Free A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland

eloquence to directly intervene in political affairs. By 42 BC in Rome, the powerful triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavian (later to become the emperor Augustus), and Marcus Lepidus ruled as a three-man dictatorship, mercilessly purging their political opponents, 2,300 of whom were arrested and executed. Starved for cash, the triumvirate imposed a heavy tax on 1,400 upper-class women. The women marched in protest, and tried to speak to the womenfolk of the three rulers, hoping for a sympathetic hearing. They were only partially successful, but managed to force their way into the Forum to the speaker’s rostrum.
    According to Valerius Maximus, ‘no man dared take their case.’ Hortensia stepped forward and ‘pleaded their case before the triumvirs, both firmly and successfully.’ Something remarkable then happened, both in the history of misogyny and in the history of women (which to a large extent is the story of the struggle against misogyny). For the first time the question of franchise was raised, if only by implication. During her powerful speech, which focuses on the sufferings of women during war, Hortensia asks, ‘Why should we pay taxes when we have no part in the honours, the commands, the statecraft, for which you contend against each other with such harmful results?’ 54
    Though there is no outright demand for extending the vote to women, Hortensia’s words come very close to the demand the American revolutionaries voiced many centuries later: no taxation without representation. 55
    The women’s protest of 42 BC is the high point of their public activism in Rome and the last such demonstration they ever undertook in this era. It is also the last public protest by women aimed at political change that we know about in the history of Western civilization until the nineteenth century. Then the rise of the suffragette movement made the demand for the vote central to the campaign for women’s rights.
    Out of the turmoil that destroyed the Republic and replaced it with one-family rule came the conservative backlash against women. Fretting at women’s freedoms, moralists took up the refrain, ‘less lust and bigger families’. No sooner had Octavian become the Emperor Augustus in 27 BC than the historian Livy began to write his history of Rome (as seen from the winner’s point of view) and expressed clearly the new regime’s moral intentions:
     
I hope everyone will pay keen attention to the moral life of earlier times . . . and will appreciate the subsequent decline in discipline and in moral standards, the collapse and disintegration of morality down to the present day. For we have now reached a point where our degeneracy is intolerable – and so are the measures by which alone it can be reformed. 56
     
    As in the 1960s and 1970s, the problem was that women were having fewer children but more sex. The resurgence of the ‘family values’ movement was an attempt to reverse that trend. The Roman state, however, had more coercive power than the moral majoritarians of 1980s America.
    The old strict form of marriage, which had placed a wifeunder the absolute authority of her husband, lapsed with the centuries, and was replaced by more informal arrangements. Clearly, husbands were no longer made of the stern stuff of Rome’s founding fathers and had grown too tolerant over the years. Some were refusing to divorce their wives when they caught them in adultery. A few husbands were accused of even profiting by it. Liberalism of this sort was judged to be the cause of the rot which moralists saw all around them. Augustus drafted a series of laws, known as the Lex Julia, aimed at encouraging men and women to marry and at restoring the traditional Roman family. Augustus imposed penalties on those who had not married by a certain age, and rewarded those who did and fathered children. He revived the ancient law allowing fathers to kill their daughters, and husbands their wives, if caught in the sexual act; husbands