The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

Researchers estimate that around 70 per cent of societies around the world are patrilocal, meaning people tend to live with their fathers’ families. Matrilocality, where people stay with or near their mothers’ families throughout their lives, often goes hand in hand with matriliny.

After all, this is how social transformation usually works: by normalising what would have been unthinkable before.

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

As the professor of women’s studies Chandra Talpade Mohanty has asked, ‘How is it possible to refer to “the” sexual division of labor when the content of this division changes radically from one environment to the next, and from one historical juncture to another?’ If there were some fundamental aspects of male and female natures that put men in co

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.

In the galaxy of alternative worlds, there are the imaginary ones, the ones we see in science fiction. But none are as radical as the ones that are real. This kingdom of women, Choo writes, ‘has shown that it is possible to have an alternative model’. It’s an example in living memory that things can be different.

‘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.’

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.

In 2018, the curators of the museum did something unusual. Acknowledging that the diorama was historically inaccurate, they decided that instead of removing it, they would add large explanatory labels to the window in front. The story wasn’t deleted or replaced, but corrected in full view of visitors, like a teacher with a red pen. Where the origin