Jack Holland - A Brief History of Misogyny - The Worlds Oldest Prejudice

JACK HOLLAND was a highly respected author and journalist known particularly for his commentary about Northern Irish politics. He grew up in Belfast (where he was taught by Seamus Heaney), and worked with Jeremy Paxman and other outstanding journalists at BBC Belfast, during a period of seminal current affairs programming. Jack published four novels and seven works of non-fiction, most of the latter relating to politics and terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the bestselling Phoenix: Policing the Shadows.

Sadly, Jack died of cancer in 2004, just after finishing the manuscript of Misogyny. On his death, his family received letters of respect from statesmen including Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, who had come to rely on his balanced analysis of Irish politics.

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Thanks are due to a number of people in our quest to get this book published posthumously. For their moral and/or practical support, we would like to thank Stephen Davis, Don Gilbert, Susan Phoenix, Marcia Rock and Michelle Stoddard. We are particularly grateful to Brad Henslee, David Goodine and Mike Myles for creating, developing and maintaining www.jackholland.net.

We especially wish to thank Sappho Clissitt, our London literary agent, who had the courage and foresight to take on this project, when many other agents would not.

They all have our heartfelt thanks.

Mary Hudson and Jenny Holland

My father loved history and he loved women. These are the two factors that brought him to the topic of misogyny, one substantially different from the Northern Irish political matters on which he had built a career.

He began work on Misogyny: The Worlds Oldest Prejudice in 2002. The topic was quite a conversation starter. A common response from other men, when my father told them what he was working on, was an assumption that he was writing some sort of defence of misogyny, a reaction he found startling. Another common response was surprise that such a book should be written by a man. To this, his answer was simple. Why not? he would say. It was invented by men.

While he was writing, he became consumed by the astonishing list of crimes committed against women by their husbands, fathers, neighbours and rulers. My mother and I would shudder as he recounted them: from the mind-boggling torture of suspected witches in early modern Europe, to the horrendous cruelty suffered by women in North Korean prisons. He clipped newspaper articles; he read myriad histories; he turned to poetry and plays in an attempt to find cultural explanations.

My father felt that this was his most important work. In it, he turned his journalists eye to a daunting question: how do you explain the oppression and brutalization of half the worlds population by the other half, throughout history?

The tools he used in tackling that question were the same ones he employed to make other more contemporary conflicts tangible to his readers his ability to condense difficult, inaccessible material; his considerable knowledge of Western culture and history; his sympathy for the oppressed; and his lyrical prose style. With these at his disposal, he created a history which, despite its often brutal subject matter, is remarkably pleasurable to read.

In March 2004, a month after he finished Misogyny, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He died that May of NK/T cell lymphoma, an extremely rare form of cancer that is almost always fatal. Although weakened by illness and treatment, he remained absorbed by the project, and continued working on the final edits while in his hospital bed.

The father-daughter relationship occupies an important place in this book, for it is in this most intimate of connections that misogynys pernicious effects are carried forward, or broken. It is also a central relationship in any girls life and as a father, mine approached his parental role with lightness, admiring without fawning, accepting the arrival of my womanhood with grace and tactful approval. Most of all he always asked me for my thoughts. He encouraged me to be argumentative, to challenge him. Occasionally, he would chuckle and poke fun at my youthful convictions; other times our debates would become quite heated. I knew from what he said that he prized my intelligence. I knew from the soft look in his eyes that he cherished my womanliness.