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A Brief History of the Patriarchy in Twenty-one Pages

To understand how the Seven Deadly Sins influence our lives, even to this day (even if we don’t consider ourselves religious), we must understand the system that produced them: the patriarchy, which has defined Western culture for millennia. Its forefathers adopted and shaped early Christianity to enforce behavior in ways that continue to affect us. I struggled to understand how someone like me, even with all my privileges—white, cis, heterosexual, upper middle class, agnostic/spiritual—still feels prisoner to these Judeo-Christian ideas of “goodness.” Why do I feel bound to keep from committing these “sins”? To answer that question, I’d need to examine the story about who we are, a story we’ve been telling each other through history. A warning: This chapter is the book’s densest and most academic—skip it if you’re inclined—but to imagine something new, it’s important to understand where we’ve been.

Originally Partners

While we tend to think of the patriarchy as an inevitable reality, this conception is wrong. For most of human existence—from 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 b.c.—we were nomads, ranging across the planet in small collectives that were partnership societies, dependent on what many disparate bands thought of as the “Great Mother,” the creative force behind all life. In these partnership societies, women were revered for their generative powers—after all, birth is a miracle.

This is not to say early tribes were matriarchies—that would have still insisted on an arbitrary hierarchy, where women were perceived as superior to men. Paleolithic societies were primarily affiliation based, rather than predicated on continual oppression. In these first millions of years of our existence, there was no private property in the way we’d define it today—no resources to hoard, no generational wealth to sock away under the mattress, no land or titles to pass to biological children. Our ancestors were focused on the collective—a “we” rather than an “I,” where all would have been dependent on the group, and nature, for survival.

Throughout the Stone Age, our ancestors planted small gardens and foraged for fruit, vegetables, and small animals like snails and frogs, with only the occasional big game prize; anthropologists assert we were gatherer/hunters, not the opposite. As much as 80 percent of our food supply was generated, and processed, by women. And though hunting has been significantly overstated as the way of life, where it did occur, some women participated. In settlements like central Turkey’s Çatalhöyük (7500–6400 b.c.), men and women were the same size, received equivalent calories, and spent an equal amount of time inside. I can’t be the only one who was startled to read in The New York Times that a recent examination of nine-thousand-year-old graves in the Andes revealed that ten of the twenty-six bodies buried with hunting tools were the bodies of women, or when I discovered that a recent reassessment of prehistoric cave drawings, long held to be hunting scenes painted by men, concluded that the handprints were primarily female.

There are many theories for what changed some ten thousand to twelve thousand years ago, when we started practicing agriculture on a wider scale, and between 8000 and 3000 b.c., when farming became the norm. Most historians seem to agree that resource scarcity or opportunity—changing temperatures around 5000 b.c. revealed uber-fertile lands around rivers throughout Eurasia—pushed humans to migrate, bringing discrete groups into conflict with each other. Waves of Proto-Europeans invaded the existing “Old Europe” planting culture—overwhelmingly male Indo-Europeans from the North and Akkadian and Semitic tribes from the Syro-Arabian desert in the South. These warring tribes raped, pillaged, and subordinated those they conquered, creating hierarchical cultures that elevated some and oppressed others. While Paleolithic and Neolithic societies had acknowledged their dependence on nature, those in agrarian society thought of nature as something to dominate, control, and order. When we became agrarian—over a protracted period, variably around the globe—everything changed, particularly for women, children, domesticable animals, and whoever and whatever could be marginalized, co-opted, and enslaved for the benefit of others.

If conflict begat chaos, the fallout demanded a reorganization of society into structures through which order could be imposed. Between 3000 b.c. and 1300 b.c. we see the advent of such systems; a broader array of rules and laws became essential as society became more complex. Yet power almost always perverts, particularly when scarcity and security are in play.

Women as First Property

Women and children conquered in conflict and taken as slaves, servants, and concubines were the first property of the patriarchy: Men practiced their dominance on them and learned its possibilities. This became the foundation of slavery, the economic engine for many cultures. Over time, the oppression of women came to seem natural, normal, the way it had always been. “Otherization,” creating socially acceptable power distinctions, has been used broadly since—against Jews, Muslims, Black people. Women simply went first.

One of the mechanisms of the patriarchy was to force adherence to a vertical family structure. Because strong, even primary bonds between women had persisted over time in communal-living cultures, the push toward vertical family structures was intended to shift women from interdependence among each other to dependence on men. Even married women were essentially enslaved. While we think of marriage now as a mutually elective (and ideally romantic) partnership, that’s a very modern interpretation. In marriage’s earliest incarnations, women connected families, concentrated assets and status, and produced children; effectively, women were owned by their husbands, purchased through marriage or sold into the arrangement.

Before monotheism became standard (it appeared first in 1300 b.c. in Egypt, though millennia later in the Greco-Roman world), women did maintain active roles in temple life as priestesses, prophets, and healers—the goddess, and her power to give life, continued to be worshipped among other deities, perhaps as primary. But in civil society, day-to-day, there was little reverence for mortal women. Even women who were more proximate to power were in permanently tenuous positions: A wife could easily, without warrant or reason, be demoted to concubine or slave. This ever-present threat coerced dependence and good behavior and ultimately was codified into law.