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Sunshine for
Women Book Summaries | Home |
Preface
Introduction: Eve, Xanthippe, and Clodia
II Medieval Attitudes Toward Love and Marriage
III The Renaissance: The Court
Wanton, The Bossy Bourgeoise, and the Insatiable Strumpet
IV St. Paul with a Difference The Puritans
V Reason vs. Folly and Romantic Illusion:
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
VI The Drooping Lily: The Nineteenth Century
VII The Fear of Mom: The Twentieth Century
VIII The Reason Why
1) "Since most writers have not felt free to express misogyny directly-it is an unnatural attitude, considered shocking in most periods- they have found it necessary to conceal it in some way, both from others and from themselves. Misogyny, therefore, is more apt than not to appear in disguised form. Sometimes the hostility is displaced, so that the hostile feelings for wife or mother, about which a man usually feels guilty, are transferred to the whore, who should be vilified. Sometimes it is projected, so that the man who callously exploits women insists that it is they who are exploitative and incapable of love. Sometimes it is rationalized, so that a man insists that keeping women in subjection is necessary protection for their weakness. Sometimes it is made light of, so that the writer claims to be joking when represents suffering as the usual condition of married men." page xii
Introduction: Eve, Xanthippe, and Clodia
1) "The Jahvist's story of the creation of woman implies that she is inherently a more imperfect creature than man. His story of the Fall serves to prove her moral weakness and her ruinous influence. The serpent mislead the woman, as the less intelligent and virtuous human; and then she misled her husband. If she had not yielded, he would not have yielded and thus brought misery on all his posterity. Adam's primary fault, indeed, was hearkening to the voice of his wife. He was punished by the necessity of toil and struggle with recalcitrant nature- a punishment which of course afflicted Eve as well. But she, as the greater sinner, was in addition punished with labor pains and subjection to the man. This story justified the subjection of women both explicitly and implicitly (by showing what happened when a man listens to his wife) and provided divinely inspired "proof" of their natural depravity and inability to control their impulses. Its influence on the Judeao-Christian tradition can hardly be overemphasized." page 4
2) Writing of St. Paul: "He was the first Biblical writer to emphasize the misogynistic implications of the Jahvist's account of the Creation and Fall. He gave unprecedented emphasis to the Fall, in part no doubt because the story gave support to his natural misogyny, in part because it was the cornerstone of his theology; without the Fall there would have been no need for redemption by Christ, and hence no need for his own mission. The more catastrophic the Fall was, the more important it became to exonerate Adam as much as possible by placing the major guilt on Eve. " page 9
3) "The foundations of early Christian misogyny- its guilt about sex, its insistence on female subjection, its dread of female seduction- are all in St. Paul's epistles. They provided a convenient supply of divinely inspired misogynistic texts for any Christian writer who chose to use them; his statements on female subjection were still being quoted in the twentieth century opponents of equality for women." page 11
4) "Virtually all the major patristic writers from the first century to the sixth insisted that virginity was a state greatly superior to marriage and emphasized the propriety of keeping women in subjection; most of them repeatedly expressed dread of women's seductiveness and contempt for their mental or moral frailty. They recurred to the Fall again and again, and managed to interpret many other Biblical texts as divine condemnations of the female sex." page 14
5) Quote of Tertullian (160-230) "On the Apparel of Women": "You are the devil's gateway...you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert- that is, death- even the Son of God had to die." page 15
6) "When a man named Helvidius dared to take literally the Biblical reference to Jesus' brothers, concluding that Mary must have had relations with Joseph after the virgin birth, St. Jerome was moved to fury by the obscene blasphemy: "... you have defiled the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit from which you are determined to make a team of four brethern and a heap of sisters come forth." How inexpressibly disgusting to think of Mary behaving like an ordinary wife, being agreeable to her husband and having about her "children watching for her word and waiting for her kiss"! St. Jerome saw nothing in the least attractive in motherhood: pregnant women he considered "a revolting sight," and he could not imagine why anyone would want progeny, "a brat . . . to crawl upon his breast and soil his neck with nastiness." " page 19, includes citations of quotations
7) "While the Fathers were by no means all Tertullians, most of them not only enthusiastically followed St. Paul's teaching on man's Fall and the consequent subjection of women, but accentuated and elaborated the Biblical material on their own. Every one of the major Christian writers from the first century through the sixth assumed the mental and moral frailty of women, dwelt upon the vexations of marriage, and reviled the body and sexual desire. This attitude was to pervade the medieval Church and persists into religious writings even today." page 21
8) "Under the guidance of the Fathers, Christian literature became misogynistic to a degree unequaled in the Western world before or since. It had reached the point where Christ's association with women had to be explained away on the ground that otherwise the sin-laden female sex could not even hope for redemption." page 21
9) "And at the same time that they denigrated woman's sexual functions, they tended to reduce her to an exclusively sexual being, existing solely to fulfill these functions. The Fathers generally assumed that a man cannot look at a woman except lustfully, and they saw every woman, no matter who she was or how behaving, as a seductress. This over preoccupation with sex was of course an indirect effect of their attempt to repress their own physical natures, and their extreme sexual guilt caused them to project their forbidden sexual desires onto women. This projection in turn reinforced their belief that women were particularly sexual, and hence particularly sinful, and intensified their constant warnings against the dangers of associating with them. If femininity is equated with sexuality and sexuality with sin, woman is naturally seen as a degraded being whose only hope of salvation is through suppressing herself as much as her frailty permits." page 22
10) Roman matrons enjoyed much higher status than Greek counterpart. page 28
11) "Just as Pandora was degraded from the giver of all gifts to the bringer of all evils, Here, originally another avatar of the Great Goddess, declined to the mere consort of the major deity and finally degenerated into a shrewish nuisance, forever trying to exert a power which she did not have and to hold a husband bent on the pursuit of more attractive females." page 29
12) Writing of Aristotle: "Unable to admit that women play a major role in so deeply important an activity as the creation of offspring, Aristotle reduces them to mere incubators. A summary of his views cannot convey the insistence with which he iterates and reiterates his theory that woman plays a passive, almost negligible, role in reproduction. The female contributes only matter, identified with menstrual blood, its soul coming from its father. Because the female role is passive, a child is formed from a man and a woman, "only in the sense in which a bedstead is formed from the carpenter and the wood." " page 36, citations of quotations on bottom of page
According to Aristotle, all fetuses start development as males. By some deformity, they become female, or worse, monsters. In other words, boys are the norm, girls are deviant boys.
13) "If the male members of a patriarchal society were altogether confident of their superior power and capacity, they would feel no anxiety about their status and - on this ground at least- no hostility to women." page 37
II Medieval Attitudes Toward Love and Marriage
1) Greeks were virulently misogynistic. Romans allowed women more freedom but were ambivalent toward woman. The pain of an unfaithful lover is a constant theme in classical Roman writings.
2) The medieval era is virulently misogynistic-- sex even within marriage was regarded as a sin; because of Eve, women were regarded as the source of sin and mortality, and , consequently, all woman should be punished throughout their lives -- an attitude only slightly tempered by the concept of courtly love.
3) Typical themes in medieval writings: women have unbridled passions; women are unable to keep secrets; women have weaknesses for flattery, greed, extravagant dress, pride, and duplicity; and women tend to shrewishness. page 61
4) "St. Thomas had to overcome a serious stumbling block in adapting Aristotle's biology to Christian theology: Aristotle had said that the father provides a child's soul while the mother supplies only formless matter. As Christians believe that a the soul comes from God, the superior father is left making no contribution at all. St. Thomas' solution is ingenious: while the soul comes from God, the father supplies the formative power without which the female matter could not receive it. For this reason, a child should love his father more than his mother, since the father principle of his origin " in a more excellent way than the mother, because he is the active principle, while the mother is a passive and material principle." " page 66-67 includes citations St. Thomas consistently assumed that a woman is her husband's property.
III The Court Wanton, The Bossy Bourgeoise,
and the Insatiable Strumpet: The Renaissance
1) The Renaissance was much less misogynistic than in the medieval period. Public expressions of misogyny were less acceptable than in medieval period. Only some women are shown in a bad light instead of all women being shown as fundamentally flawed. Misogyny often expressed as comic relief or as satire by unsavory characters. Still many anti-woman views are expressed and there is a very pronounced double standard.
2) "At the same time that these men were exhausting their ingenuity to cheat women, they complained of female wiles; while they regarded women as vessels to be used at minimum expense, they complained of female incapacity to give love." page 114
3) "Although the Renaissance retractions were more secular and generally less virulent, as well as less frequent, than those of the Middle Ages, poets continued to indulge in the medieval charges that women's bodies are really masses of corruption; that women are lustful and undiscriminating; that they offer no more than sensual gratification, which is degrading; and that they are to be used, discarded, and escaped from before they ruin their lovers." page 118
4) "For the most part, however, Renaissance dramatists limited the misogyny in their comedies to particular characters, whom they used as satiric butts rather than as mouthpieces for their own point of views. But of course at the same time that the misogynists were being ridiculed, their charges against women could be enjoyed as antifeminist satire." page 123
5) "Partly because of this tendency to cling to old ideas about women in a changing culture, partly because the Renaissance was a period of transition-between medieval asceticism and modern idealization of conjugal love, between harsh attacks on women's ungovernable passions and moderate criticisms of their weaknesses- the Renaissance attitude toward women was curiously mixed. ... Most of the playwrights definitely disavowed misogyny by restricting their attacks to certain types of bad women or by placing generalized denunciations in the mouths of unreliable characters. " page 133
6) "In the religious writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we are also apt to find harsh antifeminism reminiscent of the Middle Ages, although it is usually tempered by a high regard for marriage. Neither secular nor religious writers in this period felt any need to moderate their criticism of women by consideration for the supposed fragility of the female sex." page 134
IV St. Paul with a Difference: The Puritans
1) "While the subordination of women was accepted almost universally during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the really zealous expressions of this doctrine are to be found among religious writers, especially those of Puritan sympathies. Reacting against the Roman Catholic Church and all its ways, the Puritans reverted to the patriarchy of the Old Testament, specifically as it was expounded by St. Paul. Although they extolled marriage- for they almost never followed St. Paul's sexual asceticism- they condemned the courtly lover's worship of women as disgusting effeminacy." page 135
2) Lots of stuff about women's subordination to man because of the fall, men's complete domination (even to chastisement) of women
3) "Numbers of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century preachers delighted in giving the Bible the most antifeminist possible interpretation, self-righteously using Biblical texts as justification for their contempt for and distrust of women. Although they did confine themselves to misogyny which could be sanctioned by the Bible, they demonstrated what virulence could be extracted from it even without the aid of early Christian asceticism. That extreme condemnations of the female sex remained morally and socially acceptable until well into the seventeenth century is shown by their appearance in sermons and in the Religio Medici." page 159
V Reason vs. Folly and Romantic Illusion: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
1) "Among many changes brought about by the reaction against Puritanism at the Restoration was a shift in the predominant attitude toward women. Patriarchal feeling weakened, and sympathetically presented heroines in Restoration drama choose their own mates, set their own terms of courtship, hold their own wit in combats with men, and clearly do not intend after marriage to make their husbands' wishes their law. While this departure from the Miltonic ideal marriage implied a more independent and equal status for women, it also encouraged a rivalry between the sexes which was overtly playful but frequently descended into sadism." page 160
2) Regarding Alexander Ratcliff's "Satyr Against Love, and Women": "Since women were designed by Nature to be enjoyed by men, the way to deal with a reluctant girl is to ravish her, for which she will thank you." page 161
3) Rogers notes many authors write degrading works about women because they are embittered, jilted lovers.
4) "There is another influence behind the Restoration cynic's delight in stripping away what they saw as romantic illusion: the neoclassical emphasis on reason as opposed to misleading appearance and sentimental illusion." page 163
5) "...the Restoration wits often satirized women for preferring fools to intelligent men. and indeed for being less rational than men in every respect." page 163
6) "Except for Swift, most writers from the early eighteenth century through the nineteenth apparently felt that the "fair sex" had to be treated with at least overt gentleness. Accordingly, denunciations of woman's lust, vindictiveness, or particular propensity toward evil are largely replaced by paternal guidance or playful ridicule of her frivolity. Harshness was reserved for the "unfeminine" woman who dominated her husband, studied Latin, or pursued a career." page 174
7) "Despite neoclassical exhortations to reason, the woman who aspired to shine in any intellectual field was a stock butt in comedy from the later seventeenth century on." page 180
8) "Most of the learned ladies in drama are not only odious for the unwomanliness but ridiculous for the gullibility, their pride in nonexistent learning, and their belief that woman are mentally capable of studying philosophy or writing plays." page 180
9) "The savage exposure of women in the Restoration, which went along with an implicit recognition of their equality, yielded- with the increasing propriety of the eighteenth century- to gentle criticism; but writers who felt they must abstain from harsh attacks on women often compensated by patronizing them. Swift showed a reversion to Restoration tough-mindedness, in his conviction that women should be as strong and rational as men as well as in the savagery of his attacks on those who failed to meet his standards. (The latter, of course, were sharpened by his personal hostility to women as sexual objects.) Steele, more typical of his period in his scrupulous chivalry and his lower estimate of female capacity, still exhorted women to be rational. Although the appeal to reason continued to be used throughout the eighteenth century, it gradually came to lose its meaning. For Gregory, who considered the love of dress reasonable in women and the love of books not, the word "rational" must have meant "proper." Propriety, in fact, was becoming the major ideal for women, who were encouraged to be weak, dependent, and unthinking. Overt literary attacks on women ceased to be acceptable, but the insidious belittlement which replaced them was hardly less destructive." page 187-188
VI The Drooping Lily: The Nineteenth Century
1) "The nineteenth century, as its writers never tired of repeating, was the era of women's apotheosis; they were the nobler half of humanity, whose role was to elevate men's sentiments and inspire their higher impulses. Women were purer than men, more religious, more altruistic, more devoted. As members of the delicate sex, they were absolutely entitled to chivalrous protection; no decent man would even criticize them harshly. ....
The obvious corollaries to this affecting picture, however, are that woman must be protected because she is by nature incapable of looking after herself, and that her vocation is self-sacrifice, devotion of her life to ministering to men. If a woman is naturally weak, it clearly follows that any attempts she may make at independence are doomed to failure, that she must resign herself to a dependent and therefore subordinate role, which is, of course (according to nineteenth century theory), her mission in any case. In fact, many nineteenth-century writers insisted quite as firmly on female subjection as the Puritans had, although they tactfully attributed St. Paul's strictures on women to his concern for their welfare rather than for their punishment and needful restraint." pages 189-190
2) Rogers has a long discussion about Dickens' and others writers' characterization of the henpecking wife.
3) "The old maid provided an even more convenient butt for hostility against women, since she did not justify her existence by being a wife or mother. Hence she was often depicted as a figure of fun, stripped of the sentimental chivalry with which other women were swathed, caricatured as ugly, disagreeable, and relentlessly in pursuit of men." page 201
4) "The other female type against whom nineteenth-century writers could acceptably release misogynistic feelings was the bluestocking: that is, the lady who refused to conform to the intellectual restrictions laid upon her sex, who studied Greek and theology, who wrote and published, who worked for public causes, or - worst of all, when she made her appearance later in the century- who pursued a career." page 204
5) "As women started increasingly to demand equality with men- the right to vote, to own property, to enter the universities and the professions- male objections to competition from women took a sharper edge. Tactful disparagement often gave way to outright censure, and implications of female inferiority to flat declarations. Persuasion gave way to threat: instead of simply recommending soft weakness and dependence as endearing and appropriate feminine qualities, men told women that they would cease to be women and thus forfeit all masculine love and respect if they aspired to strength of body or mind, and that such aspirations would be further disastrous because women are weak- physically, mentally, and morally." page 209
6) "The first major feminist struggle in the nineteenth century was for a married woman's right to her own property and income, since at that time a husband was legally entitled to all his wife owned and anything she might earn." page 210
7) Rogers has a long discussion about The Saturday Review (of London?) and the progression of its arguments regarding women's rights (property rights, rights to enter universities and the professions) and women's suffrage
Women can have quite as full of a life outside the home as inside the home. Feb 21, 1857
Women should forcibly be kept in the home. Nov 12,1859
No one wants an intellectual wife.
Education and ambition make women poor wives and mothers.
Referring to medical education, the subject is immodest and unseemly for women to study.
9) " Berating the New Woman for mannishness and the traditional woman for childishness, The Saturday Review plainly revealed its misogyny by disapproving of woman whatever they did." page 217
10) Regarding the response to the woman suffrage movement: "As the movement for woman suffrage gained strength and men began really to fear that it might become law, they published a spate of impassioned books, expressing the arguments already given by The Saturday Review as well as some ingenious new ones. The more chivalrous opponents of woman suffrage claimed that participation in political life would necessarily sully the purity of womanhood and that - since women already ruled men by sweetness and submission- they would only endanger their present position by insisting on overt competition with them (in which, it was always implied, they would be sure to lose). If these arguments failed to prove convincing, the antisuffragists bluntly stated that women were mentally unqualified to vote: they lacked essential qualities such as justice, their physical inferiority to men necessarily entailed mental inferiority, their brains were smaller or less convoluted, their earlier maturation placed them closer than men to the lower animals, they were periodically incapacitated by menstruation and childbearing. These points were supported by anything from simple assertion to pseudo-statistics. Occasionally, the old Biblical arguments were used, and it was often stated that normal women had no interest in the suffrage: the movement consisted exclusively of frigid or sex-starved women, along with a few male weaklings." pages 218-219
VII The Fear of Mom: The Twentieth Century
1) Women emasculate men when they consider themselves the equal of men.
2) H.L. Mencken, a confirmed misogynist, claims that:
Mother-love is the essence of exaltations of the woman's ego. In other words, mother-love is a selfish love because women get a sense of accomplishment from raising a child
Marriage is slavery with man the slave.
4) Moss Hart claims that a woman experiences true womanhood when she rejects a career for a man..
5) Herbert Lobsenz writes about a man who, after being emasculated by career woman wife, is rejuvenated by a Spanish girl who confines herself to serving his wants.
6) George Jean Nathan contends that a man is always happiest with a woman who is deferentially his inferior.
7) Rogers debunks of the romantic illusions of women and the role of Sigmund Freud
8) Rogers analyzes misogyny in D. H. Lawrence (what an enormous task!). Lawrence is a throwback to the nineteenth century antisuffragist misogynist who believes that women naturally have power over men; men are happiest when they restrict their friendships to other men; if a woman asserts herself at all, she undermining a man's self-esteem and therefore his virility; and women should be subjected to men. Lawrence is hostile to the distinctively female function of motherhood (men should deny women the opportunity to become mothers) and definitely is afraid of the power of woman.
9) Ernest Hemingway, who preferred undemanding primitives over emancipated Anglo-Saxon women, claimed that women are not important to a genuinely virile man, and agreed with Lawerence that when woman is not kept in subjection, she is destructive.
10) Nathanael West saw woman as mindless, heartless, all-powerful but dangerous and found sexual involvement with her is irresistible. He encouraged a man to defend himself from a woman before she devours him, and believed that no matter what he does, she will survive because of her animal insensitivity and unawareness of morals.
11) William Faulkner envisioned women much like Nathaniel West but like Hemingway believed there are 2 types of women: masterful ladies and mindless female animals.
12) "The most significant new development of recent decades has been the undisguised attack on woman as mother." page 263
1) "The fact that certain male writes have always found some female villain to hold up to ridicule, censure, or furious indignation indicates the perennial desire to express hostility against women. ... Since misogyny is generally recognized as an abnormal feeling, not to be expressed directly, it is apt to be disguised as criticism of an admittedly obnoxious type, or satire against women's failings, or statements of their mental and moral differences from men, or ostensibly harmless jokes about the married state. The disguise is given away by uncalled-for vehemence in the satiric attacks, the blurring of the distinction between censurable women and women in general, the revelation that women's differences from man invariably make her inferior, and the undercurrents of seriousness in the jokes.
The volume of misogyny which has poured forth in all periods must be interpreted in the light of several modifying factors. In the first place, the attacks on women were sometimes justified - not only because women have their faults like everybody else, but because social conditions often encouraged the development of obnoxious female types." page 265
2) Reasons why men become misogynists
b) Domination by mother yields fear of dominance by any other female (Lawrence)
c) Men become embittered by a bad experience with a lover or wife (Milton)
d) A desire to tear down what has been raised unduly high results in misogyny as a result of the idealization of women as mistresses, wives, and mothers
e) Men project their emotions, attitudes, and actions (greed, fear, jealousy, lust, treachery, exploitation, etc.) onto women
f) Most important cause - the patriarchal feeling - the wish to keep women in subjection.
Use science or reason to justify their attitudes (Restoration, Victorian, modern)
See women as helpmates, i.e., as someone to help a man accomplish his agenda, resent any independence in womanand project their feelings (greed, jealousy, unfaithfulness, anger) onto women.
Show hostility to every attempt by woman to escape from their traditional limitations and condemn such behavior as a violation both of time-honored traditions and of woman's basic nature.
See woman as basically insubordinate, greedy, grasping, scheming.
Considers women men's property and believe women should devote their lives to making their man happy.
Is attached to the idea of woman's physical, mental, moral inferiority
Fears the power of woman. Because men desire sex and immorality through their children, men must convince a woman to have sex with him, to bear his child, and to raise that child. Because men must rely on women to fulfill these needs, woman has an normous amount of power over him.
b) Misogyny stems from a number of causes: bad experiences with women, projection of one's own failings onto an innocent other, outgrowth of the normal frustrations of men and women living together, and the fear of woman's power.
c) Men fear that if women are ever freed from the restrictions, women will become men's master. (This point is emphasized over, and over, and over, again.)
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