The Misanthrope’s Corner

UNDERSTANDING female misogyny requires a taste for paradox. A female misogynist is an exceptionally independent, self-confident woman who starts out assuming that other women are just like her and gets dismayed and impatient when they aren’t. Eventually, after years of watching the majority of her sex snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat and call it femininity, she realizes that women capable of leading women are also capable of despising them.

Nineteenth-century suffrage literature is replete with examples of female misogyny. In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton called housewives “the mummies of civilization” and boasted that “such pine knots as you and I are no standard for judging ordinary women.”

About the Author

Florence King

Florence King was a contributing editor of National Review.

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UNDERSTANDING female misogyny requires a taste for paradox. A female misogynist is an exceptionally independent, self-confident woman who starts out assuming that other women are just like her and gets dismayed and impatient when they aren’t. Eventually, after years of watching the majority of her sex snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat and call it femininity, she realizes that women capable of leading women are also capable of despising them.

Nineteenth-century suffrage literature is replete with examples of female misogyny. In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton called housewives “the mummies of civilization” and boasted that “such pine knots as you and I are no standard for judging ordinary women.”