Misogyny Has Always Been Respectable.

The Right has always wanted women to be weak, stupid, and cowardly.

One of the themes of my Substack is that misogyny is respectable in a way racism is not. Both forms of bigotry are deeply harmful, make no mistake. Neither one is worse and both forms can lead to violence. The only difference between the two is that misogyny leads to a long and distinguished career these days while racism does not. This piece, which has its own problems, by Matthew Yglesias has a pretty good outline of the decline of respectable racism. This excellent book by Kate Manne describes the very different way misogyny gets treated. Besides Manne, there are plenty of feminist scholars who can demonstrate how legal and social restrictions forced women into the prison of femininity, but I want to focus on one specific useless wingnut, GK Chesterton.

Chesterton is beloved of the reactionary set because he wrote a lot of aphorisms which can be flung around in place of argument and evidence. One of the best comments on Chesterton is George Orwell’s line in The Road to Wigan Pier — “I have seen too much of slums to go into Chestertonian raptures about them.“ Even Orwell, who has misogyny problems of his own, couldn’t condemn Chesterton for the fat dude’s obvious and brutal misogyny. Misogyny is respectable. His antisemitism has been noted frequently, but the only person to discuss his misogyny was Rebecca West. In NINETEEN THIRTEEN. Granting the point that Rebecca West was an excellent writer and that she dispatched Chesterton’s arguments quite well, it is remarkable that no one cared very much to mention how much Chesterton hated women in the intervening 112 years. And oh good GOD did Chesterton HATE women, at least women who refused to be mindless idiots. This tripe, filled as it is with unsupported assertions and evidenceless conclusions, is a good example of how contemptible Chesterton found women.

There is a lot more where that came from, but what I want to discuss today is Chesterton’s belief that women should be prohibited from pursuing excellence and how he uses facile, circular arguments. In the often-quoted passage from What’s Wrong With The World:

The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original and artistic tales, but tales—better tales than would probably be told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests.

“Second bests” is all women will ever be allowed in Chesterton’s fantasy world. Note that he does not say that women ARE cooks by nature; he says that we “MUST BE” cooks. He does not argue that we lack the capacity but that we should be prevented by law and custom from doing so. Further, we have to be bad cooks, or at least not exceptional ones. Women in ChesterWorld cannot be allowed to devote time and energy to pursuing excellence.

This less-quoted passage from the same work, immediately preceding the one quoted above, openly states that women should be prohibited from doing work that engages our minds:

Unless the Socialists are frankly ready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes and electric lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any telescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order to keep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he earns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not "give her best," but gives her all. [Emphasis Added to show what a moral monster Chesterton was.]

His assertion that there is a contrast between excellent and sanity serves to emphasize just how cruel his plan for women is. All women in ChesterWorld are one single woman, an undifferentiated mass of mindless protoplasm that occasionally buds off a new blob which sometimes forms itself into a creature with a brain — a male — and other times into another blob to be absorbed back into the one mindless Woman. If any one of those blobs decides she has a mind and wants to use it, Chesterton has no place for her.

There is a subtle point that I want to make explicit: Chesterton does not think women are incapable of excellence. He thinks we have to be prevented from being allowed to develop it. He is far more cruel than the biological essentialist who thinks women are just mediocre because our neurobiology is worse than males. He wants Taliban-like laws and customs keeping women away from achievement.

I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard. One’s own children, one’s own altar, ought to be a matter of principle—or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the other hand, who wrote Junius’s Letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.

Chesterton’s habit of deceiving his readers by replacing facts with unsupported assertions makes it seem like he really is saying women are mentally unfit for public achievement. In his words women are naturally ‘stubborn’ and somehow this trait carries over into office work at which even the old fat misogynist thinks we excel.

The example he gives is about a scholarly debate concerning the authorship of some 18th Century pamphlets. His ‘modern girl secretary’ is ‘taken’ to a lecture about this problem and, through some undefined magic, starts believing what she’s told out of ‘mere loyalty to her employers.’ Chesterton cannot describe the process by which this happens. He doesn’t explain who took her to the lecture or how or whether the authorship of the pamphlets is in any way connected to her work. Without this information — and Chesterton quite deliberately and deceitfully excludes it — he can manipulate the reader into thinking that the typist is unfit for work in offices.

Chesterton lies to the reader by stating that the authorship of the pamphlets should be a matter of “free and almost indifferent inquiry” which he thinks women can’t manage. He doesn’t define what he means by ‘almost indifferent inquiry.’ An honest writer would describe the steps involved in researching and solving scholarly questions. Because he omits any analysis of what tasks scholarship requires, he can airily dismiss women’s abilities as mere emotionalism, and then state that we should prevented from using our abilities. This is, again, a standard right wing habit of defining terms themselves so that they aren’t required to prove anything in a real debate. This method of argument is the real meaning of ‘begging the question;” posing the question in a way that assumes the answer the writer wants. Chesterton asserts that scholarly work requires emotional detachment from the subject and then that women are too emotional for scholarship for Reasons.

One might object to my assertion that Chesterton wants women kept stupid with the response that he complains that men’s world is not that special. He claims in this bilge that being confined at home is somehow more important than the public world. Like every other word he wrote on the subject, this essay contains no evidence and no connections to anything resembling a fact. He does assert however that women seeking to vote and to have a public role are abandoning a kind of power over their homes.

We said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing room. In both cases the idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the necessity of votes; the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins; all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers.

His assertion that women’s sphere is more important than men’s is entirely self-contradictory. In “The Wildness of Domesticity” he states:

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim.

Note that he says men, by which he means males, can alter their houses however they wish, without any regard to the opinions of the women sharing the space with them. Men, in ChesterWorld, should be the tyrants of all their spaces and women nothing more than porcelain knickknacks.

Nothing demonstrates better his conviction that women are essentially trivial than his answer to the question of what is the purpose of government? What do votes do? Chesterton, in one of the very few statements which I agree with him, says votes form governments. What do governments do? He answers:

This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice.

The purpose of state coercion is to punish wrongdoers:

. . . the essential point is that in self-governing countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kicked by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a man is hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only possible meaning of democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.

So, voting, which for my purposes is a good synecdoche for public life in general, makes the voter part of the collective than can punish criminals.¹This includes passing the laws under which criminals are punished. So, why shouldn’t women be part of that collective? Because voters serve on juries, and juries impose the death penalty. Chesterton loved him some hangings, which can be learned from reading that essay. He heartily endorses women BEING hanged. His only problem with women voting was that we might have some say in whether or not we were hanged. Instead of considering whether or not the death penalty itself or the manner in which it was imposed at the time he was writing was wrong, he simply wanted women excluded from being involved in it.

This connects directly to his refusal to grant women the space to develop excellence. He never once considers the fact that I just noted: women were subject to the death penalty but barred from the system that imposed it. He never considered the actual concrete facts of any woman’s particular life or death. At no point does he, or any of his modern admirers, compare his assertions to the things any real existing women did all day. In the same way he ignores the question of how male juries judge the behavior of women defendants, he never considers anything about the actual tasks a woman in Edwardian England had to perform each day.

Housework, especially when Chesterton was writing but still today, was backbreaking and brutal, and never completed. There are plenty of resources available to study things like how much time a woman had to spend cooking or cleaning. The best evidence I can show about how horrible housework at the time was is the fact that one fourth of the British labor force before 1914 were domestic servants of which about 80% of those workers were women. ANY woman who could get out of cooking and cleaning in those days did so. Chesterton himself employed women as domestic servants, yet he never once condemned the practice. Women working for wages in offices was terrible but women working 10 hour days in laundries or scrubbing floors in private houses was just fine. His problem was never at all women working, only women working where we could accrue prestige and good pay.

His description of what women do contains nothing concrete. Chesterton never once bothers with actually asking actual women what their lives are like. Data is beneath him. His callous disregard for citing anything concrete or specific makes it very difficult to dispute the vicious implications of his statements. If he never mentions any concrete examples it is not possible to analyze where he is wrong. Specific facts are true or false and can be refuted. Verbal farts untethered to any actual evidence cannot be.

An excellent example of his foggy speculations is this passage from the “The Romance of Thrift” section of What’s Wrong.

For in the average human house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section. The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their husbands home, simple minded “social workers” always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time that is wasted in talk.

Chesterton deliberately deceived his readers here. He knew that women were in fact powerless and physically unsafe at home with their husbands. In the following passage from Democracy versus Divorce, Chesterton enthusiastically defends wife-beating:

I will take but one instance of the enormity and silliness which is really implied in these proposals for the extension of divorce. Take the case quoted by many contributors to the discussion in the papers—the case of what is called “cruelty.” Now what is the real meaning of this as regards the prosperous and as regards the struggling classes of the community? Let us take the prosperous classes first. Every one knows that those who are really to be described as gentlemen all profess a particular tradition, partly chivalrous, partly merely modern and refined—a tradition against “laying hands upon a woman, save in a way of kindness.” I do not mean that a gentleman hates the cowing of a woman by brute force: any one must hate that. I mean he has a ritual, taboo kind of feeling about the laying on of a finger. If a gentleman (real or imitation) has struck his wife ever so lightly, he feels he has done one of those things that thrill the thoughts with the notion of a border-line; something like saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, touching a{9} hot kettle, reversing the crucifix, or “breaking the pledge.” The wife may forgive the husband more easily for this than for many things; but the husband will find it hard to forgive himself. It is a purely class sentiment, like the poor folks’ dislike of hospitals. What is the effect of this class sentiment on divorce among the higher classes?

The first effect, of course, is greatly to assist those faked divorces so common among the fashionable. I mean that where there is a collusion, a small pat or push can be remembered, exaggerated, or invented; and yet seem to the solemn judges a very solemn thing in people of their own social class. But outside these cases, the test is not wholly inappropriate as applied to the richer classes. For, all gentlemen feeling or affecting this special horror, it does really look bad if a gentleman has broken through it; it does look like madness or a personal hatred and persecution. It may even look like worse things. If a man with luxurious habits, in artistic surroundings, is cruel to his wife, it may be connected with some perversion of sex cruelty, such as was alleged (I know not how truly) in the case of the millionaire Thaw. We need not deny that such cases are cases for separation, if not for divorce.

But this test of technical cruelty, which is rough and ready as applied to the rich, is absolutely mad and meaningless as applied to the poor. A poor woman does not judge her husband as a bully by whether he has ever hit out. One might as well say that a schoolboy judges whether another schoolboy is a bully by whether he has ever hit out. The poor wife, like the schoolboy, judges him as a bully by whether he is a bully. She knows that while wife-beating may really be a crime, wife-hitting is sometimes very like just self-defence. No one knows better than she does that her husband often has a great deal to put up with; sometimes she means him to; sometimes she is justified. She comes and tells all this to magistrates again and{10} again; in police court after police court women with black eyes try to explain the thing to judges with no eyes. In street after street women turn in anger on the hapless knight-errant who has interrupted an instantaneous misunderstanding. In these people’s lives the rooms are crowded, the tempers are torn to rags, the natural exits are forbidden. In such societies it is as abominable to punish or divorce people for a blow as it would be to punish or divorce a gentleman for slamming the door. Yet who can doubt, if ever divorce is applied to the populace, it would be applied in the spirit which takes the blow quite seriously? If any one doubts it, he does not know what world he is living in.

The false distinction between ‘wife-hitting’ and ‘wife-beating’ should be dismissed immediately. Note, first, the snobbery Chesterton demonstrates by excusing the behavior of poor men who hit their wives as being a product of their physical environment and exhausting work Working class males just can’t help being brutes to the women and children who are their helpless thralls. Instead of arguing for measures to improve those circumstances with better working conditions, pay, and housing, Chesterton rewards poor men with the right to beat their wives. As for his claim that poor women defend their husbands against charges of beating them, that is circular with his assertions that women should never have our own money. Make a world where women have to helplessly depend on their husbands’ wages with no way of earning their own money means that the women must endure beatings in order to eat and live indoors.

Chesterton remains popular among the Right precisely because his arguments are so bad, but also couched in Edwardian blather and therefore hard to read. They continue his practice of ignoring concrete facts in favor of the world inside their own heads. The real purpose of their work, just as it was for Chesterton, is to preserve and unjust hierarchy of birth that leaves most people leading dirty, ignorant lives toiling to make life beautiful for the lucky few born into wealth. His work has no redeeming value, from his overwrought, dated language to his pernicious policy recommendations, he adds nothing to the collective wisdom or common good. Leave him for antiquarians and PhD students.

1. Chesterton is at best lukewarm about even most males voting, but that is beyond the scope of my essay today.