A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland Read Free Book Online

philosophically respectable, Aristotle (384–322 BC ), Plato’s pupil, made itscientifically respectable. Because much of Aristotle’s science appears to the modern mind as ludicrous, it is easy to forget that his doctrines dominated Western thinking about the world for close to 2,000 years. It was not until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century that his ideas were overthrown. ‘Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine,’ observed Bertrand Russell. 32
    Aristotle has been described as one of the most ferocious misogynists of all time. His views on women take two forms: scientific and social. Although at times Aristotle was a precise observer of the natural world – his descriptions of various species impressed Charles Darwin – his observations of women were decidedly warped. As a sign of women’s inferiority, he referenced the fact that they did not grow bald – ‘proof of their more childlike nature. He also claimed that women had fewer teeth than men, about which Bertrand Russell is said to have commented: ‘Aristotle would never have made this mistake if he had allowed his wife to open her mouth once in a while.’ 33
    Aristotle introduced the concept of purpose as fundamental to science. The purpose of things, including all living things, is to become what they are. In the absence of any knowledge of genetics, or of evolution, Aristotle saw purpose as the realization of each thing’s potential to be itself. In a sense, this is a materialistic version of Plato’s Theory of Forms: there is an Ideal Fish of which all the actual fishes are different realizations. The ideal is their purpose.
    When applied to human beings, notably to women, this has unfortunate but predictable results; it becomes a justification of inequality rather than an explanation for it. The most pernicious example is seen in Aristotle’s theory of generation.This assumes different purposes for men and women: ‘the male is by nature superior and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; the principle of necessity extends to all mankind.’ Therefore, according to Aristotle, the male semen must carry the soul or spirit, and all the potential for the person to be fully human. The female, the recipient of the male seed, provides merely the matter, the nutritive environment. The male is the active principle, the mover, the female the passive, the moved. The full potential of the child is reached only if it is born male; if the ‘cold constitution’ of the female predominates, through an excess of menstrual fluid in the womb, then the child will fail to reach its full human potential and the result is female. ‘For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male,’ Aristotle concludes. 34
    Much of Aristotle’s discussion of women takes place in the context of his treatment of slaves. Slaves, like women, are purposed by nature to be the way they are. Aristotle argues, however, that slaves lack the ‘deliberative faculty’, whereas this
is
granted to women. Nonetheless, this faculty is ‘without authority’. Obedience is seen as a woman’s natural state, in which she achieves her purpose. And women and slaves are similar in one important respect: their inferiority to their ruler – a master in the slave’s case, and a husband in the woman’s – is permanent and unchanging.
    The consequences of seeing females as mutilated males could be heard at night, in the world of Classical Antiquity, when newborns’ cries disrupted the silence. ‘If – good luck to you! – you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is female, expose it,’ wrote Hilarion to his wife Alis, in 1 BC , testifying to a custom that lasted until Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. 35 Unwanted infants were abandoned on rubbish dumps. The majority of those exposed were deformed or