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Patriarchy, then, wasn’t introduced overnight.
It was the product of one battle after another, stretching out over centuries. It slowly chipped away at existing laws and customs, just as it did in India in the nineteenth century among Kerala’s matrilineal Nairs.
They lost status not only within their own societies, but their societies also lost status because of colonization.
The history of suffrage that’s glossed over, the one that’s messier than the triumphalist version, proves what few want to admit: patriarchal ideas are carried within states and institutions to which women have also been committed, from which they have also drawn benefits, and which they have also defended.
This history also goes to show that the emergence of patriarchy could never have been a single global catastrophic event at a point in time so long ago that we have no record of it anymore. How could it be when there are people today who can recall how it was imposed on their own communities within their own lifetimes? There are matrilineal societies that are resisting its encroachment even now.
Just because a society has female deities or produces scores of female figurines doesn’t mean it’s necessarily dominated by women.
Gimbutas had been raised on the rich folklore of Lithuania, on its fantastical tales of women with supernatural powers. There was the “Baba Yaga,” for instance, considered a witch in Russian folklore, whom Gimbutas described as a Slavic goddess of death and regeneration. In Celtic cultures, she wrote, women enjoyed a relatively high status and were known for fighting in battles. In many of the stories she collected, goddesses, witches, or otherwise supernatural women were described as transforming into animals such as vultures, crows, or goats. The “Andre Mari,” which Basque folklore saw as a
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“I find thinking in mythological terms has helped people,” the late literature professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell once said. “Myths and dreams come from the same place; they come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.”
What this kind of gender essentialism does, as other feminist scholars have also been at pains to point out, is ignore that women are also capable of cruelty and violence. Men, too, can be nurturing and creative. The “feminist recourse to an imaginary past needs to be cautious,” argues Butler. The qualities we define as “masculine” and “feminine” are shaped by social and cultural forces. There’s no basis for assuming that what sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century Western beliefs about gender were held by people living in completely different societies thousands of years ago.
Putting our assumptions aside is almost impossible. We’re all constrained by our biases. Feminist archaeology may be slower work, but it is more intimate than the sweeping approach that experts used to take in the past. It requires the archaeologist to let go of certainty and embrace ambiguity. It accepts that even in a village with a strong culture of its own, individuals might have lived in different ways, just as people do now. It forces us to ask whether the social norms we take as given today might not have been the same ten thousand years ago.
Power and wealth are transmitted through sons if a society tends to be patrilineal. And this means that genetic data can also be used to gauge how far back patriliny might go.
Where we really can start to spot a shift in gender relations, the first shoots of overarching male authority, is with the rise of the first states. The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organizing principle, when entire populations are categorized in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose. It’s when the category a person belongs to overrides the way society thinks about the individual.
Lists were one of their tools of control.
At its most basic, the ancient Greek household, the oikos, can be seen as a system for keeping people in a condition of unfreedom.
These paternalistic relationships fed the impression that women were foolish and immature, and men were rational and wise—when, in fact, it was just their age differences that made it appear that way. We live with these stereotypes to this day.
Gender also became associated with virtues like honor, courage, and loyalty. There was anxiety around those who didn’t follow the rules or live up to society’s values.
There’s an ancient Greek medical text On Regimen, attributed to the fifth-century BCE physician Hippocrates (the one doctors remember these days when they take their Hippocratic oath), which says that a baby’s character is decided in the womb by a battle between its mother’s seeds and its father’s seeds. Each of these seeds, Walter Penrose explains, can lean toward the feminine or masculine regardless of which parent it comes from, meaning that mothers can make male-leaning seeds and fathers can produce female-leaning ones. So, for instance, a “masculine” female baby could be the result of the
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“All is habit,” Plato commented. We can get used to anything.
At worst, she’s consigned to the bottom of the domestic hierarchy until she bears a child. Often, only when she has a son.
“In the majority of the cases we are seeing, it’s not only the male’s fault,” Choudhury tells me. “It’s a collective kind of abuse done by everyone in the family.” A husband may be cruel or controlling, but so might his parents, sisters, and brothers. Children will be inducted into these power hierarchies. Almost all the members of the family can bring their weight down to bear upon the brides who marry into them.
Women become the instruments of the same patriarchal forces that previously oppressed them.
Women’s oppression, we often hear, predates all other forms of oppression.
The most recent figures estimate that of the more than forty million people living in modern slavery worldwide, at least fifteen million are in forced marriages. This means that a person somewhere in the world is being married against her will almost every two seconds.
If there’s one thing that historically patrilocal and patrilineal systems have in common, it’s that brides are generally the ones being “given away” by their families—more precisely, by their fathers. It took until 2021 for mothers in England and Wales to see their names included on the marriage certificates of their children, after the government corrected what it called a “historic anomaly.”
Dating back to the Middle Ages, the English common law principle of coverture stated that women no longer existed legally as individuals once they were married.
Perhaps it wasn’t the subordination of women that originally provided the model for slavery and other forms of oppression. Maybe instead it was the practice of slavery that gradually came to inform institutions of marriage.
by the end of the eighteenth century more than three-quarters of the world’s population may have been living under some form of human bondage, including indentured labor, serfdom, and slavery.
The boundary between choice and coercion becomes blurry.
Scott tells me that in ancient Rome, the name “Barbara” was used to refer to the wife of a Roman citizen who had origins as a slave—as in “barbarian.” This word’s roots, in turn, lie in a racist term in ancient Greece referring to a foreigner who couldn’t speak Greek.
Male anxiety that women weren’t loyal to their families or to the state, that they might someday revolt, may have been grounded in a genuine fear because so many of them were foreign captives.
Patrilocality was a social system in which women would leave their families to be with their husbands, becoming outsiders in their new homes. At the same time, captive taking and slavery provided models for how to treat outsiders.
The body survives, he explains, but everything else is subsumed into nothingness. Slavery represents nothing less than “social death.”
Of the factors essential to psychological well-being—the need to belong, to have control over one’s life, to be able to trust others, and to see people as essentially good—slavery is an assault on all of them,
The very presence of captives in early captor societies could have transformed the way everyday people thought about violence and inequality, says Cameron. It made the gross mistreatment of fellow humans seem acceptable. Enslavement lowered the bar for depravity. It taught ordinary people how to separate and subjugate others, to normalize violence in their own homes and communities, to deny individuals their dignity and agency, and to extract their labor for free.
Their identities are transformed piece by piece.
What caused the woman to carry out this act, she believed, was the deep-rooted conviction that she was there to serve the family, that her contribution to it was worth less than everyone else’s.
This ideology of female sacrifice, even at the price of a person’s own health and well-being, was one that Delphy observed right across France, in the cities as well as in the countryside.
nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labor was unpaid.
“patriarchal bargain” to describe the ways in which women strategize within the constraints of systems dominated by more powerful and usually older men—those whom we might refer to as patriarchs.
most human relationships in reality reflect some degree of ownership of one person over another. We recognize freedom as something distinct, he suggests, only because so many people in history have had to live in the state of not having it at all. Even now, all of us are under someone’s authority to a degree, whether it’s our parents, our partners, our employers, or the state. It’s the way this authority is exercised through the law and the eyes of society, the amount of agency we have in these relationships, and our ability to negotiate within them that determine how free we really are.
Far from it. She laughed at the idea that there was some universal sisterhood wrapping “a unifying ribbon around bourgeois ladies and female proletarians.” Different women had different problems. It was impossible for the wealthy and privileged to understand the lives of ordinary working people, not least when women at the top of society directly benefited from the cheap labor of female servants and factory workers. So, she actively distanced herself from what she saw as the “bourgeois feminism” of the capitalist elites.
Women had long aligned themselves with powerful men to suppress the rights of other women.
the root of the problem is capitalism.”
Socialism proved that how the state was organized could have a profound impact on how people thought about themselves and each other, and it instituted that change perhaps more rapidly than any other regime has in history. Where it failed on gender equality was to forget that humans are cultural creatures, not automatons. We cling to our customs, our beliefs, even if we don’t understand why we do. Instituting equality wasn’t just a fight against capitalism. It was also a fight against the past.
The tradition they’ve been sold by their new leaders isn’t a return to the old days. Instead, it is a tradition that has been deliberately refitted to suit the needs of those in charge. They’re not looking to bring back the past as it really was. What they’re doing is using the past to strengthen their hand in the present. And this form of control—tinged with expedience and hypocrisy—is one of the enduring themes of patriarchal power.
Because without protesting, they have already been punished by the government.” Whether they speak out or not, she says, women and girls suffer the daily indignity of being judged for wearing their veils inappropriately or not dressing “modestly” enough.
Laws and religions came to be built around the gendered principle that there were only two useful kinds of person: women who could bear and raise children and men who could
The stranglehold of patriarchal power lies in how deeply woven it has become into so many of our cultures. More than anything, humans are cultural creatures. We feel the need to belong, to have a history, to feel that our existence has some meaning beyond ourselves. Without connections to the past, we would have no reference point on which to build our identities.
Part of the privilege of having power is being able to pour your definition of what is moral, natural, or authentic into your own container.
If it’s ancient history, tradition, or an unchanging faith that justifies circumscribing women’s lives, how is it possible for the patriarchs in the present to define what’s acceptable and what isn’t? How are they able to bend the past and tradition to their will, yet women who want greater rights and freedoms can’t do the same?
