A new book takes us through the complex history of male domination, and why it’s also vulnerable to change
Tribal Khasi maidens dressed in traditional costume in Shillong, Meghalaya. The Khasi people are matrilineal. Pic/Getty Images
Science journalist Angela Saini’s spirit of enquiry is unceasing. And for good reason. When in 2017 she wrote Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, there was a chapter that looked at male domination and “the idea that this is how things have always been”.
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Saini tells mid-day over a video call from New York “that this is a widely held view... That there is something in our biology that led to societies becoming the way they are now. But, there is very little evidence to back this. Anthropologists quite universally agree that humans haven’t always been patriarchal in the way that we are now.”
The one question that Saini was constantly asked by readers when Inferior launched was, then how did societies become male-dominated?
Angela Saini
“To be honest,” says Saini, “I didn’t have a great answer, because the literature on the subject is so thin. I wonder if that’s because we do naturalise it [patriarchy] or because, we assume that the answer is a simple one—that this is just biology.” Saini’s curiosity led her on a three-year-long search for the roots of gendered oppression, as she read up on and travelled to the world’s earliest-known human settlements.
Her latest work, The Patriarchs: How Men Came To Rule (HarperCollins India), uncovers a complex portrait of our past, which may not offer an answer but upturns the way we think about how social structures were created. “When you look at this question properly,” she argues, “you realise the many layers to it; that there is no one monolithic structure that we call patriarchy. It’s much more variegated around the world.”
The material Saini was working with was endless—“I could have written 50 volumes on it”—but she had to be selective, and make no assumptions. “This is also a problem for academics in the area, as well as archaeologists and anthropologists. The further back you go into pre-history, the more difficult it becomes to know what people were thinking. You have to let go of everything... whatever you are raised to believe in, you have to try and relinquish it. So right throughout the book, I had to keep challenging myself—how much can I trust my own judgment of what’s happening here, and what can I say is unequivocally true and what is conjecture.”
She cites the example of Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, where the Seated Woman—a voluptuous nude female figurine seated in command between two feline-headed arm rests—was discovered. She was thought to be the Mother Goddess, and the society was assumed to be matriarchal. “But, what we can now say, given the evidence we have, is that gender didn’t matter very much [here] to how people lived.”
In order to understand patriarchy better, Saini, who is of Indian origin, also turned the lens on recent matrilineal societies closer home, the Nairs of Kerala, and the Khasis of Meghalaya.
“Existing matrilineal societies are crucial in helping us understand how much social variation there actually is in the world, and secondly, the ways in which they [these societies] have resisted the encroachment of patriarchy, or sometimes succumbed to it. It can be a lesson in how societies in the very distant past may have followed very similar routes.” What these societies also show us, says Saini, is that change is very rarely sudden. “It doesn’t happen in one generation, but over a stretched period of time, and very subtly.” She references author-historian Manu Pillai who discusses how a celebrated Malayalam novel in 1889 featured a new brand of Nair woman—“she is tremendously dedicated to her man, has the graces of an English lady, and is horrified when her virtue is questioned”.
Eventually by 1920s and 1930, legislation in Travancore and Cochin brought “further assaults on the traditional [matrilineal] family setup of Nairs”. “While matriliny was undermined in Kerala for hundreds of years, today, as a state it is trying to rediscover its matrilineal past and traditions, and frame that as part of its future.”
One of the things that she does discuss is how colonialism played a role in perpetuating patriarchy. “When I talk about empires spreading patriarchal systems, it’s even those predating Romans, Greeks and Mongols,” she says, “It was beneficial for them, because systems of oppression, whether they are class-based or gender-based, benefit those in power because you invent classes of people who then can be exploited. Patriarchy creates a group of people who will work for free. It’s no surprise why people have defended it so religiously, and it has become so woven into our systems of power, because for those in-charge it ensured many benefits.”
The early feminist movements then become an important expression of resisting such power dynamics. “It would be a mistake to imagine that patriarchy was invented a very long time ago, and that now we are simply living with its effects. Patriarchy is constantly being reinvented and reasserted,” says Saini. The fresh clampdown on access to abortion in the US, the Taliban taking control of Afghanistan and rolling back education and work rights to women, and the compulsory wearing of hijab and fresh conservative rules being imposed in Iran, are oppressions as recent, as they have been in the past. “We cannot take for granted that our societies are becoming progressive. We have to keep making a case for it, and feminism helped make that case. We need to frame equality as one that is not just for women, but for everyone.”
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