The Patriarchs Quotes

“This ideal also gave birth to what the historian Linda Kerber has called the "Republican Mother." This was a woman whose job was to raise healthy, sturdy sons in service of the state. Rosemarie Zagarri, a historian of early America at George Mason University in Virginia, has described this paradoxical agreement, which accepted the family unit as politically viral but women not as political actors in their own right, as a form of "Anglo-American Womanhood." It gave women a respected and visible place in society but only as defined by their capacity to have children and raise them. If they wanted to exercise political or economic power outside the home, they would have to do it vicariously through their husbands and sons.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

“2010, researchers from the Max Planck Institute spotted a chimpanzee at a wildlife trust in Zambia tucking a blade of grass in her ear for no apparent reason. Soon, other chimps started doing the same, continuing with the trend after she had died. Scientists described it as a “tradition.” And”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

“But nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labour was unpaid. ‘They are excluded from the realm of exchange and consequently have no value,’ wrote Delphy. Even outside the home, women were more likely than men to work as volunteers. This couldn’t be explained by the nature of the work they were doing. It wasn’t that cleaning, cooking, caring, or doing agricultural work were always unpaid. People could be hired to do these jobs, and these workers would expect to receive wages. It wasn’t the case, either, that wives were getting nothing in return. It’s just that what they were getting in return was so little. The wife’s job was to work, honour, and obey, Delphy concluded. What she got in return was upkeep. This situation was so obviously exploitative that ‘when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife’. Delphy’s argument was that, rather than her work being worthless in monetary terms, it was a wife’s relationship to production that gave her labour so little value. It was because she was a wife doing it, in the same way that if a slave were doing it, they wouldn’t be paid either. In the family, and by extension in wider society, the product of her labour was seen to belong to her husband.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“As Scott explains, life could be more secure and predictable for people living within these states than it might have been for those on the outside. But in other ways, it could be bleaker. Compared with relatively looser hunting, foraging, and gathering communities, diets might be narrower, more reliant on grains that could be stored in large quantities and divided up between people into fixed units. Young men might be expected to go to war at any time, facing the risk of death. Young women might face pressure to have as many children as possible. ‘The problem of these early states was population,’ says Scott. ‘How to collect that population under conditions of unfreedom, and how to hold them there and get them to produce the surplus that’s needed for the elites that run the state, the priestly caste, the artisans, and the aristocracy and royalty.’ Population – maintaining its size and controlling it – is crucial to understanding the rise of inequality and patriarchal power.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“The earliest states, entities that these days feel reassuringly solid but once had to be built from scratch, were faced with a basic problem. They needed to convince people to stay within their geographical boundaries, to not wander off because they did not like the conditions, says American anthropologist James Scott, who has devoted his career to understanding how the first states emerged and the factors that helped them grow. Without a population, states have no power. And this made people the most valuable commodity of all.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“Once codes were created and meaning given to categories, they had to be policed for fear of transgression. And that’s exactly what’s seen over time in the historical data. Laws around marriage, divorce, and adultery in Mesopotamia become harsher for women as time passes. Their freedoms and privileges are slowly eaten away. At the same time, over centuries, working women gradually disappear from the historical record. If there’s attention on what women are doing, it is increasingly on their loyalty as wives, mothers, and citizens.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“Keeping a population growing was best served by creating conditions in which as many women as possible were having as many babies as they could, raising those children to be useful to the state as future breeders, workers, and warriors. Ancient Mesopotamian cities became concerned with taking censuses – including gender as a category alongside age and location – so they could measure their human resources and collect taxes more efficiently. Categories were needed for hierarchies to function, for leaders to know how many people they had, and how to allocate work and rations between them. People had to be given social codes to follow so the state would keep ticking over efficiently without falling apart. In many ways it was like a machine: every part designed for a particular function.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“It is difficult, then, to pin gender inequality firmly to the emergence of agriculture or property ownership. If there were changes in the balance of power between people in prehistory because of these factors, they must have been subtle because they left no appreciable trace in the archaeological record. 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 organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule