What’s the origin of the fundamental misogyny in Western thought? If we’re ever going to get rid of it – to, in the large-scale terms I’ve started to think recently – get rid of the gender binary, the insistence that everything be split in two opposing categories to which the negative is assigned the female – one of the things we certainly need to do is work out where it came from.

That’s the subject of Vigdis Songe-Moller’s Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, translated from the Norwegian by Peter Cripps. That a publisher should have chosen to translate such a text suggests something pretty special, and while it ventures into aspects of philosophy to which I have limited exposure, I rather think that it is.

Songe-Moller is conerned primarily with how Greek citizens (which means of course men), and particularly classical Athenian citizens, thought about women, and about reproduction, and relations between the sexes. Her basic conclusion is that they “seem invariably to have drawn sustenance from the dream of women’s superfluity”. (p.4)

In Greek and particularly Athenian myths, she finds again and again asexual, vegetative reproduction preferred to sexual – and suggests that this is related to the fact that only this way can a “perfect” reproduction of the male – a copy – be related. Despite Greeks liking to think of women as simply a vessel for the male seed (she quotes from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Eumenides: “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”), the fact that a child was not a copy of its father was undeniable.

So Athenians (men) thought of themselves as the descendants of Erichthonius, who is born when the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus, fails in a bid to rape Athena, but instead spills his seed on the earth, the soil of Athens, from which the child springs. He has a father, but no mother.

There’s also sociology: “Since it is the woman who gives birth to the child, it seems reasonable to regard her as the physical link between one generation and the next. For the Athenian oikos, however, she was an unstable link, insofar as a new woman had to be fetched into a man’s family for each new generation. ..Thus the secure link in the family was the man, the master of the house, the paterfamilias. It was he who symbolized the family’s unit and continuity, that is who enabled the family to remain the same through time.” (P. 16)

But it is Greek philosophy that is at the heart of the author’s argument, and particularly the pre-Socratic Parmenides, who establishes an ideal: “The ideal is eternity and immutability… a form of divine reality in which mortal phenomena such as life and death play no part. Parmenides can be characterized as Plato’s spiritual father; and the extent of his influence on European philosophy right up to the present day can hardly be overestimated. Philosophers of the Platonic tradition – from Parmenides and Plato through to Kant and Hegel – have for example found it natural to think in terms of heirarchies. Immutability is suprerior to change; eternity is set above time; immortality above decay and death.” (p.21)

More, Parmenides tries to define what is existence, or Being – something that exists. And central to his definition is certainly, lack of plurality or mutability. Not-Being, the alternative, is an essential part of change – e.g. a shoot becoming a leaf, but No-Being can’t be allowed anywhere near the pure Being. In her introduction, Songe-Moller explains how as a pregnant post-doc, she realised that “the Parmenidian idea of all things existing ultimately as one and self-identical is… far from self-evident.”

Songe-Moller goes then back to the 1960s and 70s Paris School around Jean-Pierre Vernant, which she says argued that there was a close link between the geometrical way of thinking of the ancient Greeks, with the circle as the central motif, and the archaic and classical city state. Each citizen was theoretically equidistant from the centre of power. Extending on from this, she says that Parmenides establishes this balance and equality through exclusion – the exclusion of women and slaves. “The unity and balance of Parmenides sphere of Being depend on the exclusion of Not-Being, and … this strategy can be regarded as analogous to democracy’s dependence on those groups that were excluded from it.” (p. 51)
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It was a Housman’s £1 special, and a well-spent £1 it turned out to be. Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945-1968 by Elizabeth Wilson (published 1980)was fascinating in part because although I was born in Australia, which was probably a half to full decade behind Britain in social developments at this time, it pretty well stops where I came in – getting to the point, more or less, that I remember. (I was born in 1966.)

A rather different idea of feminism, before the second wave: it quotes Sheila Rowbotham in the 60s: “Feminism … meant shadowy figures in long old-fashioned clothes who were somehow connected with headmistresses who said you shouldn’t wear high-heels and make-up. It was all very prim and stiff and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.” (p. 4)

Citing sociologist Ferdynand Zweig, it suggests that in the 50s “housekeeping money” was the dark secret of the British family “the subject of equivocation on the part of both husbands and wives. He also discovered that, amongst the older generation at leas, the housekeeping allowance was still often referred to as ‘wages for the missus’.” (p 32) And fascinating that in 1952 Michael Young was pointing out the household income was not an adequate measure of how individual members were doing (something Fawcett has recently had to again try to point out to policymakers), and consequently a significantly inadequate easure of poverty. he argued that “the financial burden of having an extra child fell not, as was always assumed, on the family as a whole, but on the mother and previous children.” This was all in the context of the debate over who should get the children’s allowance (which I assume became child benefit – now of course being cut by the new government.)

But there’s plenty of traditional 50s stuff of the sort of attitudes I recall from my childhood among my parents’ generation. A pamphlet on education and training of girls in 1962 saw education of girls “as a barrier against the degeneration of moral standards of which there was evidence in the increase in veneral disease amongst the young, and in the commercial exploitation of sex. … clung to the idea of women as moral saviours in the face of declining standards of behaviour. Implicitly this invoked a double standard, in which men had natural sexual urges which it was for women to control.” (p35)

And I also well recall the arguments about women’s education being a “waste”, except in cases of exceptional talent. Commenting on the Royal Commission on Equal Pay in 1946, Wilson says “Work and marriage were understood as alternatives…. You could either be a wife and mother or a single career woman… It was assumed that the majority of those who chose to work belonged in the more interesting fields of work; in the professions, in the Civil Service, or in teaching. The rest were, as workers, transient, less highly skilled, inferior in class and status. The Report implied that the first group whould receive equal pay, partly because it was from these women that the pressure for equal pay had come; but it was argued that woman in manual employment did not make a contribution equal to that of men. This was because of their lesser strength, greater absenteeism, and ‘a certain relative lack of flexibility in response to rapidly changing or abnormal situations.’ But the three women members of the Committee, Annie Loughlin, Janet Vaughan and Mrs P.L. Nettlefold, all disagreed with these assumptions.” (p. 45) Underlying this was the fear that given a decent work opportunity “no women would want to reproduce”.

Women who said they wanted job AND career found it very hard to get attention, Wilson reports. Yet mothers were welcome back in the workforce under highly restricted conditions. Older women workers who’d had their children (now usually only two), raised them, were welcome back but would “often be both part-time and unskilled, to fit in with their diminished but not extinguished domestic responsibilityies; to fit in, too, with a shortage of unskilled labour.” (p. 48) Wilson describes this division (and she seems to be speaking here right up to publication time), as “rigid”. That I can attest too – I was 11 when my mother nearly got a job she was extremely keen on, as an estate agent. But in the end they gave it to a man, telling her, “well you might need to take time off for the child”. (I was at high school remember.) It was a blow for my mother, who then went back to part-time, less challenging jobs.

And in the nothing’s changed category, Wilson quotes Laura Balbo on women’s dual role leaving no space for a third sphere of activity. “Study, leisure, creative rest, political participation, active membership in trade unions or other associations, are experiences unknown to the great majority of adult women.” (p. 49)
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Writing this weekend in the Guardian, Kira Cochrane notes a surge in new feminist books, but complains, I think fairly, that “much of it repackages longstanding arguments”. The problem is there are new, radical ideas out there, but they are often wrapped up in much academic argument that fails to reach the mainstream. That’s not necessarily a criticism exactly of their authors – they are writing academic books, the kinds of things that they need to do to keep up in these “publish or perish” days of universities, but it’s frustrating that popular debate keeps retreading the same ground, in part as a result.

Take, for instance, Jo Doezema’s recently published Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: the Construction of Trafficking. Her basic tale is of two parts: first, she looks at the “white slavery” panics (primarily in Britain and the US) in late Victorian times and extending early into the 20th century. She then looks briefly at the international developments between then and the present, which saw a loss in interest in the issue matched with a dramatic swing in the direction of international agreements, before moving on to a detailed account of the negotiations around the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, in which she was involved as a sex-worker advocate, in which she finds echoes and shadows of that original white slavery myth. She concludes with a frustratingly brief epilogue that considers ways forward, specifically ways to “reinscribe” the white slavery myth and find more productive ways of looking at women’s (and men’s) involvement in the sex industry than through the simplistic prism of consent.

Much of this is straight account and analysis, but it is also wrapped up in a lot of heavy theoretical weaving about the nature and inter-relationship of myth, narrative and ideology, from Althusser to Zizek, Levi-Strauss to Barthes. I understand why as an academic Doezema would do this (on the right day I can almost enjoy the word-play), but the book I’d rather read from her, based on her studies and experiences, would be rather more focused on the women’s issues, rather than the academic ones.

I’ve heard many sex workers and their advocates speak, and discussed the issues with some in quite some depth, but one of the key practical points I got from this account was just how much sex workers, globally and historically, have found and regarded the state and the police as the problem, not the solution, which helps to explain why the Network of Sex Work Projects, for which the author worked, had real problems in deciding its approach to the Protocol negotiations. They, understandable, didn’t want more regulation, more state and supra-state interferences, since their experiences of that are almost universally negative, but they also wanted to lobby to ensure that the harms were minimised.

From the Victorians onwards, “rescued” sex workers have either had to be beautiful (by definition), naive, frightened young country girls who’ve simply been victimised, or hardened, dissolute, dangerous city women who are simply a threat to society and need to be locked up – no nuances allowed. Doezema writes: “A curious phrase from the inaugural resolution of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, one of the female anti-vice societies, and dedicated to converting prostitutes and closing brothels in New York City, encapsulates this ambivalence. ‘Resolved: That the licentious man is no less guilty than his victim.’ The notion of the ‘guilty victim’, oxymoronic as it may sound to our ears, expresses perfectly how these feminists (and others) struggled to harmonize their moral impulse to condemn a woman’s loss of virtue with sympathy for her fall, as well as a desire to make men share the guilt. ..Certain feminist desires to protect vulnerable girls – primarily working-class and immigrant girls – took shape through a disciplinary desire to control ‘wild’ tendencies.” (p. 99)

The drive to eliminate “vice” was, as Doezema’s historical account shows, closely related to broader campaigns for “moral reform”. William Coote in Britain in 1911 set up the National Vigilance Association, which campaigned on an aggressive attack on the sexual behaviour of young people. The drive against “white slavery” was a powerful legitimising and recruiting device, even though the increasingly repressive turn eventually led the campaigner Josephine Butler to resign her membership. So drives to tighten controls on female sexual behaviour, and indeed other female freedoms, have gone hand in hand with anti-prostitution drives – and have been very much directed by middle-class “reformers” against the Other – primarily working class, immigrant and those from ethnic minorities. That’s then, and now:

(p.122)

It’s telling that parallel negotiations saw the Trafficking Protocol being discussed in parallel with the Protocol against Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, which assumes that the knowing subjects it addresses are male – “trafficked women are assumed to be duped victims; while smuggled men are assumed to be knowing agents in their own movement.” And not only are women not granted agency, they are also grouped in with children – both lesser, vulnerable groups that are treated together.
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