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

sickly males or ‘mutilated males’ (babygirls). It was such a common practice that the cries of the abandoned babies are unlikely to have disturbed the citizens’ repose. Archaeologists studying burial remains in Athens of the seventh century BC made the startling discovery that there were twice as many men as women interred in the plots. By 18 BC , the historian Dio Cassius was lamenting that there were not enough women for upper class men to marry. Females, one scholar wrote, were ‘selectively eliminated’. When combined with high mortality rates during childbirth and abortion, this practice ensured that men always outnumbered women, in significant ratios. 36 But not all the exposed daughters died. Because abandoned infants were automatically reduced to slave status, brothel owners frequented dumps, searching for baby girls to raise as prostitutes. We will never know how many millions of Pandora’s daughters ended up on the rubbish dumps of Greece and Rome – some dying of hunger and cold; others, more ‘fortunate’, destined for a life of prostitution.
    A population imbalance in favour of men has been associated with lower social status for women. Today, we find this in parts of India and China, where the selective abortion of female foetuses has meant fewer women than men, and women’s status suffers accordingly. Women become ‘scarce goods’ and are confined to the narrow roles of marriage and child-rearing.
    Where females outnumber males, on the other hand, they enjoy a corresponding rise in status. 37 Sparta has been cited as proof of this phenomenon. The victor of the Peloponnesian War, and the model for Plato’s Republic, Sparta was something of an anomaly: It practised infanticide, but did not discriminate between males and females, only between healthy and sickly babies. All healthy babies were raised and, since males tend to be sicklier than females at birth and have morecomplications, fewer females were exposed than males. The fact that Sparta was a militaristic state and frequently at war further drastically increased the male mortality rate. Moreover, Spartan women married at an older age than was typical at that time, so they had a better chance of surviving pregnancy. Because women were expected to be strong in order to be fit mothers of Spartan warriors, their health was of concern to the state. To the horror, and no doubt fascination, of the rest of Greece, they exercised naked, took part in athletic games, and generally tended to be stronger and fitter.
     
Dear Spartan girl with a delightful face,
Washed with the rosy spring, how fresh you look,
In the easy stride of your sleek slenderness.
Why, you could strangle a bull. 38
     
    Much to the outrage of Aristotle and other conventional moralists, Spartan women even wore short, revealing tunics. They were able to inherit their husband’s property and manage it. By the fourth century BC they possessed two-fifths of all Spartan land. The result was a seeming paradox – a militaristic society where women enjoyed greater freedoms and higher status than in Athens, the home of democracy.
    Sparta faded into oblivion, its treatment of women cited only as an unnatural folly. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, survived to become the twin pillars of philosophic and scientific thinking in the Western world, supporting the massive edifice of Christianity. Plato’s Theory of Forms, with its inherent contempt for the physical world, and Aristotle’s biological dualism, in which females were seen as failed males, provided the intellectual apparatus for the centuries of misogyny that were to follow.

WOMEN AT THE GATES:
MISOGYNY IN ANCIENT ROME
     
    Roman women were the Greek male nightmare come true. They defied the misogynistic dictate (attributed to the Athenian statesman Pericles) that a good woman is one who is not talked about, even in praise. Obeying this had consigned the good women of fifth-century BC Athens to complete oblivion; today, not a