The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

According to Creanza, the single factor that did seem to affect a society’s move away from matriliny was ‘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’. But even this correlation didn’t hold true all of the tim

Ultimately, this is the story of individuals and groups fighting for control over the world’s most valuable resource: other people. If patriarchal ways of organising society happen to look eerily similar at opposite ends of the globe now, this isn’t because societies magically (or biologically) landed on them at the same time, or because women ever

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.

His answer to male domination was a frustratingly tautological one: It was natural for it to exist, and it existed because it was natural.

‘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 insidious part of this racket is how it has shaped so many of our beliefs about human nature. If the Indian goddess Kali tells us something about our past, it’s that how people have pictured the world has never been static. Those in power have worked desperately hard over time to give the illusion of solidity to the gendered codes and hier

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.

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.

The heart of sociologist Steven Goldberg’s argument in The Inevitability of Patriarchy back in 1973 was that if a pattern of behaviour is seen everywhere, it probably has a biological basis.