Robinson £8.99 pp320

Some years ago, when my son was little, he saw a book on my shelf called Votes for Women. What was this book about? I explained that when my grandmother was born, women in Britain were not allowed to vote. My son asked, “But why?” Well, there was a trillion-dollar question. Should I reveal to him the inside of this particular can of worms? My sister advised me not to, on the grounds that he would find out soon enough.

You see, darling, I could have said, lots and lots of grown-up men don’t like women. For as long as there have been two genders, men have made enormous efforts to enforce and institutionalise the oppression of the female. Even in a supposedly enlightened and “post-feminist” society such as ours, hatred of women stinks out the whole shooting-match like a bad drain. Young women are bitches and sluts who absolutely force men to rape them by not wearing enough clothes. Old women are either invisible or grotesque, and when they get too old to shag, they have the temerity to take a man’s money if he goes off in search of something fresher. This is so deeply ingrained that it hardly seems worth pointing out.

To say that misogyny is everywhere is like saying air is everywhere. As Rebecca West observed, “The difference between men and women is the rock on which civilisation will split.”

Except that it hasn’t split yet. Every year, an estimated 5,000 women are murdered globally by their own relations for damaging the family “honour”. Millions of girls have their clitorises cut off and their labia stitched together. Millions more are expected to go about their lawful occasions shrouded from head to foot.

This kind of jiggery-pokery is (mostly) confined to what is politely termed the “developing” world. In this society, we like to think we are more enlightened. Women have such luxuries as votes and maternity leave. But misogyny has only gone underground. Trendy middle-class couples call their little girls “Billie” or “Charlie” and dress them in jeans. But this is not a sign that the barrier has disappeared. If it were, they would also call their little boys “Daisy’”or “Violet” and send them to school in frocks. To give a girl a masculine identity is to pay her a compliment, implying she is better than the others. To give a boy a feminine identity would count as child abuse.

Jack Holland’s Misogyny, an invaluable addition to Robinson’s Brief History series, attempts to find the source of man’s inhumanity to woman. Sadly, Holland died soon after finishing the book. His daughter, Jenny Holland, supplies a foreword, in which she assures us that he “loved history and he loved women”. Some people, she says, were surprised that a history of misogyny should be written by a man. “Why not?” was Holland’s response. “It was invented by men.”

Holland himself relates, with quiet amusement, how many men assumed he was writing some kind of defence of misogyny. “If I had said I was writing a history of racism, I do not think anyone would have concluded automatically that I was a racist.”

This prejudice, he says, is the oldest of the lot, and runs so deep that it is almost invisible. “Was there,” he wonders, “a women’s history BC — ‘before contempt’?” If so, he has not found it. In the ancient world, there were endless attempts to control women. The infamous “Lex Julia” of the Romans made it illegal for a wronged husband not to prosecute a straying wife. Baby girls were routinely left to die — as still happens in many parts of the world today. Jewish men traditionally thanked God “for not making me a woman”. I have always respected this because it shows their awareness of the awfulness of the female lot — it was only polite to thank the Creator for sparing them.

The arrival of Christianity should have made things a little better. Although Jesus Christ liked and respected women, however, his followers down the centuries have stitched them up worse than ever — the Roman Catholic Church in particular does not come out of this book looking good. In the name of Christianity, women have been stoned to death, thrown to lions or burnt as witches. They have been tortured and imprisoned ever since in the name of all sorts of things.

Holland’s history is meticulously researched and briskly related. Nothing here surprises, but his wry comments and apposite quotations are a constant delight, as is his refusal to be simplistic. Misogyny is “a Gordian knot of interwoven dependencies” and can be attributed to the basic natural differences between men and women. But as Katharine Hepburn says in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above.”

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £8.54 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict