Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
For fans of Sapiens and The Dawn of Everything, a groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression--its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it
How would our understanding of gender inequality--our imagined past and projected future--look if we didn't assume that men have always ruled over women? Traveling to the earliest known human settlements, analyzing the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and studying cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini finds there's always been more variation in social structures, in the amount of gendered oppression and the forms it takes, than simplistic narratives imply.
But beginning sometime in the Bronze Age, as the first states began to expand, patriarchy also spread across Central Asia and the ancient Mediterranean world. This spread was not in any sense natural, Saini argues: it took a lot of work--ideological, legal, religious--and a lot of time to create societies where women were systemically excluded from political and economic power structures and then for these social structures to be seeded across the globe. Colonialism and the slave trade, Saini shows us, was an integral part of this work. Not only did they create racial hierarchies, they spread patriarchy into indigenous societies, in some of which women had had more power than in the societies of their colonizers.
For some who went in search of a universal theory to explain women's oppression, a glorious matriarchal prehistory was ruined by patriarchal invaders; for others, it was inextricably intertwined with capitalist exploitation. Ending with explorations of what was and wasn't accomplished in some of the states that sought revolutionary change in the 20th century, Saini eschews the grand narrative and asks that we look instead to the particulars of any culture or conflict. We should understand patriarchy, she says, as a set of factors in ongoing power struggles--as one way people looking to assert dominance over others through claims to nature, history, and the divine.