Social Studies: How do you define a male feminist? This question rattled round in the back of my head as I read A Brief History of Misogyny, by the journalist Jack Holland. Holland might not have given himself that label but he neatly identified the kind of ambivalence provoked in both sexes by men who profess to be pro-women, writes Katrina Goldstone
As he puts it: "When I told people I was writing a history of misogyny I got two distinct responses and they were divided along gender lines. From women came an eager curiosity . . . but from those men who knew what misogyny meant, there came a wink and a nod in an unspoken assumption that I was engaged in justifying it."
Holland, who wrote extensively on Northern Irish politics, died in 2004 and this book was a long-cherished project, helped to fruition by Holland's daughter and widow only after a protracted struggle by them to get it into print. Certainly, at a time when many younger women seem disconnected from the concept of feminism and "raunch culture" is a pervasive feature of the media landscape, the appearance of such a book is timely, though in some ways it provokes more questions than it answers.
While the word "misogyny" came to be used first in 1656, according to Holland, the roots of hatred of women, and their oppression, can be traced back millennia. Holland identifies the ancient Greek and Roman eras as a starting point for sustained misogyny and it is also inextricably linked to the rise and rise of Christianity. Holland begins this potted history in the eastern Mediterranean region and the evolution of Greek and Judaeo-Christian belief systems as the origins of the subjugation of women and the definition of them as inherently inferior beings.
Holland reiterates the point that, pre-feminism, the innateness of women's inferiority was taken for granted. He explores, albeit in a superficial fashion, the many and various ideas that underpinned this belief. Eve and her supposed responsibility for the Fall of Man is right up there as a justification for the suppression of women's rights. Woman as temptress, virgin, whore, and irrational hysteric - variations of these themes recur depressingly often through the centuries.
The myths that have festered about women and fed millions of violations of their rights, were, more often that not, a means to underpin, justify and perpetuate structures of power. Holland is clear-eyed in his analysis of religions and their institutional structures in endlessly stoking woman-hatred. And he sees the battle over women's bodies and women's sexuality as key in the 20th and 21st centuries. Religion cannot be the only explanation for the persistence of woman-hatred and the institutionalisation of it in patriarchal structures. Yet the blame for the longevity of misogyny cannot be laid solely at the door of Christianity and other world religions. As Holland reminds us, Freudian psychoanalysis, Nietzschean philosophy and totalitarianism all contained core beliefs that consigned and kept women in miserable circumstances.
As with so many forms of discrimination, misogyny can endlessly reinvent itself, take on the virtuosity of ventriloquism and, chameleon-like, reappear in another guise. Secularism and socialist states did not rid us of misogyny and sexism. Some truly chilling tales of the maltreatment of women come from China and are just as horrific as the accounts of witch-hunts of the Middle Ages.
Holland was not an academic. His account is presented in readable, accessible prose, marshalling his arguments eloquently and, at times, forcefully. However, at times he is muddle-headed in his theses, and at others downright wrong. The section on rape as a war crime is disturbing. But Holland's assertion that "rape in war is as old as war itself, both as a way of taking revenge on the enemy population and as sexual relief for frustrated soldiers" flies in the face of most analyses, which assert that rape has nothing whatsoever to do with sex and everything to do with power and the oppression of women.
What is slightly irritating about the book is the lack of examples of women's autonomy and role in their own liberation. There's a bit of a victim vibe going on here that, however unintentionally, reinforces the very stereotype that Holland is deconstructing. Nonetheless, if Holland's book does nothing else, it assembles and collates important facts and figures in the one place and should be a starting point for further reading.
It is also a timely reminder to contemporary women who "diss" and dismiss feminism that it wasn't always so and that for very many women the world over, equality is still a dream rather than a reality.
Katrina Goldstone is the communications officer of Create, a leading national arts support organisation. She is also a critic and freelance researcher of Jewish history and culture. She has written on anti-Semitism, anti-racism and ethnic minorities.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice By Jack Holland Robinson, 320pp. £8.99