by KRISTEN R. GHODSEE
Socialist feminists have long argued that gender inequality isn’t a universal rule of human societies. There’s now a mountain of historical evidence to back up that view, showing us that we can abolish social hierarchies if we recognize their man-made origins.
The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini (Beacon Press, 2023).
One of the hardest things about feminist parenting is the princess phase. If you are trying to raise a child in a patriarchal capitalist society, you’ll probably wake up one day to find your little one enamored of all things pink and sparkling. Although children of all genders may find themselves seduced by the Disney-industrial complex, it is most often little girls who succumb to the desire to don tiaras, wave wands, and prance about in billowing skirts, puffed sleeves, and sweetheart necklines.
In my own case, after months of trying to resist, I finally gave in when my toddler begged for a Cinderella costume. At least it was blue. I had done everything possible to resist the gendered socialization she faced. Every time someone told my daughter that she was “pretty” or “cute,” I immediately interjected that she was also “brave” and “smart” and “strong.”
This became an almost mantra-like habit. I’d be standing in the grocery store checkout line, and my daughter would be sitting in the front of the shopping cart. Someone behind me would say, “Oh, what a beautiful little girl!” And I would unthinkingly add: “And also brave and smart and strong.”
Cinderella was a worker
Then one morning, I caught her admiring herself in the mirror in her new Cinderella outfit, and she said, “This dress makes me look so pretty.” Almost robotically I added, “And brave and smart and strong.” My three-year-old then turned to me and with utter matter-of-factness asserted, “But mommy, princesses are not strong.”
I stared at her. This was one of those moments when I had to stand up against an entire social milieu that pigeonholes female-identifying children into stereotypical roles of weakness and submissiveness.
I panicked at first, but as a social scientist, I understood that what this aspiring princess needed was some empirical evidence. Thankfully, the two of us had watched the animated Cinderella movie many times, and I remembered the scene where the young heroine washed floors with a large bucket of soapy water.
I rushed down to the basement and found a five-gallon bucket from Home Depot. I took the bucket outside and filled it about halfway up with water. “Cinderella doesn’t have anyone to help her carry the bucket when she washes the floors,” I said. “So she has to be strong enough to carry the bucket, right?” My little three-year-old nodded and dutifully tried to lift the bucket. Her eyes widened at the weight of it. Point made.
Today, my daughter is almost twenty-two years old. I recalled this specific moment in her childhood as I started reading Angela Saini’s brilliant new book, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. As I found myself drawn into Saini’s deep history of male domination, I realized that my spirited effort to redefine the princess trope faced thousands of years’ worth of indoctrination. The great value of this slim and accessible volume is the sweeping story it tells about how “men came to rule” in a world that was once much more diverse in its social structures.
The construction of patriarchy
Too often, the American left is characterized as being dominated by “brocialists” and “manarchists.” But there is a long tradition of socialist and anarchist feminism that interrogates the myriad ways in which our economic systems are intertwined with older forms of domination.
Saini is an award-winning British science journalist who discusses the latest biological, anthropological, and archeological evidence available to reveal the contingency of patriarchy as a system of power and domination. She is the author of two previous books, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story (2017) and Superior: The Return of Race Science (2019), both of which investigate the way science has been complicit in perpetuating structural forms of discrimination.
In her latest book, Saini explores a rich diversity of cultural contexts and historical epochs in which patriarchal forms of power were not hegemonic. She writes:
This is the story of individuals and groups, fighting for control over the world’s most valuable resource: other people. If patriarchal ways of organizing society happen to look eerily similar at opposite ends of the globe now, this isn’t because societies magically (or biologically) landed on them at the same time, or because women everywhere rolled over and accepted subordination. It’s because power is inventive. Gender oppression was cooked up and refined not only within societies; it was also deliberately exported to others for centuries, through proselytism and colonialism.
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