Despite feminist resistance over centuries of human civilisation, patriarchy remains deeply embedded across political systems, cultures and mindsets. This has been made maddeningly apparent in recent years, where we’ve witnessed the fall of Roe v Wade, the backlash to #MeToo and the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini. All of these regressive events sparked fierce resistance from women worldwide – but still, patriarchy endures.

In her third book, Angela Saini goes in search of the answers as to why, how and where patriarchy manifests and persists. By fusing archaeological findings, scientific research, political history and cultural studies, Saini reveals the complex nature of the system of patriarchy, and how it isn’t as straightforward as we often think. Tracing the world across its earliest human settlements, analysing the latest findings in science and archaeology, and revealing cultural complexities across the globe, she debunks reductionist understandings of patriarchy and reveals how its history and emergence are far from linear.

Here, we speak to Saini about the murky roots of patriarchy, colonialism’s impact on the spread of patriarchal systems, and why fighting for an end to patriarchy also means fighting for the rights of trans and non-binary people.

From ancient Athens, to Mesopotamia, to Native America, your book traces geographical and cultural lines of history around patriarchy and gender relations. How did your understanding of patriarchy change while writing the book?

Angela Saini: I was as intrigued as everybody else as to why there isn’t more literature on the history of patriarchy, because you would imagine that there would be hundreds of books about it. But I think the last big book on this subject was Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy, which is about as old as I am. We’ve learnt so much more since then: we have so much more of an understanding of women in history, we’ve rewritten a lot of the biased accounts of history and archaeology that we had before, we know more from archaeology and anthropology, and we also have more scientific genetic evidence about how people lived in the past.

So taking that all together, what I wanted to do with this book was just ask, well, actually, what is patriarchy, really? How does it manifest? As it turns out, it’s far more fragile and piecemeal than we imagine.

Did you find yourself challenging your own pre-existing understanding of patriarchy? Did it change any of your ways of thinking, or were things as you suspected?

Angela Saini: Nothing was as I suspected. I don’t know what I was imagining I would find when I wrote it – I was half-hoping that there would be a smoking gun, some historical big reason that would explain everything, and of course, there wasn’t, because that’s not human societies work. The answer is complex, and maybe that’s not to everyone’s taste, but that’s the reality of life. If we look at the social changes that have happened in different places in the world over the last 100 years, why would we imagine that 1,000 years ago, people wouldn’t also be having the same fevered, complicated social changes, and resistance, conversations and battles among themselves, about how they want to live? Why do we not imagine that that’s how it would always have been, right throughout human history?

We kind of flatten out the past and treat it as though it’s very linear, when it’s not really at all, it’s something that’s living and always moving. And as much as we can identify some of the roots of patriarchal beliefs from thousands of years ago, we can also see how ideas about gender are being manipulated and forced on people right now, in an effort to maintain patriarchal control.

How much do you think that our lack of understanding of matrilineal society, and the erasure of these communities, relates to colonial history?

Angela Saini: I think it’s fundamental, especially the recent history of patriarchy, from the last 100 or so years. The deliberate changing of gendered norms in societies that had completely different norms before was directly a product of European colonialism and Christian missionaries imposing their idea of how people should live. That’s not to say that these traditions didn’t survive in some form, or that they haven’t been retained and that they aren’t reclaimed, but the damage done is immense. I moved to the US about a year and a half ago and it’s been interesting living in New York and getting to understand those Indigenous histories a lot more, especially from Indigenous peoples themselves, and hearing about it in their own words and understanding that sense of loss and this desperate struggle to reclaim what was lost.

In the book, you talk a lot about marriage and its role in the institutionalisation and reproduction of patriarchy. What significance does the nuclear family have in the history of patriarchy? 

Angela Saini: Often in historical literature, we ascribe patriarchy as beginning in the family, at the level of ‘the father’ being where the first system of male domination emerges. I argue exactly the opposite, which is that it’s with the first states that you see the family being invented and controlled in order to serve the gendered aims of the state. 

In places like ancient Mesopotamia, and empires around that time all over the world, one of their biggest concerns was population. How do you get people to stay? How do you get them to be loyal to the elites and defend this entity which they’ve created? That was a huge preoccupation for them. This meant that young women needed to have more children, and young men needed to be able to fight. That was what the state needed. That’s where you see the first roots of these gendered laws and rules coming in, that sometimes sit very contrary to how individuals actually want to live, but the state requires them to do this in order to serve its own aims. That has a profound effect on the family because then it has to be organised in a certain way. It becomes, essentially, a unit serving the state in terms of both population and loyalty. 

When things are really bad, a woman is not thinking about feminism or gender solidarity, she’s thinking: how can I keep my family safe and protected? What sources of protection do I have?

Recently we’ve seen feminist uprisings in reaction to America’s overturning of Roe v Wade and the killing of Jina Masha Amini by the morality police in Iran. Despite immense resistance from women across the globe, why is patriarchy so potent and powerful in reconsolidating itself?

Angela Saini: I think it’s because this isn’t the only form of oppression in the world, there are so many others. For many people, then, there are other systems of power to reach to, and as a woman in a very gendered, patriarchal society you know that if you align with those systems, you will be rewarded and you will do it, because you ultimately have to think about yourself. That might feel tragic, but when things are really bad, a woman is not thinking about feminism or gender solidarity, she’s thinking: how can I keep my family safe and protected? What sources of protection do I have?

This is why conservative women’s movements are still so powerful all over the world, because the bargain that patriarchy offers women is a level of protection and safety. They say we will keep you safe as long as you follow this system, we will offer you power and seniority within the family as long as you follow this system as you get older. As uncomfortable as it is for us to hear, in those very mundane and everyday ways, in our individual choices as men, women, non-binary people, everybody, because of those negotiations we make based on class and race, as well as gender, is how systems of oppression manage to stay alive.

You mention the rising popularity of conservative feminism. In the UK, there is a growing fight against the rights and lives of trans women from conservative women. As women who are fighting for the rights of all women, including trans women and non-binary people, what do you think we should do better?

Angela Saini: I think the fight for transgender rights and non-binary rights is an anti-patriarchal fight, because gendered oppression flattens people and expects you to follow certain rules, which disadvantages everybody who doesn’t conform to that system. So we have to see it all as intrinsic. The anti-transgender movement in the US mainly is associated with religious conservatives, and that’s true in many other parts of the world, like Eastern Europe for example.

I find it bizarre that, in the UK, it’s associated with a certain section of feminists. I don’t know how that has happened. I really hope that we can reach a point at which we understand and accommodate the fact that we cannot wish people away. What happens at the administrative level and institutional level is a problem we have created because we’ve created our institutions in such a binary way. If we hadn’t created them in such a binary way we wouldn’t be in as much of a mess as we’re in right now. What you have to ultimately accept is that space needs to be made for everyone. We need to make everyone feel comfortable and safe in society – and surely that’s something we can all get behind. 

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini is published by Fourth Estate and available now.

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