But since the fourth millennium BCE, French informs her readers, men began to construct ‘the patriarchy’, a system she defines as ‘male supremacy backed by force’. For women ‘it has been downhill ever since’. We are informed that women were ‘probably’ the first slaves and have since then been ‘increasingly disempowered, degraded and subjugated’. For the last four centuries, French says, this has got completely out of control, with men (‘mainly in the West’) attempting to ‘tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature – people of color and women’.
