For her part French declared at the outset of her book, ‘there is evidence’ that for around three and half million years the human species lived in a situation in which men and women were equal. In fact more than equal, for in those days women apparently enjoyed a higher status than men. Then for the last 10,000 or so years our species allegedly lived in ‘egalitarian harmony and material well-being’, with the sexes getting on pretty well. 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
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