The Patriarchs, by Angela Saini

In The Patriarchs, science journalist Angela Saini searches for the origin of patriarchy. This book is mostly historiography, exploring how ideas about the history of gender have evolved over the last four centuries and exploring the impact of our theories of gender, all while searching for solid facts in the mess.

This isn't a comprehensive history — it jumps between distant places and times to explore how key phenomenon — like agriculture, slavery, and statesmanship — might have become powerful influences on our cultural understanding of gender. In a later chapter on the Soviet Union, Saini brings in a skillful discussion of capitalism.

Biology

Saini begins by dismantling received wisdom about gender. She quotes anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo:

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

The realities of gender break most of our closely-held assumptions of it. Throughout history women have been laborers, warriors, generals, and sovereigns. The same is true in nature. Bonobos — one of our closest primate relatives — organize in matriarchal communities underneath aggressive female leaders. This is not because the women are larger or stronger than the men (they're not) but because the women organize strategically to consolidate power. In fact, animals in general often assert dominance through non-violent means, such as kindness and politicking. Animals, like humans, dislike bullies and tyrants. Other animals with female leadership include killer whales, lions, spotted hyenas, lemurs, and elephants. Even aggressive males tend to only assert dominance over other males, not females.

In human societies, patriarchy must contend with the biological reality that gender is not binary. Indigenous communities often recognize many manifestations of gender, which may correspond to our conceptions of queerness.

It may have been easier for people to cross genders in egalitarian Native American communities, because neither men nor women carried out jobs that were more highly valued than the other.

By in human history, Saini doesn't search for a matriarchy that looks like a female parallel to patriarchy. Patriarchy, after all, is quite violent. No one is really interested in a society where women have the legal right to beat or murder their husbands, where men are routinely kidnapped from their families and pressed into a laborious and abusive marriage far from home, where men's intellectual achievements are stolen and repackaged as female ones — nor is there any evidence that any such society has ever existed. So, matriarchy as the inverse of patriarchy isn't a reasonable proposition. Instead, Saini advances the idea of matriliny, a society where, "Children learn that their female ancestors matter, that girls have an important place in their families."

Societies where women's lineage is upheld and respected are more common than societies where women are held as dominant. Africa has a "matrilineal belt" that stretches from Angola to Mozambique.

Even as a tempered form of female leadership, matriliny confounds researchers enough that its existence has been labeled "the matrilineal puzzle." Researchers who have tried to crack the puzzle and understand what foments female lineages have struggled to find any common thread between matrilineal societies around the world. Quoting researcher Nicole Creanza on the leading hypothesis:

When populations had property, not in terms of land, but movable, transmissible wealth, where if your offspring inherited this thing that you have, they would be potentially better off.

The emergence of fluid capital potentially explains the move away from matriliny, but it doesn't really explain the existence of patriarchy. Flashing forward to the modern era, Saini quotes 19th-century suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who said upon the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, "It is the sarcasm of the nineteenth century to represent liberty as a woman."

In many ways, the modern era has been one of the worst times in history to be a woman. Saini quotes 19th-century Native Americans who criticized Christian gender roles: "As an Indian woman I was free... I owned my home; my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law." At this point, there was no such thing as "illegitimate children" in Seneca society, nor any stigma attached to unmarried motherhood, but by the middle of the 19th century the American government was forcing Seneca women to name children after their fathers. The settlers insisted on conducting transactions with Indigenous men, rather than women. Over centuries, the colonial powers managed to impose patriarchal politics on many Indigenous nations — a story that rang true around the world. Saini describes in detail the process of matrilineal culture in India falling into patriarchy under the force of British rule. Quoting historian David Veevers,:

From the Levant to Virginia, from Massachusetts to Sumatra, the patriarchal order of gender was circulated and transplanted from one global region to another.

Looking at the historical record, the question is not so much "How could a woman assume the role of warrior?" as "How have we come to exclude women from the role of warrior?"

We can see it in the historical record around the same time that the earliest states and empires began to grow, as they tried to expand their populations and maintain armies to defend themselves. 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.

The before times

Saini takes this story back to the Stone Age, in 7400 BCE, at the construction of the great ancienct city of Çatalhöyük, in modern-day Turkey. This is an elaborate city built before humans had writing systems. To us, the culture seems profoundly alien. Houses were built side-by-side-by-side, with no windows or doors in the walls — just an entrance by ladder from a hole in the ceiling. The people kept their dead ancestors in a storage space underneath their floorboards, and would remove their skulls as keepsakes — sometimes even being buried themselves with the skull of an ancestor in their arms. And, the people of Çatalhöyük seemed to hold women in high regard, making elaborate female figurines. Çatalhöyük — unearthed in the 1960s — became the inspiration of New Age feminism and modern goddess worship and speculation about an ancient age of matriarchy. This — the idea that prelapsarian humans lived in matriarchal utopias, an idea that had already been inferred from anthropological studies of Indigenous peoples and popularized by Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels — is the next myth that Saini seeks to dismantle.

While it seems true that there were Stone Age Eurasian societies with less patriarchal dominance, it's unlikely that these were any sort of matriarchal utopia. Unfortunately, this reveals an instability in modern feminist doctrine: so far, feminist theorists have failed to offer a compelling narrative explanation for how patriarchy has emerged that doesn't ultimately rest on an assumption that women are somehow natural caregivers or biologically weaker. The myth of the ancient matriarchy reinforces the former (the idea of woman as a natural nurturer) while trying to debunk the latter (the idea of women as subservient to man). So, "If a matriarchal prehistory didn't really exist, their faith that women really could hold power in the future starts to feel shakier."

If we move away from the myth of matriarchy, is there an acceptable feminist explanation for why patriarchy has been so effective? One partial solution to this problem is that any solution that rests on a binary understanding of gender will fall into gender stereotypes that can be used in service of oppression. Judith Butler argues that gender needs to be understood as complex. If women were ancient warriors, then misogynists can argue that they made poor warriors, because they were barred from military service in the great military powers of the modern era. But if we understand that strict gender roles don't reflect any biological reality, then we can easily accept a worldview where women are sometimes stronger than men, and men sometimes make better caregivers than women — where some people are neither men nor women, or perhaps both a man and a woman — where gender is complex and ultimately less authoritarian. In this world, which is perhaps neither a matriarchy nor a patriarchy, both men and women experience greater freedom and autonomy.

This might be what we see in Çatalhöyük, which archaeologist Ian Hodder describes as an "aggressively egalitarian society."

At Çatalhöyük, parents didn't raise their biological children. Children were fostered out, and the community was "one great family." The people of Çatalhöyük likely had a more fluid understand of kin relationships beyond blood ties. Likely, Çatalhöyük served as a village center for many independent farmers and hunter-gatherers who lived together as equals, without overlords. Yet these peasants had ornate artwork, rich intellectual lives, and complex social relationships.

So, what happened?

Agriculture

The matriarchal myth asserts that there was a sudden revolution when patriarchy violently conquered Eurasia. Many commentators pinpoint this moment at the emergence of agriculture. Saini quotes archaeologist Ian Hodder:

I think the old idea that as soon as you get farming, you get property, and therefore you get control of women as property, I think that idea... is wrong, clearly wrong... I think we have to accept that these societies were egalitarian and were relatively gender-blind for a long period after early agriculture.

Humans didn't suddenly take up ploughs and settle as farmers. The move into agricultural society was a long, gradual, indirect process. Communities mixed gardening, foraging, and hunting as needed for centuries or millennia. Some agricultural communities reverted to hunting and gathering after a time.

Nonetheless, there is some evidence of a relationship between agriculture and patriarchy. Livestock are a mobile form of wealth — a form of financial currency that can enable a culture of private property. Agricultural land can produce durable goods like grain that upper classes can hoard and trade. Plough-based agriculture requires more upper-body strength, associated with men. And when societies have valuable land and stockpiled goods, they invite warfare. These are all ingredients in the modern understanding of patriarchy.

People living today have many more female ancestors than male ones. Between 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, the number of men having children decreased. This could be because many men died in battle, or because a small elite of men claimed many women as partners. This time period also overlaps with the diffusion of agriculture in Europe.

Conquest

Humans from Ireland to India almost universally speak languages descended from one common ancestor — Proto-Indo-European. There are a few notable exceptions, like Basque, Finnish, Turkish, and Hungarian. Otherwise, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Latin, Greek, Iranian, and Sanskrit languages are all cousins. Five thousand years ago, this was not the case. There was no Gaelic in Ireland, German in Germany, Latin in Italy, Greek in Greece, or Sanskrit in India. All of these regions were populated by people speaking languages that are now more or less completely lost.

Starting 4,500 years ago, a violent, patriarchal group from the grasslands of central Eurasia migrated in large numbers into Europe. These people were nomads who sustained themselves by herding cattle and traveled with horses and wagons (likely the first people to do so). They likely had male chiefs and a male god, a "sky father" (the Latin Jupiter literally means sky father, related to words Zeus, Deus, Divine). They distinguished between high-status and ordinary people. They wielded battle axes and engaged in warfare as a political project.

These settlers likely cut down Europe's forests to clear pastureland for their livestock. Among the incoming settlers, there were five to fourteen men for every one woman. The migrants were almost all men. Modern genetic research indicates that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were ruled by a king who sired many offspring; today, 20 to 40 percent of Indian men, 30 to 50 percent of Eastern European men, and at least 10 percent of men in the Indo-European language region overall share one common ancestor. However, this ancestor would have lived centuries before the invasions began.

However, it would be inaccurate to assume that these settlers were just violent misogynists. After all, they settled and — to some extent — integrated with the local populations over the course of many centuries.

This was certainly a patriarchal society. Women went to live with their husband's families — often far away from their own. Linguistic research shows that there was a far broader vocabulary to describe relationships on the husband or father's side of the family than on the wife or mother's side. Around 4000 BCE, more gendered language appeared in the Indo-European languages, indicating that gender was becoming more important to society.

However, in this new Europe, there is also evidence that women were still treated as relatively equal to men — having, for example, similar burials. There is evidence that the new family would keep in contact with the wife's family, likely as friends or allies.

The society draws striking parallels to the Mongol Empire, a nomadic, horse-riding, pastoral society from the central Eurasian grasslands, which — in the 1200s — became the largest empire at any point in history before or after. The Mongols were so patriarchal that their leader, Genghis Khan, is the ancestor of one in two hundred men alive today. But, nonetheless, Mongols

showed tremendous latitude in how they thought about gender... women weren't seen as necessarily weak or inferior... sons-in-law would sometimes live with the bride's family.

Some have quipped that Genghis Khan, who allowed divorce, was more liberal than Napoleon, who abolished divorce. Genghis Khan also accepted consul from his mother, who commanded immense power and respect in the empire.

Legal roles

War plays an important part in the construction of gender and patriarchy. "The history of war is very often the history of wars of capture." Wars were typically contests for booty — to capture property and people. Women were valuable spoils as they helped grow a society's population. So, war was "about grabbing people, not land."

Warriors generally took women and children as slaves. This was so common, that Romans had a slur for foreign women — "Barbara", for "barbarian." The taking of foreign slave women creates a blurry line between marriage — which, in patrilocal societies, takes a woman away from her homeland and submits her to the rule of a man — and slavery, especially when men sometimes married the women they took as slaves. The discomforting similarity between the phenomena of marriage and slavery underscores how a patriarchal society treats everything in the household as the property of the man. Medieval texts talk about how to "tame" a wife, describing her like an animal that must be corralled and controlled.

Flashing forward, Christine Delphy argues that marriage in 20th-century France was "nothing less than a contract that kept a woman in human bondage." Marriage in patriarchy is a way to extract unpaid work from women. The economist Nancy Folbre estimates that women's unpaid labor is worth 43% of the American GDP, and historically women were legally obligated to provide this labor for free. Moreover, women are taught to believe that this is what they deserve. "Submission is woven into the concept of feminity."

After the Indo-European transformation of Europe, gender roles evolved in different directions for millennia, with regions of greater and less patriarchal power shifting over time. In 900 BCE, the Book of Genesis told the story of Eve bearing responsibility for the downfall of man. Shortly thereafter, in 700 BCE, the poet Hesiod wrote that Pandora (who famously opened the box containing plague, disease, famine, and war) was the originator of "The race of womankind. The deadly race and tribes of womankind... with a nature to do evil." This marks a shift from standard patriarchy towards the misogyny that we know today, a world where women aren't just barred from politics — they are confined to tight roles and treated as second-class citizens.

Saini argues that gender relations truly transform with the rise of states.

The moment gender becomes salient is when it become 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.

The gender binary doesn't emerge out of any natural role of men and women, but because the legal and bureaucratic institutions of the state impose rigid expectations on people based on gender, in the same way caste-based, apartheid, and segregated states make caste or race real: “Dividing people into groups in this way, even when it’s arbitrary, pushes us to look for differences between them. And this is what makes it such a powerful psychological tool.”

Saini takes us to ancient Sumer, around 3000 BCE, with the rise of written language, record-keeping, taxation, censuses, and bureaucracy. A state like Sumer requires a growing population to populate the workforce and the military, so rulers wanted women to have as many children as possible.

At the same time, gender was still pliable. In Ancient Mesopotamia, a man could legally change the gender of his wife or daughter to allow her to inherit property. "A woman's legal gender was changed to give her different status within the family."

In Ancient Greece, women were restricted to the home. As managers of the household, aristocratic Athenian women had some political influence, as an aristocratic household might have been a busy industrial center and an important part of Athenian society. The introduction of democracy, however, shifted power toward the male-dominated political realm: "When democracy flourished in Athens, then women were most oppressed," Saini quotes classics professor Sarah Pomeroy.

Athens contrasts to nearby Sparta, where women were known to be strong and courageous. At one point, women owned two-fifths of the land in sparta. In Athens, it would be normal to insult a man by calling him a woman, which a Spartan would never think to do — it was not seen as an insult to be womanly.

The gender binary was important to Athen's social hierarchy, and Athenian intellectuals wrote complicated texts to rationalize their idea of gender. Athenians routinely killed intersex people, who they saw as a bad omen and a threat to the natural order.

At the same time, Athenians regarded wife-beating as shameful, and a woman could bring her husband to court for abuse. In ancient Rome, where women had more legal rights and freedoms, husbands had the right to beat and, in some circumstances, murder their wives.

Around the same time, women in Ancient Egypt had the most freedom of any women in ancient Mediterranean states. They could own property, run businesses, and live independent lives.

Capitalism

Saini basically skips the middle ages, which was arguably the worst possible time to be a woman. Even in 1889, activists in Delaware had to fight to convince the government to raise the age of consent from the age of seven years old.

In the 1600s, English theorists linked the concept of the family and the concept of the nation. Sir Robert Filmer said that the state was like a family and the king was the father of his subject. William Blackstone said that youth are "under the empire of their father." What do they mean by this? The household patriarch and a sovereign are the two roles in society who have the right to use violence in their respective domains. Both "own" their subjects in a very loose sense — they cannot be bought or sold, but they also must obey and accept subjugation.

In the modern era, Saini treats communism as an experiment in "smashing patriarchy." The Soviet Union gave women the right to vote before the UK or the USA, and it was the first country to legalize abortion. In 1936, the Soviets made it a serious criminal offense to fire a pregnant woman.

To the communists, housewives lived in a form of bondage. The right to work and to live independently empowered women with freedom and agency. Hungary undertook a project to socialize domestic work, including daycare, cooking, and laundry, freeing women's time outside of work for leisure. In 1981, Angela Davis took up the cause of socialized domestic work. Meanwhile, American politicians promoted technical advances like the washing machine as the key to women's liberation.

Post-war America actually backslid on gender equality. The number of women in college dropped from 47% before the war to 35% after. Regardless of what they say, states need population growth, and reproduction is the easiest way to achieve it. After the war, the government wanted women to have babies, so they pursued policies to keep women at home.

The view of women as housewives is ancient and modern. In 2004, a year before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger campaigned to keep women out of the priesthood. He argued that when women seek power, it leads “to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family.”

Imagination

If Saini comes out against anything, it's not marriage or agriculture or capitalism — it's expectation. Misogyny rests on an idea that a woman has a specific role to fulfill, whether that's as domestic servant or goddess nurturer or astronaut. Saini paints a picture where women's liberation means that women can do what they want, whether that's working in the home or fighting on the battlefield.

Saini points out that many scholars fail to comprehend how a woman could ever be a warrior, complaining that female burials containing weapons must have a convoluted explanation, since the woman herself couldn't have been a warrior. Throughout the book, Saini gives examples of women on the battlefield, from the ancient British queen Boudica (who led an uprising that killed 70,000 invading Romans) to 20th-century female guerilla fighters (who comprised up to 30% of membership in African, Asian, and Latin American guerilla forces) to the Red Army in WWII (in which 800,000 women served and more than 100,000 were decorated for bravery).

Saini gestures towards a world where gender is "not an organizing principle." In both the Yoruba language of Nigeria and the German of East Germany, gendered language had less emphasis because it simply isn't that important.

We know from our own societies that people come in all shapes and sizes, that individuals have all sorts of traits and interests, that gender manifests in multiple ways. Yet we look to the archaeological record to do something magical. We expect it to show us worlds in which every single person followed strictly defined social patterns and never deviated from them.

In this imagined world, everyone is easily classified. Every woman is incapable of fighting in battle or of being a ruler, and every man is born a warrior. Each person in the past is extruded through the same narrow caricatures. We ourselves become guilty of blindly accepting the gender codes and hierarchies that those in power in the earliest states tried so hard to naturalize.

This book is a nice way to start to imagine an alternative.