. There are some who believe it was his cousin, Catherine Littlefield Greene, who handed her solution to a problem in the gin to Whitney because women were not eligible to apply for patents. There are many other and more widely acknowledged examples of women’s work in the sciences going unrecognized. It was Dr. Rosalind Franklin who actually discovered the now familiar double helical structure of DNA, though she was not credited when the Nobel was handed out to three male co-researchers who gained access to her discovery without her knowledge. Am I more interested in a woman being beaten or in learning that despite everything, women have managed to make a difference in the world?
Harvard psychology professor, Steven Pinker reminds us that “equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of people are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged by the average properties of their group” (282). In practice, I believe this means that we must revaluate our assumptions not only of what men and women have done in the past, but of what they are capable of doing and how they are capable of behaving.
What Holland does is document millennia of abuse of women. In the process I can’t help feeling he may have lost sight of the goal—assuming his goal was to improve the behavior of men towards women. There’s a danger as he argues that misogyny is “pervasive, persistent, pernicious, and protean,” of also making it sound inevitable rather than contemptible. It’s not enough to describe abuse. It is never enough to tell us what not to do: dystopian cruelty and bald unwarrantable usurpation.
Show us our better nature. Show us how we should be.
