If a man recognise in woman any quality which transcends the qualities demanded in a plaything or handmaid—if he recognise in her the existence of an intellectual life not essentially dissimilar to his own, he must, by plainest logic, admit that life to express itself in all its spontaneous forms of activity.
George Eliot
Hard the task: your prison-chamber
Widens not for lifted latch
Till the giant thews and sinews
Meet their Godlike overmatch.
George Meredith
UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY
“I hate every woman!” cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a citation of the Florilegium of Stobæus. The sentiment was not new with Euripides—unfortunately. Before him there was bucolic Hesiod with his precepts on wife-choosing. There was Simonides of Amorgos, who in outcrying the degradation of the Ionian women told the degradation of the Ionian men. There was Hipponax, who fiercely sang “two days on which a woman gives a man most pleasure—the day he marries her and the day he buries her.”
And along with Euripides was Aristophanes, the radiant laughter-lover, the titanic juggler with the heavens above and earth and men below—Aristophanes who flouted the women of Athens in his “Ecclesiazusæ,” and in the “Clouds” and his “Thesmophoriazusæ.” Thucydides before them had named but one woman in his whole great narrative, and had avoided the mention of women and their part in the history he relates.
“Woman is a curse!” cried Susarion. The Jews had said it before, when they told the story of Eve—
“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.”
Down through many centuries our forebears cast to and fro the same sentiment—in spite of the introduction into life and literature of the love of men for women and women for men; in spite of the growth of romantic love. You find misogynous expression among the Latins. In early “Church Fathers,” such as St. John Chrysostom, you come upon it in grossest form. Woman is “a necessary ill,” cried the Golden Mouthed, “a natural temptation, a wished-for calamity, a household danger, a deadly fascination, a bepainted evil.”
You see the sentiment in the laws of church and of kingdom. You sight its miasm in the gloaming and murk of the Middle Ages, amid the excesses which in shame for it chivalry affected and exalted. You read it by the light of the awful fires that burnt women accessory to the husband’s crime—for which their husbands were merely hanged. You see it in Martin Luther’s injunction to Catherine von Bora that it ill became his wife to fasten her waist in front—because independence in women is unseemly, their dress should need an assistant for its donning. You chance upon it in old prayers written by men, and once publicly said by men for English queens to a God “which for the offence of the first woman hast threatened unto all women a common, sharp, and inevitable malediction.”