A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (11 page)

The strain of Jewish misogyny already had a long history by the time it was absorbed into Christian teaching. But it would have remained largely irrelevant to the rest of the world had it not been for the events of the mid-first century
AD
concerning an obscure prophet named Jesus. What seemed like just another split within the always contentious ranks of Judaism attracted little attention at the time. Had there been headlines, they would have been claimed instead by the bloody fall of Sejanus, the Emperor Tiberius’ favourite, and the resulting turmoil within the Roman ruling elite; what took place in Judaea would not have been worth even a sound bite. However, thanks to Christianity’s extraordinary triumph over the ensuing centuries, a handful of proverbs and practices belonging to a small and politically insignificant nation have achieved almost universal status. The myth of creation as told in Genesis is now central to the belief of two billion Christians in 260 countries – that is, one-third of the world’s population have inherited a myth that blames woman for the ills and sufferings of mankind.

Unlike Greek misogyny, the Jewish version remained, as did Jewish religion, at the level of proverb, parable and practice. Instead of philosophy, the Jews had extensive commentary and interpretation of the sacred texts. But the similarities in both the creation and Fall of Man myths are clear. As in the Greek myth, in the Jewish tradition God creates the first man, Adam, as an autonomous being who lives a happy, contented existence in the Garden of Eden. His only communion is with the divine. Eve, like Pandora, is an afterthought. She is created from Adam’s rib because God thought he required ‘an help’. And, as with her Greek equivalent Pandora, Eve is disobedient, ignoring God’s instruction not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. ‘The serpent did beguile me and I did eat,’ Eve confesses rather nonchalantly (Genesis, 3:13).

The God of the Old Testament proves every bit as vindictive as Zeus. He tells Eve:

‘And I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; and in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children and thy desire shall be for thy husband and he shall rule over thee’ (Genesis, 3:16).

The message for Adam is clear. ‘And I shall put enmity between thee and the woman,’ God tells him in what turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (Genesis, 3:15).

The moral universe of Judaism differed profoundly from that of the Classical world in ways which, through Christianity, would deeply affect the development of misogyny. It was dominated by a sense of sin, a concept unknown to the neighbouring Greeks and Romans. Zeus and his fellow divinities held gripes and grudges against individual mortals, but with the exception of the punishment inflicted on mankind for Prometheus’ overweening ambition (see
Chapter 1
), rarely do they threaten to punish the world because of this or that violation. But Jehovah took offence easily, saw sin everywhere
and throughout much of the Old Testament sits in heaven with his finger, metaphorically, on the nuclear button.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.’ (Genesis, 6:7)

He was as good as his word on at least one occasion, flooding the world and drowning the whole human race, save for Noah and his family, intending them to repopulate the world.

Along with sin came a sense of shame of the human body, something completely alien to the world of the Greeks and Romans. Shame strikes as the very first consequence of Eve’s transgression: ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons’ (Genesis, 3:7). Passing from the Jewish tradition into Christianity, shame took a firm grip on human sexuality. To a surprising extent, it has not yet relinquished this hold. It gave misogyny a new and destructive dimension.

Linked to shame was the Jewish belief, which the Christians inherited as well, that sex was for procreation, not recreation. Among the Romans, moral reformers, no doubt reflecting on the futility of their own efforts to get Roman men and women to behave themselves, admired the moral strictness of Jewish family life. Adultery was punished severely, with both the adulterer and the adulteress being stoned to death. As we also learn in Deuteronomy (22:20–21), loss of virginity incurred the death penalty for unmarried women:

But if this thing be true and the tokens of virginity be not found, for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door
of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel to play the whore in her father’s house: so shall thou put evil away from among you.

Homosexuality was forbidden, as was any wasteful spilling of man’s seed, including sodomy, masturbation and oral sex. Not a drop could be spared from the business of begetting.

Apart from the magnificent poetry of the Song of Solomon, the Old Testament is harsh and bleak in its attitude to human sexuality, and almost always hostile towards women. The God of the Old Testament sits gloomily aloft and alone, a brooder whose emotional range is usually restricted to jealousy and anger. The beauty of the beings he has created does not usually fill him with pride, and never with desire. Unlike the divinities of Mount Olympus, he is devoid of love or even lust. He is a master of the psychology of revenge, forever eager to chastise and punish his chosen people for breaking one of the 613 laws that governed all aspects of their daily life; or ready to smite their enemies and prepare the way for the Day of Judgement when the righteous Jews will be saved and the rest of humankind cast down into the flames of perdition.

The Jews shared with their pagan neighbours the premise that the moral health of the nation depended to a large extent on the virtue of its women. The most bitter outbursts from the Jewish God against women come when they indulge in a fondness for finery. This is deemed an act of rebellion against God.

Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:

Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts.

In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon.

The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers.

The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings.

The rings and nose jewels.

The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins.

The glasses and the fine linens, and the hoods and the vails.

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. (Isaiah, 3:16–24)

The God of the Old Testament was remarkable, if not unique, among divinities, in being both grandiose and extraordinarily petty, one minute creating the universe, the next making women’s hair fall out.

In Ezekiel God goes even further than threatening to give women a bad hair day. Women accused of idolatry, as well as adultery and harlotry with Assyrians and Egyptians whom they allow to press and fondle their bosoms shall ‘drink a cup of horror and desolation . . .’

And I will set my jealousy against thee, and they shall deal furiously with thee; they shall take away thy nose and thine ears . . . And the host shall stone them and dispatch them with their swords; they shall slay their sons and their daughters, and burn up their houses. Thus shall I cause lewdness to cease in the
land, that all women may be taught not to do after your lewdness. (Ezekiel, 23:25, 48–9.)

Ecclesiastes sums up the misogyny of the Old Testament succinctly when he states: ‘From a garment cometh a moth, and from woman wickedness.’
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The misogynists of Greece and Rome were constantly berating women for moral failings. But divine disapproval was a new and powerful addition to the history of misogyny. It lent it cosmic significance. The God of the Old Testament is not, one would think, a good model from which to create a religion of forgiveness and love. Yet, it is one of the many paradoxes of history that it was on this stock that the vine of Christianity would first grow.

The Jehovah – or God the Father – we encounter in the New Testament has mellowed considerably from the thundering sky-god of the Old. Indeed, some early Christians like Marcion found the contrast so incredible that they advocated ditching the Old Testament’s entire corpus altogether.
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What is most striking about the parables and proverbs attributed to Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is the absence of both misogyny and vengefulness. Women were among his first followers. We are told by Matthew: ‘Many women were there beholding afar off, which followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him.’ They had good reason to do so. Matthew also tells us (9:20–22) of a woman ‘which was diseased with an issue of blood’ who touched the hem of his garment. Jewish law had strict taboos on menstruating women as ‘unclean’, forbidding them contact with the male and entrance into the Temple, among others. In contrast, Jesus does not rebuke the bleeding woman but tells her, ‘Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.’ (28:55).

In the Gospel according to St John, Jesus’ disciples are said to have ‘marvelled that he was talking with a woman’. (John:
4:57) In that Jesus was unique. None of the great Classical teachers/philosophers, nor the Jewish prophets who preceded him such as John the Baptist, gathered women followers about them to any significant extent.
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When Jesus is invited to dine at the house of Simon, he defends a woman whom the host accuses of being extravagant when she uses an expensive oil to anoint him: ‘And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me.’ (Mark 14:6)

The story is repeated in Matthew and Luke. Luke gives the most detail, including the fact that she is a sinner. When Simon points this out to Jesus, he waves it aside: ‘Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loveth much.’ (7:47). Jesus judges women not according to some rigid code but in terms that acknowledge and understand women’s experience. In a society where women risked being stoned to death for loving too much, it was a liberating alternative that accounts for the strong following he had among them, one that Christianity later inherited. Luke (1:24–80) describes woman’s experience of conception and the wonder of the baby moving in the womb – the first time in ancient literature that this experience is given any sort of attention. The radical nature of Jesus’ morality is made explicit when the woman ‘taken in adultery, in the very act’, is dragged before him. The Pharisees ask what should be done, knowing full well that the penalty for such an act is death by stoning. Jesus seems to ignore their questions at first and disdainfully bends down to write in the sand:

So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin, first cast a stone at her. None who had accused her dared accept his challenge, but turned and melted away, and Jesus resumed his writing. Then he looked up and finding the women alone said: Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. (John, 8: 4–11)

Jesus’ sympathy for the woman is in startling contrast to the attitude prevalent in the Old Testament, which is too often a case of (in Bertrand Russell’s words) ‘the infliction of cruelty with a good conscience’.
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Mark notes that at the crucifixion there were ‘many women’ (15:40). The male disciples flee from the scene, but the women remain to pray. Significantly, after his resurrection, Jesus appears first to a woman, Mary Magdalene (Mark: 16: 9). When she reports the event to the apostles, they do not believe her. The resurrection is the central doctrine of Christianity, promising salvation. That it was revealed to a woman, and one who was the first to accept it, gave women in general a powerful basis to play a dramatic role in the new religion.

Jesus’ whole attitude to women was revolutionary. They became crucial to early Christianity’s spread. Three centuries later, when the Church had triumphed, St Augustine admonished: ‘O you men, who all fear the burdens imposed by baptism, you are easily beaten by your women. Chaste and devoted to the faith, it is their presence in great numbers that causes the Church to grow.’
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Women flocked to the new faith right from the start. In the mid-first century
AD
St Paul in his epistle to the Romans mentions 36 believers, 16 of whom are women. Most remarkably, one of the very first people we know of thought to be a Christian was Pomponia Graecina, the wife of Aulius Plautus, the commander of the Roman invasion of Britain in
AD
43 when Claudius was emperor (
AD
41–54). The historian Tacitus describes her as a ‘distinguished lady’ who was accused of adhering to a ‘foreign superstition’, a phrase usually employed when referring to Christianity.
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