Eleanor Herman - Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power

For Leslie Harris

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who werent there.

George Santayana, philosopher, 18631952

One of the many questions that have often bothered me is why women have been, and still are, thought to be so inferior to men. Its easy to say its unfair, but thats not enough for me; Id really like to know the reason for this great injustice!

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 19291945

One spring day in 2019, I sat down to read a book for pure pleasure, a rarity for me. Because I often read as many as a hundred books in order to write one, my TBRFF (To Be Read For Fun) stack is halfway up to the ceiling. On that day, I chose a book on the amazing life of a controversial, smart, powerful woman. Settling into the story, I was disturbed to see a calculated misogynistic hate campaign to take her down.

Shes unlikable.

Shes untrustworthy.

Shes sexually depraved.

Shes disgustingly ambitious.

Shes a spendthrift.

She busts mens balls.

You might be thinking I was reading about Hillary Clinton. In fact, I was reading Stacy Schiffs lush, Pulitzer Prizewinning 2010 biography of Cleopatra. I noticed that in Cleopatras rise and fall, the story of her power and Romes horror that a woman should wield it, there were uncanny similarities with Hillary Clintons trajectory through the 2016 election and beyond. Certainly, we can judge some of the political choices of both Cleopatra and Clinton negatively. But what I found was more than that. In each womans story, I discovered organized smear operations churning out unfounded accusations of sexual improprieties and criticisms of her ambition, untrustworthiness, appearance, and unlikability, accusations rarely made about male leaders either in the first century BCE or today.

Wait a minute, I said to myself as my jaw dropped. Has this same stuff really been going on for more than two thousand years?

Longer than that, I found, when I delved into female pharaohs who lived many centuries before Cleopatra. More than three thousand years.

In between Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh who came to power in 1479 BCE, and Kamala Harris, countless other powerful women have been subjected to almost identical sexist takedowns. Byzantine empress Theodora. Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth I. Catherine de Medici. Marie Antoinette. Catherine the Great. More recently, there is Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Prime Minister Theresa May of the UK. Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand. Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. And many more.

The accusations rarely have anything to do with experience, political mistakes, policy, or platform. They are name-calling caricatures that create two-dimensional comic book villainesses. Shes a whore. A lesbian. A nymphomaniac. Frigid. Or all of the above. Shes treacherous. Decadent. Power-crazed. Frivolous. Her voice is shrill. She is phony, inauthentic, unlikable, unpresidential. She is a witch. A bitch. Shes ugly. Dresses poorly. Her clothes cost too much. Her butt is big. Her hair is wrong. She is angry, nasty, hormonally imbalanced, and irrational. She is a bad woman, a bad wife, a bad mother. Shes a sexy vixen whose wanton ways and feminine wiles destroy good men. She is the very essence of moral turpitude, demolishing everything she surveys as she strides through life in four-inch stilettos, cackling wildly.

There is, I discovered, a clear pattern of vilification across the millennia and throughout history to bring down powerful individuals suffering from chronic no-penis syndrome. Its as if for thousands of years somebody has been passing along an instruction manual. I call it the Misogynists Handbook.

The handbook was crafted to enforce the Patriarchy, a concept so towering it must be capitalized. According to Cynthia Enloe in The Curious Feminist, Patriarchy is the structural and ideological system that perpetuates the privileging of masculinity.... [L]egislatures, political parties, museums, newspapers, theater companies, television networks, religious organizations, corporations, and courts... derive from the presumption that what is masculine is most deserving of reward, promotion, admiration, [and] emulation.

Though no one knows for sure, it is likely that the Patriarchy arose in the shrouded mists of unrecorded human history. Its enforcement arm, the handbook, probably did, too, and is therefore one of those rare books written long before writing was invented. For many thousands of years, the handbook has kept women in lineto differing degrees. In ancient Egypt, for instance, men almost always ran the show, but women had rights: to own property, operate businesses, initiate lawsuits, make contracts, and divorce their husbands with their assets intact. Their contemporaries to the north, the Athenians, locked well-to-do women up in harems. Though this book focuses mainly on stories from Western countries, the Misogynists Handbook has been wielded against women in cultures around the world, exerting an inexorable, hypnotic, and often unquestioned pull on humanity. Consider, for a moment, foot-binding in China. Harems in the Ottoman Empire and many other cultures. Bride burning in India. The Taliban wrapping women up in ugly blue bags, faceless creatures to be beaten if so much as a fingertip emerges from their hot, heavy shrouds. Rape everywhere, in every era.

Which prompts us to ask: Is misogyny in our DNA, perhaps arising as a method of forcing women to stay home to take care of the young, ensuring the continuation of the human race? Or is it a worldwide social construct, passed down from one generation to the other? Or did it start with the one and continue with the other?

Whatever the cause, I think most of usmale and female alikewill agree it is high time to destroy the handbook, to rip out its pages one by one, and burn them as we cheer. But in order to do so, we must first understand exactly what is on them. That is what this book is about.

I need to point out that most of us who enforce the handbook, support it, and obey it unquestioningly are not bad people. Most of us are probably very good people. We merely continue the traditions we learned from infancy on, as our parents did, and theirs, going back thousands of years. Most of us certainly dont mean to harm anyone. Indeed, many of those being harmed are blissfully unaware of it. The millennia-long triumph of misogyny is largely due to its invisibility.

Another important thing to understand about the Patriarchy is that it doesnt hate women in general. It is actually quite fond of those of us who keep within its proscribed bounds, where we will be loved and praised for our gracious acceptance of its rules and regulations. Just consider for a moment all those male politicians accused of treating women badly who defend themselves by pointing proudly to their lovely wives and daughters as uncontestable proof that they are not misogynists. Of course, the lovely wives and daughters, smiling rapturously as they cook him dinner, are serving him rather than competing with him. But what happens when a person in possession of a uterus runs against him in an election? Is she now a threat to be taken down by a man concerned about his virility?

Yes, she is probably a threat, and threats must be eradicated in the most ruthless way possible. The Patriarchy selectively punishes those women who challenge male power, who refuse to be silent, and who are insubordinate to the unwritten but well-understood rules. And it uses the Misogynists Handbook, those dependable measures discussed one by one in the following chapters, to do so.