Enter The Patriarchy

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; send him off to fish and you get a matrilineal society.

When I first started trying to think like a feminist, I thought patriarchy referred to the fact that men are typically stronger than women, throw their weight around, and tend to impose limits on women which accentuate that delta. It isn’t a bad working model, in some ways, and certainly, the word “patriarchy” is a great sassy answer to many questions about women’s disadvantage. However, there is a lot more to it than that. Patriarchy is about rule by men and is a social construct. It is generally taken to be demonstrated through male dominance, male control, and male identification. It is a facet of societal organisation, not a facet of biology. This really matters.

Homo sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago as a nomadic hunter-gatherer species. It is difficult for us now to grasp some important facts about early members of mankind. One of these is that they - we - had no real concept of wealth or property, or trade; what they “owned” was broadly limited to what they could carry. Another is that they - we - were as intellectually able as we are today, even if less informed. Finally, our existence as settlers is comparatively speaking very recent: less than 5% of our time as a species has been spent this way. It is worth bearing these things in mind as we look at the development of patriarchy.

Hunter-gatherer societies still exist, as does archaeological evidence, so we know some of how people lived. Most people lived in kin-based groups. Society was, in most cases, quite egalitarian, both between group members and between the sexes. While men had some advantages in hunting, these were not many, and as interactions with other groups were relatively few, battles were not as common or as costly as you might think - there was no land to defend. Women were vulnerable to male violence, but a badly treated woman would find it relatively easy to leave because she could walk away - even with her children - and join her family elsewhere, or another group. Mankind existed in this hunter-gatherer mode until around 12,000 years ago, when some people began to develop a new way of living: agriculture.

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Agriculture enabled humanity to shift from nomadic to settled status. The reasons are unclear; the evidence suggests that life became harder (humans got smaller, for instance). It has been suggested that humans might have stuck with it because despite the hardships, they could accumulate things, and have bigger families, than if they were on the move. We acquired land and livestock, and property beyond what we could carry (and with that, eventually, technology).

Acquiring things - especially livestock - meant that tribes had things worth defending from other groups and predators. As men were stronger than women, it came to be the men who defended the property, especially livestock away from the homestead, from attack, with women specialising in other ways, including child-rearing and dealing with crops. Because men defended the property, they increasingly took control of it.

Therefore, women’s relatively smaller and less physically powerful bodies meant that, coincidentally, men came to be the ones who owned property. This male dominance would have consequences.

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Men who own property want to use it to provide for their own young - not other men’s. Unusually for mammals, in women ovulation is concealed and is likely only to be known to an intimate partner, at most, and possibly not even then. Ascertaining paternity was impossible until the late 20th century, so controlling whose baby a woman carried to term required controlling her access to men at all times. Women’s bodily autonomy was therefore limited; after all they were the birthing vessels (thanks, transactivists - so progressive!) for the future inheritor of a man’s wealth.

It isn’t hard to see consequences flowing from this. Women whose chastity was necessary would have their lives curtailed. To discourage women from leaving with their children or having female allies, they would be removed from their own families and placed in the family of the man who controlled them. They would not be encouraged or enabled to learn skills that might enable them to support themselves. Older women, less subject to control through childbearing, were sidelined. With fewer options to avoid an abusive man, women learned deference and tolerance. So their lives became further curtailed, and so on. Male control is thereby established.

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Women’s reproductive capacity also became a valuable resource to be farmed. Agriculture is labour intensive - it takes more calories to farm a give quantity of food without sophisticated tools than to gather it - and the pressure for villages to grow was probably significant. Children were needed, a phenomenon seen well into the twentieth century in many communities. Women ovulate, over a lifetime, about 400 times. Typically women are fertile for around 30 years and are reasonably capable of producing between 15 and 30 live births at most - in reality, far fewer surviving offspring. Men, on the other hand, can father many children - the highest recorded number was over a thousand. A woman’s peak fertility is in the first half of her reproductive capability. Because of this, the relatively small number of women at peak fertility became very much prized by men.

Men began to compete with each other for access to women. A wealthier man could offer a better home or lifestyle to a woman he chose. New property ownership rules developed, and women were at the centre of these. Brideprice - a fee paid by a man to a woman’s family for a desirable bride - meant that women were traded as economic commodities. Further, of course, a woman who wanted to leave her husband would be discouraged by her family because that money would need to be repaid. In some societies, polygynous relationships became the norm, with wealthy men able to exert control over other men and acquire more birthing vessels - sorry, I mean women! - to propagate their genes. In others, bride capture - a euphemism for what is really sex trafficking, slavery and rape - featured.

Male identification of their property, the third pillar of patriarchy, is shown. It is no accident that women were seen as chattels - a word with the same root as cattle.

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Not all societies were like this, and the differences that remain now shed light on why men came to dominate in the way that they do. For example, societies in the Tsetse belt in Africa are less patriarchal; this seems to suggest a link with livestock farming. In mountainous areas in Asia, particularly those engaged in the spice trade, where agriculture is more marginal and men are absent much of the time trading goods, matriarchies with communal familial structures have emerged. In other societies where fishing, rather than livestock, was the protein mainstay, again patriarchal structures did not develop so much; in fact, in groups where men were absent for long periods, society developed in a very different way. Studies even show that quality of marine life - good fishing - significantly correlates with matrilineal ownership of wealth, for instance.

To understand this, we need to look again at why men came to dominate in the earlier model. There were two salient features: defending land and livestock denoted ownership; and male ownership of property led to a wish to pass that property on to one’s own children. However, in societies where men were absent and unable to defend land that was being farmed, perhaps trading (as in Minang society) or, as in the Solomons, attending to fish that they could gather but never own, men never developed the relative advantages of ownership; and how could they be sure of paternity if they were away from the village for weeks or months on end? In these societies, matrilineal inheritance made more sense.

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The point of this is not to say that we should all become fishing societies - it is hardly practical, after all - but to show that the things that underpin patriarchy are not inevitable, are fairly recent, and are produced by circumstances that no longer prevail. Over the next two weeks, I hope to cover some of the mechanisms put in place to perpetuate patriarchy and some of the ways in which these might be reshaped in our changing world. I hope you will join me.