It was too wet to go out so I started on some Spring Cleaning. I get the urge every year or so, but it doesn’t last long – just till the next sunny day. However, during last week’s little flurry of activity I found an old book tucked away at the back of a shelf. Small, scruffy, tiny print, and bound in a cheap, red coloured, cardboard cover, it could hardly look less inviting. It was part of Cassell’s Pocket Reference Library series, and was titled Proverbs and Maxims. First published in 1910 and reprinted 6 times before the edition now in my hands was put together (1931). There are probably many subsequent additions for, as the compiler John L Rayner quotes on his frontispiece, ‘a good maxim is never out of season.’
I glanced through it idly – thinking this would be marginally more interesting than dusting the shelf – and looked up husbands (half a page of quotations), men (one and a half pages), wives (two and a half pages) and women (over three pages). I can’t be sure, because the original authors were not cited, but the gist of each proverb/maxim suggests that in most cases, they were opined by a man.
Take those on husbands – ‘if a husband be not at home, there is nobody.’ ‘Husbands be in Heaven when wives scold not.’ And so on (mostly) in the same vein.
Likewise, there is a complacency and tolerance about the proverbs on men: ‘Man, woman, and devil are the three degrees of comparison.’ ‘Man is a bundle of habits.’ ‘Every man is the son of his own works.’ A proverb about old men is a bit disparaging – ‘it’s hard to break an old hog of an ill custom.’ But this is nothing on the general gist of proverbs about women.
Wives in particular, get a raw deal. ‘He that has a wife has strife.’ ‘Wives and wind are necessary evil.’ ‘Wife and children are bills of charges.’ But women in general don’t fare much better. The most complimentary was, at best, patronising. ‘A good woman is worth, if she were sold, the fairest crown that’s made of pure gold.’ Which is better, I suppose, than ‘A man of straw is worth a woman of gold.’
Most however are plain nasty, and stress the importance of keeping a woman in her place. ‘Women are ships, and must be manned.’ Women are the devil’s nets.’ ‘When an ass climbs a ladder, we may find wisdom in a woman.’ And my all-time least favourite – ‘a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they’ll be.’
Well, it’s a booklet from a hundred years ago, you may say. Things are so much better these days. True. When it was first published, women did not have the vote. And it is only in the last 50 or so years that women have been able to open bank accounts or take on a mortgage without permission from their husband or father, that the Football Association has graciously allowed women and girls to play football, and that athletics has permitted women to run in marathons. None of this has happened without a fight by women (and some men), so it’s great that Jasmin Paris, a young British woman, and the first woman ever to complete the Barkley ultra-endurance race in under 60 hours, has dedicated her achievement earlier this month ‘to woman everywhere.’
Because in other spheres, ‘progress’ is not always so evident. The NHS talks about ‘people with ovaries’ rather than acknowledge that these are bodily parts unique to women (though they have no problem talking about men getting checked out for prostate problems), and many UK politicians struggle to say what a woman is for fear of upsetting trans identifying males. The responses to women who object to this obfuscation are often crudely worded versions of the centuries old maxim ‘Let women spin, and not preach.’
Further afield, the situation is much worse, particularly in Afghanistan where women and girls have no rights and are not allowed to leave home without a male relative as a chaperone. No school, no work, no entertainment, no sporting activities – not even a walk in the park. Women out unaccompanied risk arrest, physical punishment, prison or even death (though the purity police, aka the Taliban, aren’t averse to a bit of punitive rape of such ‘loose women’ alongside these other measures). And allegations of adultery are now likely to end in death by stoning – just for the woman, of course. This in a country where 50 years ago young women dressed like me and, like me, were free to go to university and to work. No wonder the suicide rate among women and girls is so high there at the moment.
So well may we snigger at the old fashioned, misogynistic, attitudes evident in this little book of maxims and proverbs. But scratch the surface and many such sentiments are still around in western ‘civilised’ countries. And they are pretty much Government policy in some countries, notably Afghanistan and Iran.
And now the sun is out, and it is unlikely to rain for the next few days, so my spring cleaning has come to an abrupt halt. Long may the sun shine!
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