Misogyny Quotes

“The right to choose is always the key to progress for women, as it is for men.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women's rights are human rights. Any foreign policy that fails to recognize this effectively dehumanizes half the human race.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman's right to choose - a fundamental aspect of her autonomy - must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a 'higher' religious, moral or social goal.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Ultimately...woman's equality is not derived from any theory of human nature but rather from concepts of justice, equality and the integrity of the individual based on philosophical and political principles that we have evolved since the Enlightenment. "There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical,' writes Pinker. 'To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“While it is probably a safe generalization that philosophers and priests have done more harm to women than pornographers, it is not an assertion that most people will today readily accept.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Plato and Aristotle.....survived to become the twin pillars of philosophic and scientific thinking in the Western world, supporting the massive edifice of Christianity. Plato's Theory of Forms, with it's inherent contempt for the physical world, and Aristotle's biological dualism, in which females were seen as failed males, provided the intellectual apparatus for the centuries of misogyny that were to follow.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Deification dehumanizes women as much as its polar opposite, demonization. Both deny women their ordinary humanity.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“In 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encylical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical reaffirmed the Church's rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God's law...In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban. For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue. Unfortunately, for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is. There, the right to choose whether or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman's prospects for freeing herself and her family from poverty. It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women. Pope John Paul II spent a considerable part of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells ppor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ's sacrifice on the cross 'in vain'. He said:'no personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Tertullian thunders at women in the manner of the God of the Old Testament who once threatened to make their hair fall out. But his tone and his words are altogether more menacing. Not only are women held responsible fot the Fall of Man, but it is they, not the Jews, not the Roman authorities--who are blamed for the suffering and death of Jesus, man's Redeemer. It is through their flesh that the devil comes into the world.”
― Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Misogyny seeks to dehumanize women through restrictive definitions of what their ‘true’ role supposedly is and in making sure they are confined to it. In Western civilization, there had been no more powerful apparatus for imposing such a definition than the Christian churches. But by the middle of the twentieth century, their influence had considerably weakened in most parts of the West.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Overall, it has been impossible to gauge the number of victims who died as witches–estimates range from several millions to around 60,000.158 The numbers, and some of the methods, varied from country to country. The witch-hunts raged most violently in Germany, Switzerland, France and Scotland.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“The question remains: How is it that women came to be demonized for close to 300 years in a society where learning and the arts were entering one of their most fruitful periods, and the scientific, philosophical and social revolutions in Europe would soon transform forever how people viewed themselves and the world? Another way of looking at this question is to ask why it was that misogyny, so long a fundamental element in Christian thinking, took on its most lethal form at a time otherwise associated with great human progress?”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“In Britain, Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98) opposed suffrage because to involve women in politics would be, he said, ‘to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of their nature’.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“In fact, birth control advocates in the early 1900s were more concerned with population control and regulating the poor, whose increasing numbers were viewed as a threat to social stability, than they were with levelling the sexual playing field between the sexes. 367”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Wollstonecraft believes such female follies are not based on the inherent nature of women but on their education, or lack of it. Following Locke, she believes that we are almost entirely the product of the social forces that shape us. Remove the forces that inculcate ignorance and prejudice, and you will make women ‘rational creatures and free citizens’. Or as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.’ 254 The same applies to women.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“The fact that the dildo was from the 1660s onwards usually of Italian manufacture, increased the upper-class English male’s sexual angst, since Italy was associated with an effeminizing eroticism. For an Englishman, what could be more humiliating than to be superannuated by an Italian dildo? 202”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Aphra Behn (1640–89), was renowned, and vilified, as a successful playwright and poet, the first Englishwoman to achieve such literary fame. She was denounced as a ‘lewd harlot’, who dared to describe how a young wife can sexually exhaust her husband, and reduce him to a trembling wreck. She made literary history by giving the woman’s version of premature ejaculation, for which male poets too often blamed their ‘fair nymphs’. In her poem ‘The Disappointment’ the ‘hapless swain’ is accused of trying to prolong his pleasure ‘which too much love destroys’ and so finds ‘his vast pleasure turned to pain’. 201”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Near Trier, in 1585, after the Catholics had reclaimed it from the Protestants, two villages were left with only one woman each–all the rest having been burned.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Technically, the Church did not actually carry out the sentence of death, since it is forbidden to take life–it merely ‘relaxed’ its protection of the accused (if convicted).”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“The speculations of the Inquisitors about sex with demons is almost entirely devoted to women and their incubi. Little is said about men making out with succubi.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Joan of Arc is the only witch that the Church has rehabilitated and made into a saint. 165”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Even if we accept the argument that misogyny was a secondary motive for the witch-hunt, it does nothing to mitigate the appalling picture that it presents. It merely means that many thousands of women perished in the flames and at the end of a rope in order to assuage men’s doubts.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“the fourteenth century the arguments for the reality of demons had won crucial support at the highest levels of the Church. Pope John XXII (1316–34) was obsessed with witchcraft and heresy; and he was a true believer in demons. It was during his long reign that for the first time in history a woman was accused of having sex with the Devil. In 1324, Lady Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny in Ireland earned that dubious distinction.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“As the historian Walter Stephens summed it up, ‘Without proof of a devil, there can be no proof of God.’ 141”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“For the first millennium and more of Christianity, belief in witches was generally treated as a superstition of the ignorant, and the Church warned against it. Usually, when witches were killed it was at the hands of enraged or frightened peasants.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“The witch craze which ran from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries and resulted in the deaths of unknown thousands of women retains the ability to shock us largely because it is the only known instance in the history of persecution in which to be a woman was to be a chief suspect in a vast conspiracy and the grounds for imprisonment, torture and execution. It is the most deadly event in the history of misogyny, and still, after the lapse of many centuries, the most disturbing and perplexing.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“As Augustine says, quoting the Psalms, we are ‘conceived in iniquity and in sin’ in our mother’s womb. The instrument of this fall from grace is woman: both in the sense that it was Eve’s disobedience that led to our expulsion from paradise, and in the Platonic sense–she represents the wilfulness of the flesh to reproduce itself.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Pandora brings with her a large sealed jar, which she has been told never to open. The jar is an earthenware vessel, womb-like in shape and primarily used to store wine and olive oil. In earlier times, it was also used as a coffin. 4 Pandora cannot resist seeing what is inside: But now the woman opened up the cask, And scattered pains and evils among men. 5 Since then, according to Greek mythology, mankind has been doomed to labour, grow old, get sick, and die in suffering.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Furious at being deceived, Zeus devises the supreme trick in the form of a ‘gift’ to men, ‘an evil thing for their delight’, Pandora, the ‘all giver’. The Greek phrase used to describe her, ‘kalon kakon’, means ‘the beautiful evil’. Her beauty compares to that of the goddesses: From her comes all the race of womankind The deadly female race and tribe of wives Who live with mortal men and bring them harm. 3 The gods give her ‘sly manners, and the morals of a bitch’.”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

“Furious at being deceived, Zeus devises the supreme trick in the form of a ‘gift’ to men, ‘an evil thing for their delight’, Pandora, the ‘all giver’. The Greek phrase used to describe her, ‘kalon kakon’, means ‘the beautiful evil’. Her beauty compares to that of the goddesses: From her comes all the race of womankind The deadly female race and tribe of wives Who live with mortal men and bring them harm. 3”
― Jack Holland, A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice