The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

‘History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other,’ writes the feminist scholar Donna Haraway.

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.

The best researchers can do is make educated guesses about what people in the past may have been thinking based on their artwork or burial patterns.

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.

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

Many European naturalists and philosophers came to the conviction that the female was closer to nature, while the male was more rational. He was capable of taming nature. European intellectuals imagined a transition from savagery to civilisation, from irrationality to rationality, from immorality to morality, as humans were shifting from being gove

If women were exploited more than men, wrote MacKinnon, it was their character that was seen to be the cause rather than their material condition. The fault lay inside us, not outside us. Even Karl Marx, who dreamed of abolishing class inequality through communism, couldn’t escape the suspicion that sexual inequality was an exception to other forms

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

The debris of the past suggests that the reality of male-dominated ideologies and institutions as they emerged couldn’t have been one flat system in which all men exercised power over all women at once, but variations depending on local circumstances.