I’ve observed several times in this newsletter that imagination is essential to envisioning a future where gender equality exists, in the legal profession as well as society at large. To feed that imagination, it’s important to have stories—even entirely fictional ones—that show us the kind of society we’d like to have. Without imagination, we start to believe that things are as they have always been—and thus always will be.

But thinking about what society could be like begs questions about how it’s been in the past. Have societies, Western or otherwise, always been patriarchal? Have there been societies where women have achieved equality or persisted as leaders? If so, how did those things happen? Do those societies tell us anything about how gender equity could be achieved today?

And if the response to all of the above questions is that patriarchal societies are the only ones that have persisted through time, should that leave us hopeless?

To start to answer all of these questions I read an intriguing book written by science journalist Angela Saini called The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. In this week’s Comes Now, we talk a little bit about what this book says and what it means for today’s fights for gender equality.

The Book

I suppose I should just start out by spilling the beans. Although Saini finds compelling stories of matrilineal and matriarchal societies throughout time and all over the world, none of them remained that way for long. In fact, many of them fundamentally changed when confronted by more “modern” societies who expressed bafflement about how those societies had managed to function so long without men being in charge. This frustratingly consistent pattern leads Saini to eventually conclude that the relevant question should not by how isolated matrilineal societies have existed throughout history, but instead how, no matter what part of the world, patriarchal societies persist.

Thus, while Saini dispels some common myths about why patriarchal structures have persisted in so many different societies—she’s quite clear that it’s not because of men’s “superior” physical size or strength—ultimately she concludes that it is far more complicated than that.

Though it’s hard to describe how she gets there (while quite well-written, the book is maddeningly non-linear), Saini ultimately concludes that it’s difficult to detail how patriarchy has managed to persist across the world because it’s just not that simple. Even if it seems like most large empires were patriarchal, throughout history we can find examples of individual women and groups of women within those empires who thrived.

In fact, Saini makes the case that in many places we may have misinterpreted evidence of women’s roles in society because we started with the premise that men were rulers and therefore the entire society was patriarchal. As they say, history is told by the victors. Archeology and DNA evidence is only beginning to chip away at these kinds of misinterpretations. (Think men were always hunter-gatherers and women were always at home tending the hearth? Think again.)

The misinterpretation of evidence doesn’t just happen in the hands of those seeking to support a hypothesis that men have always been society’s leaders. Saini repeatedly makes the case that the need to find stories of matriarchal societies has often led us in the wrong direction as well. For example, she tells the story of a specific researcher whose desire to find historical evidence of matriarchal societies led her to interpret the evidence she considered with an unduly romantic lens.

Perhaps our need to find an alternative history (or her-story) keeps us from finding far more complex truths.

There are other inherent problesm in looking at the past for a model for the future. As we’ve discussed before in this newsletter, because gender equality is inextricably bound with issues of race and class, we can’t just look at society as a whole and answer whether it’s patriarchal or matriarchal. For every society throughout time there are spectrums of answers to that question.

We also can’t automatically conclude that a society that strives for gender “equality” is necessarily an anti-patriarchal one. (Think of socialism in the 1950s, where women were expected to contribute to the “common good” just as men did.)

What It Means

As I read The Patriarchs I was often frustrated with Saini’s inability to answer her own questions. But then I thought about how aliens or some future archeologists might answer whether our current society is purely patriarchal. On one hand they would see that the majority of the most powerful positions in the world are held by men. Men hold greater levels of wealth. There remains a large gender pay gap in virtually every industry. Women don’t have access to adequate or affordable childcare and often do an undue share of housework. Women are more likely to be victims of all types of violence and abuse, including at home . . . .

And yet. There are significant exceptions to all of these things. There are gradations of race and class within all of these issues that the word “patriarchy” cannot alone capture. In her introduction, Saini touches upon this:

As Saini concludes towards the end of the book, “[t]here’s no single moment when patriarchal values decisively ‘won.’ Instead, what we see all the way through history is resistance.” p.182

I haven’t and couldn’t do justice to the depth of the research and observations in The Patriarchs. If this type of book is your thing, I highly recommend reading it.

But I began this issue by suggesting that we need imagination so that we can see a future that’s different than the present. And I think that’s where The Patriarchs leaves us: by saying we don’t need to derive that inspiration from the past. Perhaps we can find that inspiration today, in the actions of those who resist.

We fight patriarchy in the margins and in the day-to-day moments of our lives and careers. It’s in those moments that our imaginations begin to take shape.

No Issue Until March 4th

Due to the President’s Day holiday and some work commitments, there will not be a new issue of Comes Now until Tuesday, March 4, 2025. See you then!

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