The Historical Roots of Patriarchy

In the U.S., March is designated as Women’s History Month. Its purpose is to highlight the often-overlooked contributions of women to American history. What is remarkable is not that women have made — and continue to make — vital contributions to society but rather that these contributions are so little recognized that such events are deemed necessary. After all, we have no Men’s History Month. Why? For almost all of our known existence, men have written most of our history — and they have done so under what scholars call a patriarchy — a social system in which men (largely) monopolize legally sanctioned roles of leadership in the family, politics, government, religion, and economic, cultural, and social life. So, it may surprise you that for most of the human species’ existence, patriarchy was not the norm.

Hunter-gatherers

The hunter-gatherer band was the earliest form of complex human organization, lasting from about 250,000 years ago to around 10,000 years ago. These bands consisted of small nomadic groups of one or a few families, which moved from one area to another area as animals moved or plant foods were consumed. Groups were small and the world population grew extremely slowly because of the extensive nature of food acquisition — one hunter-gatherer needed about one square mile of favorable territory to obtain enough food to live. Being nomadic, people had little desire to accumulate goods. Social structure was simple and egalitarian. Groups needed all hands to ensure an adequate food supply, with men responsible for hunting large animals and women, for gathering plants and small animals. The ubiquity of so-called Venus statuettes and the central position of female figures in Paleolithic caves indicates that hunter-gatherer societies roughly balanced gender power.

Early agriculture

Things changed some ten thousand years ago. As the climate warmed after the last Ice Age, humans started to develop agriculture. The paleontologist Niles Eldredge called agriculture the single most profound ecological change in the entire 3.5 billion-year history of life. Even the earliest forms of farming could support fifty to hundred times as many people as hunting and gathering technologies from the same area. For the first time in their existence, humans could accumulate a food surplus, a prerequisite for the development of complex technologies, social stratification, cities, centralized states, and professional armies.

Initial communities combined hunting with agriculture. Men continued to hunt while women complemented the food supply with wheat, barley, peas, and other domesticated plants, tilling the soil using primitive tools like hoes. As wildlife within easy travel distance in these increasingly sedentary communities dwindled, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much value, while women’s contribution to food supply rose appreciably, and with that, their independence and authority. Matrilineal family systems prevailed in many of these early agricultural communities. As cultivation began to produce a small food surplus, a few people in the village could specialize in creating religious rituals, which captured and expressed much of the community’s beliefs, customs, and knowledge. Women played an important role in these rituals, and female priestesses and deities rose to prominence.

Plow agriculture

The power balance between the sexes changed over time as agricultural technologies evolved. A major event was the introduction of the plow pulled by a draft animal in Southwest Asia around 6000 BC. Traction plowing multiplied the amount of land that a family could cultivate manyfold. But it required greater strength that only males could provide. According to McNeill: “The spread of traction plowing served to reverse the role of the sexes… Women lost their earlier dominion over the grain fields; and as followers of the plow, men became once again the principal providers of food.” With surplus food, women had more children — the population of Southwest Asia increased fiftyfold between 8000 BC and 3000 BC — and more babies kept women at work in their homes.

The rise of cities

Even with an increasing village population, villagers produced more grain than they needed for their own consumption and for sowing the next harvest. McNeil and McNeil observed: “Grains ripen all at once and must be harvested and stored; and the consequent availability of concentrated supplies of food in farmers’ storage bins and jars made the rise of states and cities possible.” Cynthia Brown argued in her book Big History: “The rise of cities coincided with the establishment of the patriarchy.”How so? Cities offered unprecedented opportunities for wealth creation by specialized craftsmen, bakers, scribes, traders, coppersmiths, and jewelers, among others. Undoubtedly, some of these specialists were women but as a group, women were at a disadvantage versus men. Learning these specialized skills was time consuming and women had to spend much of their time caring for their expanding families.

For the first time in history, people accumulated a large amount of valuable goods — grain, precious stones, copper and bronze tools, gold, woolen textiles, and other artifacts — in one place. This had two interrelated consequences that mutually strengthened each other. First, specialization and concomitant wealth creation led to social differentiation and stratification. It led to a hierarchical society led by a chieftain or king who had disproportionate access to these resources. Second, the city had to defend its wealth against other city states and nomadic pastoralists. This required paid soldiers, who were led by the city’s king. This gave the king an instrument not only to protect the city and its agricultural hinterland, but also to impose his will on his own people. The unprecedented wealth accumulation in cities created a strong inducement for warfare. Warfare was widely seen as a male prerogative, if only because of their superior physical strength.

In the period between 3500 BC and 2000 BC, following millennium, some city states would evolve into large tribute-taking empires, with a strict hierarchy and a standing army. Rulers figured out that capturing wealth by force was faster than generating wealth organically. The primary task of rulers became war. The Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli summarized this cogently in The Prince: “A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules.” Reflecting this new socio-political situation, female gods receded in importance while male gods became more prominent and priesthood became largely a male profession.

Why did women not rebel?

Thus, since the introduction of plow agriculture, societies around the world moved decisively toward patriarchy. Why did women not rebel against the deterioration of their status? For one, some probably did rebel and their rebellion was crushed by the men in their community. Further, the shift in power balance unfolded very slowly, over thousands of years. So, any woman in her own lifetime would experience an almost imperceptible deterioration in her position. The next generation would take the situation as they found it as the normal situation and the process was repeated. Only if we compare the power balance between, say, 6000 BC and 2000 BC would we conclude that the shift is truly seismic. But no woman in 2000 BC would have knowledge of the more equitable world of 6000 BC, and most women probably considered patriarchy as the societal norm, sanctioned by the Gods, who by then were increasingly male.

But why would these women in 2000 BC not know about the world in 6000 BC? Because writing was invented only around 3400 BC in Sumer, when patriarchy was already in full swing. As we have seen, for ninety-seven percent of the time period between the appearance of homo sapiens and the present, patriarchy was not the norm, but ninety-nine percent (this is an understatement) of what we know about history comes from written records, and these records coincide with patriarchy. Therefore, it seems that patriarchy has been with us all along. Our knowledge of the past is dominated by the deeds and leadership of men. Eisler observed: “Even though humanity obviously consists of two halves (women and men), in most studies of human society the main protagonist, indeed often the sole actor, has been male.”

The role of writing

Take Plutarch’s seminal Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (aka Parallel Lives). It is among the most influential series of concise biographies ever written. In his book, running one thousand pages, none of his fifty-one leaders is a woman (although Cleopatra plays a “supporting” — and mostly unfavorable — role in the lives of Caesar and Marc Anthony). This imbalance continues. Only two women (Queen Isabella of Castile and Queen Elizabeth I of England) made it into Michael Hart’s The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. Another example is The Wisdom of Leaders: History’s Most Powerful Leadership Quotes, Ideas and Advice, written by Derek Johnson. Thirteen women (versus 239 men) collectively account for less than 4 percent of the 1,007 entries in this otherwise very interesting book.

Did women indeed have so little to contribute? Not at all. Time and again, female leaders, from Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt in 1500 BC to Angela Merkel and Nancy Pelosi in our days, have transformed society at critical moments.