I loved Angela Saini's books, Superior: The Return of Race Science and her 2017 book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong . . .
In the early 1980s, I would sometimes run across references to these hypothetical matriarchies of the Neolithic that you are referring to. I wondered why it mattered. As a distraction when I was studying for my engineering exams at Carleton University in Canada, I used to go to the women studies section in the library and read up on these hypothetical Neolithic matriarchies. To be honest, they never seemed quite plausible to me.
Years later, I had the opportunity to go to a very isolated village in the mountains of Greece. Families were still using an ox to pull their plow right into the 1970s. The concept of a Matriarch existed in these villages. She was (and is) called the Panagia. The Panagia is loosely translated as the God of All.
Later, back in San Francisco, shortly before he died, I heard a beloved Greek Orthodox Archdeacon of California giving a sermon on the Panagia. He tried to convey her fearlessness in the face of adversity. He was careful to point out that she didn't fit in the Western Christian concept of Mary. She wasn't passive. She wasn't simply the mother of Jesus. According to this Archdeacon, I could see that he was trying to stress that she had a greater degree of agency than the Catholic notion of Mary.
According to the Byzantine scholar Michael Angold, in antiquity, the Panagia was once painted on the gates of Constantinople (Istanbul) and was their patron saint. I suppose I am an atheist, but I admit that the concept of the Panagia was and is inspiring to me.
In these isolated villages, patriarchy very much existed. Men busied themselves building and maintaining their homes, singing polyphonic chant in their church, decorating their churches, icons, and iconic paintings, building roads, raising their children, taking care of their animals, tending their fields, providing food for their family, and hanging out in the local kafenion with other villagers (mostly men). The kafenion was both a social venue and a political establishment. Occasionally, men would be called to defend the village from invaders.
I once asked a group of older women in the village if they ever went to the kafenion like the men. They responded that of course they sometimes did, but they found it more enjoyable to hold their own social gatherings. These were usually in the afternoon and were held in the home of one of the women. Men sometimes attended. This form of socializing reminded me a little bit of the concept of a French cultural gatherings known as the salon. These women seemed confident in their rolls and had their own authority. The men greatly respected the women and knew not to cross a line in areas where women exerted authority. Women's roles included tending to young children, making alcohol, growing their local vegetable garden, tending chickens and goats, doing laundry, housekeeping, making clothes, hauling water from the local spring, and assisting the church in various matters. Along with men, women sometimes sang polyphonic chant in the church. Women were generally also in charge of childbirth and held a certain level of medical authority. Women gained a certain degree of autonomy by joining with other women to lessen the burden of childcare and housework. Women would often go to the fields to help with various farming activities. This was made possible by having the older women tend to groups of young children. Sometimes, if a village was under attack, women would arm themselves. In the second world war, some women went to war to defend their villages.
I never had the impression in these isolated villages that women were less. In fact, the survival of these villages was so dependent on the rolls that women played that men held high regard for women. That is not to say that there were not instances of domestic abuse. But I don't think the degree of domestic abuse was greater than in so called "modern" western European societies.
I came away from this experience of traditional Greek mountain village culture with the observation that there may not be anything fundamentally wrong with "patriarchy". What mattered was the kind of patriarchy. Did the patriarchy respect women? How rigid was the patriarchy? Could it adapt to the needs of women and children? Was it necessary for a just society to expect women's and men's roles to be exactly the same?
In Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow also stress the diversity of past human societies and that humans lived in decentralized polities for millennia where it would have been difficult to enforce a strict patriarchy or matriarchy.
Getting back to Angela Saini, I don't think it is very helpful to try to advocate for women's rights in male dominated workplaces from the position of needing to eliminate the "patriarchy". I am not saying that patriarchies don't exist. But I believe women need to ask for more specific things than hypothesizing some hypothetical future where gendered roles and patriarchies are eliminated.
Breast feeding is not going away. Anyone who believes in science, if they look at the literature, cannot argue that breast feeding should be eliminated. Babies in general want to breast feed for at least a year, and exclusive breast feeding is recommended for at least six months. Pumping machines for breast milk work only so well. And as any parent who has raised a teenager knows, parenting demands for teenagers can be even more demanding than for toddlers. Mother's still carry the larger burden for parenting. Yes, we might envision a day were men and women fully share parenting equally, but I will be long gone by then.
Until that long distant day arrives, women, especially women in male dominated workplaces, need better maternity leave (yes, maternity leave, not parental leave (which few men actually take)), much better job protections to prevent women from being targeted in layoffs, better attention paid to pay and promotion inequality and more attention paid to unconscious bias as it affects pay and promotions.
Doing more to address sexual harassment and abusive supervision would also help.
Long list. Yes, a long list of mostly not addressed things.
Meanwhile, we have Judith Butler, cloistered away at Berkeley, trying to deconstruct gender roles and the family entirely. Another faction of post-modernists envision a day where babies will be gestated in test tube wombs without biological mothers. Supposedly, this will "free" women. This is not a future in which I would want to live. In my view, this vein of feminism, which is being incubated in university feminist studies departments, is not helpful to women and is in part funded by wealthy donors like Harvey Weinstein. Yes, Harvey Weinstein donated to a lot of feminist studies departments in universities.
I'm lucky to have grown up in Canada where, starting in the 1970s, we had the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Women (and a few men) of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women explored feminism from the perspective of the problems that women were encountering in Canadian society. They achieved a lot, including winning the right to maternity leave for up to one year for women and a guaranteed job when returning from leave. Still, many of their proposed policies were never put into law and Canada has backtracked in recent years.
Still, for many countries, just achieving the right to one year of maternity leave (per child), and job protections that would protect women from pregnancy and parenting discrimination, would be a major win for the "matriarchy".
Until then, I am not sold on distant unachievable notions such as eliminating the patriarchy.
Angela Saini would do well to focus her attentions more specifically if she truly wants to elevate the status of women in the world.
IDK but I think the role that parasites and diseases (STDs particularly) played when we were forced to restructure our social relationships while transitioning from hunter-gatherer, low pop densities to sedentary agriculture, high pop densities lifestyles is generally underestimated. One could be speculating that the introduction of patriarchy was just one (adaptive?) way of dealing with this emerging threat to population health and even population persistence.
From my reading of your review it seems this topic is not covered in the book (but it might). btw I have read the two previous books by Angela Saini and defo also will look into the new one. Thanks for the review!
I loved Angela Saini's books, Superior: The Return of Race Science and her 2017 book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong . . .
In the early 1980s, I would sometimes run across references to these hypothetical matriarchies of the Neolithic that you are referring to. I wondered why it mattered. As a distraction when I was studying for my engineering exams at Carleton University in Canada, I used to go to the women studies section in the library and read up on these hypothetical Neolithic matriarchies. To be honest, they never seemed quite plausible to me.
Years later, I had the opportunity to go to a very isolated village in the mountains of Greece. Families were still using an ox to pull their plow right into the 1970s. The concept of a Matriarch existed in these villages. She was (and is) called the Panagia. The Panagia is loosely translated as the God of All.
Later, back in San Francisco, shortly before he died, I heard a beloved Greek Orthodox Archdeacon of California giving a sermon on the Panagia. He tried to convey her fearlessness in the face of adversity. He was careful to point out that she didn't fit in the Western Christian concept of Mary. She wasn't passive. She wasn't simply the mother of Jesus. According to this Archdeacon, I could see that he was trying to stress that she had a greater degree of agency than the Catholic notion of Mary.
According to the Byzantine scholar Michael Angold, in antiquity, the Panagia was once painted on the gates of Constantinople (Istanbul) and was their patron saint. I suppose I am an atheist, but I admit that the concept of the Panagia was and is inspiring to me.
In these isolated villages, patriarchy very much existed. Men busied themselves building and maintaining their homes, singing polyphonic chant in their church, decorating their churches, icons, and iconic paintings, building roads, raising their children, taking care of their animals, tending their fields, providing food for their family, and hanging out in the local kafenion with other villagers (mostly men). The kafenion was both a social venue and a political establishment. Occasionally, men would be called to defend the village from invaders.
I once asked a group of older women in the village if they ever went to the kafenion like the men. They responded that of course they sometimes did, but they found it more enjoyable to hold their own social gatherings. These were usually in the afternoon and were held in the home of one of the women. Men sometimes attended. This form of socializing reminded me a little bit of the concept of a French cultural gatherings known as the salon. These women seemed confident in their rolls and had their own authority. The men greatly respected the women and knew not to cross a line in areas where women exerted authority. Women's roles included tending to young children, making alcohol, growing their local vegetable garden, tending chickens and goats, doing laundry, housekeeping, making clothes, hauling water from the local spring, and assisting the church in various matters. Along with men, women sometimes sang polyphonic chant in the church. Women were generally also in charge of childbirth and held a certain level of medical authority. Women gained a certain degree of autonomy by joining with other women to lessen the burden of childcare and housework. Women would often go to the fields to help with various farming activities. This was made possible by having the older women tend to groups of young children. Sometimes, if a village was under attack, women would arm themselves. In the second world war, some women went to war to defend their villages.
I never had the impression in these isolated villages that women were less. In fact, the survival of these villages was so dependent on the rolls that women played that men held high regard for women. That is not to say that there were not instances of domestic abuse. But I don't think the degree of domestic abuse was greater than in so called "modern" western European societies.
I came away from this experience of traditional Greek mountain village culture with the observation that there may not be anything fundamentally wrong with "patriarchy". What mattered was the kind of patriarchy. Did the patriarchy respect women? How rigid was the patriarchy? Could it adapt to the needs of women and children? Was it necessary for a just society to expect women's and men's roles to be exactly the same?
In Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow also stress the diversity of past human societies and that humans lived in decentralized polities for millennia where it would have been difficult to enforce a strict patriarchy or matriarchy.
Getting back to Angela Saini, I don't think it is very helpful to try to advocate for women's rights in male dominated workplaces from the position of needing to eliminate the "patriarchy". I am not saying that patriarchies don't exist. But I believe women need to ask for more specific things than hypothesizing some hypothetical future where gendered roles and patriarchies are eliminated.
Breast feeding is not going away. Anyone who believes in science, if they look at the literature, cannot argue that breast feeding should be eliminated. Babies in general want to breast feed for at least a year, and exclusive breast feeding is recommended for at least six months. Pumping machines for breast milk work only so well. And as any parent who has raised a teenager knows, parenting demands for teenagers can be even more demanding than for toddlers. Mother's still carry the larger burden for parenting. Yes, we might envision a day were men and women fully share parenting equally, but I will be long gone by then.
Until that long distant day arrives, women, especially women in male dominated workplaces, need better maternity leave (yes, maternity leave, not parental leave (which few men actually take)), much better job protections to prevent women from being targeted in layoffs, better attention paid to pay and promotion inequality and more attention paid to unconscious bias as it affects pay and promotions.
Doing more to address sexual harassment and abusive supervision would also help.
Long list. Yes, a long list of mostly not addressed things.
Meanwhile, we have Judith Butler, cloistered away at Berkeley, trying to deconstruct gender roles and the family entirely. Another faction of post-modernists envision a day where babies will be gestated in test tube wombs without biological mothers. Supposedly, this will "free" women. This is not a future in which I would want to live. In my view, this vein of feminism, which is being incubated in university feminist studies departments, is not helpful to women and is in part funded by wealthy donors like Harvey Weinstein. Yes, Harvey Weinstein donated to a lot of feminist studies departments in universities.
I'm lucky to have grown up in Canada where, starting in the 1970s, we had the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Women (and a few men) of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women explored feminism from the perspective of the problems that women were encountering in Canadian society. They achieved a lot, including winning the right to maternity leave for up to one year for women and a guaranteed job when returning from leave. Still, many of their proposed policies were never put into law and Canada has backtracked in recent years.
Still, for many countries, just achieving the right to one year of maternity leave (per child), and job protections that would protect women from pregnancy and parenting discrimination, would be a major win for the "matriarchy".
Until then, I am not sold on distant unachievable notions such as eliminating the patriarchy.
Angela Saini would do well to focus her attentions more specifically if she truly wants to elevate the status of women in the world.
This is a really good interview of Angela Saini on her new book:
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2023-02/interview-angela-saini-patriarchy
IDK but I think the role that parasites and diseases (STDs particularly) played when we were forced to restructure our social relationships while transitioning from hunter-gatherer, low pop densities to sedentary agriculture, high pop densities lifestyles is generally underestimated. One could be speculating that the introduction of patriarchy was just one (adaptive?) way of dealing with this emerging threat to population health and even population persistence.
From my reading of your review it seems this topic is not covered in the book (but it might). btw I have read the two previous books by Angela Saini and defo also will look into the new one. Thanks for the review!