The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

by Angela Saini

In her, we can still recognize our potential to destroy the social order.

We can visualize the unstoppable rage in the heart of the oppressed.

We might even wonder if those are the heads of history’s patriarchs su...

what complicates any universal theory of patriarchy is that gender inequality and oppression have never been the same for everyone everywhere.

If there were some fundamental aspects of male and female natures that put men in control of women, that divided us up neatly into separate roles, we would expect everyone all over the world and throughout history to share similar living and working patterns.

women are part of the anonymous in history, but unlike them, they are also and always have been part of the ruling elite. They are oppressed, but not quite like either racial or ethnic groups, though some of them are. They are subordinate and exploited, but not quite like lower classes, though some of them are.”

There were accounts of the origins of patriarchy that ended with women being just plain unable to resist male domination.

“the culture of our own society is attributed to the ‘nature’ of a hypothetical society.”

“We would do well to think of biological sex, like biological race,” she suggested, “as an excuse rather than a cause for any sexism we observe.”

Evidence across cultures proves that what we imagine to be fixed biological rules or neat, linear histories are usually anything but. We are a species that shows enormous variation in how we choose to live, with remarkable leeway for change. By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is: something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted.

The elites that ran these societies needed young women to have as many children as possible, and for the young men they raised to be willing warriors. It’s at this point that it’s possible to spot gendered rules appearing, curbing the behavior and freedom of everyday individuals. Virtues such as loyalty and honor became recruited into service of these basic goals. Traditions and religions, in turn, developed around the same social codes.

Women’s oppression may not have begun in the home, but it did end there.

Patriarchal power could be wielded in myriad ways by everyone in a society. But all the time this was happening, people also pushed back. There was always resistance and compromise. The changes we see through time are gradual and fitful, often stealing into people’s lives over generations until they couldn’t imagine themselves any other way. After all, this is how social transformation usually works: by normalizing what would have been unthinkable before.

Gendered oppression was cooked up and refined not only within societies; it was also deliberately exported to others for centuries, through proselytism and colonialism.

Those in power have worked desperately hard over time to give the illusion of solidity to the gendered codes and hierarchies they invented.

The biggest challenge was untangling the mass of assumptions that bog down this subject, disguised as objective knowledge but often turning out to be husks of conjecture.

Even if we’re able to see beyond the sleights of hand, we’re constrained by our own experiences and beliefs. For all of us who have gone in search of the origins of patriarchy, our efforts may say less about the past than they do about the present.

We can’t help but look for threads of familiarity on which to suspend our disbelief.

Female leadership is seen not just among bonobos but also among killer whales, lions, spotted hyenas, lemurs, and elephants.

What sets them apart is that bonobo females form tight social bonds with each other even when they’re not related, cementing those relationships and easing tensions by rubbing their genitals together. These intimate social networks create power, locking out the possibility for individual males to dominate the group.

the lack of science linking Goldberg’s theory to something measurable in our bodies. His answer to male domination was a frustratingly tautological one. It was natural for it to exist, and it existed because it was natural.

The alpha wins not always by beating others into submission but by building networks of strategic allies. Primates don’t like to be ruled by bullies or treated unfairly.

Some of the key traits linked to dominance are kindness, sociability, and cooperation.

At its simplest, it tells children that their female ancestors matter, that girls have an important place in their families.

It can also determine a woman’s status and how much wealth and property she can expect to inherit.

She found that “matrilineal women report

greater autonomy in decision-making, are less supportive of domestic violence, and, crucially, experience less domestic violence.”

As local custom had it, she never covered her breasts. “A deep, subconscious wealth of history was contained within her,” he writes. “This matriarch of our extended family, a personality of great fortitude and understanding, was deeply concerned about women’s liberty.”

What was happening was a gradual realignment of where family authority was seen to naturally lie. This didn’t come about just through the efforts of colonial authorities and zealous missionaries; it was also supported by those who thought they might be advantaged by the new ways, who welcomed the end of their communal households as a chance to seize a slice of family power, property, and wealth.

“Nobody ever calls the patriarchy ‘the patriarchal puzzle.’”

The best way to understand a species is to observe how it behaves. But if we’re to follow this approach and take as a scientific fact that all the members of one sex are naturally subordinate to another, that there are innate differences between us that make it impossible for women to have equality or as much power as men, we also have to be able to explain why women fight for more rights and privileges at all.

If subordination is knitted into our bodies and minds, it’s hard to understand why we struggle against

The most dangerous part of any form of oppression is that it can make people believe that there are no alternatives. We see this in the old fallacies of race, caste, and class. The question for any theory of male domination is why this one form of inequality should be treated as an exception.

Where the original creators of the image had got their facts wrong, where the complex reality of colonization had been replaced by misleading stereotypes, would now be clear to the public. It would serve a double lesson: both correcting the facts and explaining how history had been filtered by those in power.

Putting them in loincloths served to emphasize a perceived civilizational difference between the conquering Europeans and the Indigenous inhabitants of the land. The intention is clear—one is superior to the other.

They were there to be enjoyed, to be dependent on men. This paternalism was woven into the nation’s laws and values, not through error or oversight but by design.

“Married women were civilly dead.”

She existed as a citizen only through her husband.

“Democracy itself was learned from the Haudenosaunee. A lot of their symbolism within their government was stolen from our peoples.”

Official recognition of this came in October 1988, when the United States Senate passed a resolution confirming that when its first colonies were brought together into one republic in the eighteenth century, leading to the formation of its representative democracy, the political system of the Haudenosaunee people influenced its founders.

Circles needed to be squared.

Men’s drive to control paternity and inheritance not only forced women into becoming little more than vessels for their babies, Engels wrote; it also transformed them into men’s property. “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude,

she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children,” he wrote. Modern-day legal inequality between the sexes was the product of this “economic oppression,” as he put it, relegating women to subordinates within the institution of marriage in their own homes. The husband and father became the head of household, and “the wife became the head servant.”

a single, coherent story

None was seeing Indigenous communities for who they really were, only for what they wanted them to be. Along the way, living people were reduced to relics. And this would mean that some women’s rights and freedoms would end up being sacrificed for the rights of others.

The wealthier middle classes saw it as their job to uphold traditional family values—and not just in their own households.

Almost two-thirds of the women sampled in two neighborhoods of New York for the 1855 census had no men in their households, Stansell writes. Not taking up paid work would have condemned them to poverty and homelessness.

The domesticated housewife had from the beginning only ever been an aspiration for the wealthiest. Until slavery ended, it was the labor of enslaved men, women, and children that afforded rich white women the luxury to avoid work at all.

Yet throughout her life, Schlafly was also living proof of the constraints of the domestic dream. While lobbying against equality, she studied, worked, and eventually sought national political prominence. She would never admit it, but her career contradicted the very rules she fought to defend.

him,