Angela Saini - The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

13 MILLION TO 4 MILLION BCE The human lineage diverges from other apes, including chimpanzees and bonobos, according to various scientific estimates.

ROUGHLY 300,000 BCE Our species Homo sapiens appears in the archaeological record in Africa.

10,000 BCE An agricultural revolution begins in the Middle Easts Fertile Crescent, following many thousands of years of plant cultivation across the world, marking the start of this regions Neolithic period.

7400 BCE Large Neolithic communities in atalhyk in Southern Anatolia are relatively gender-blind, according to the archaeologist Ian Hodder.

AROUND 7000 BCE The body of a female hunter of big game is buried in the Peruvian Andes.

5000 TO 3000 BCE A genetic bottleneck emerges in Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, suggesting that a small number of men are having disproportionately more children than other men.

3300 BCE The start of the Bronze Age in North Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of Europe.

2500 BCE Kubaba founds the third dynasty of Kish in Mesopotamia, ruling as a king in her own right.

2500 BCE TO 1200 BCE A movement of people from the Eurasian Steppe into Europe and then into Asia, bringing apparently more violent and male-dominated cultures, according to the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas.

750 BCE Wealthier ancient Greek homes are divided into separate spaces for women and men.

700 BCE The ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes women as a deadly race and tribe with a nature to do evil, in his history of the world, the Theogony.

AROUND 622 BCE An early form of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy is written, which has instructions for men on how to treat women taken captive in battle.

AROUND 950 CE A high-status female Viking leader and warrior is buried in Birka, Sweden.

1227 Death of the Mongol leader Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, whose descendants are thought to include one in two hundred of all the men alive today.

1590 Meeting of Native American Haudenosaunee women in Seneca Falls to demand peace between their peoples.

1680 The English political theorist Sir Robert Filmers Patriarcha defends the divine right of kings by arguing that a monarch has natural authority over his people the way a father does over his household.

1765 The English jurist Sir William Blackstones Commentaries on the Laws of England reinforce the principle that a womans legal existence is incorporated into her husbands during marriage.

1848 The worlds first womens rights convention is held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York.

1870 The Married Womens Property Act is passed in the United Kingdom, allowing married women to legally keep their own earnings

1884 The German socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels writes that matriarchal human societies were overthrown by a world historical defeat of the female sex.

1900 The Asante Queen Mother Nana Yaa Asantewaa in Ghana leads a war of independence against the British Empire.

1917 The Russian Revolution leads to the creation of the first socialist state.

1920 Soviet Russia becomes the first country in the world to legalize abortion.

1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike is elected the worlds first woman prime minister, in Sri Lanka.

1976 The Kerala legislature in India abolishes matriliny.

1979 The Iranian Revolution overthrows the ruling monarchy, leading to the creation of a conservative Islamic republic.

1989 The Berlin Wall falls, marking the start of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

1994 Bride kidnapping is made illegal in Kyrgyzstan.

2001 The Netherlands becomes the worlds first country to legalize same-sex marriage.

2017 The International Labour Organization includes forced marriage in its statistical estimates of modern slavery for the first time.

2021 The Taliban returns to power in Afghanistan after twenty years of war, immediately restricting access to education and work for women and girls.

2022 The Supreme Court in the United States overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling establishing the federal right to abortion.

Illustration by Martin Brown based on fig. 1 in Alexandra Surowiec, Kate T. Snyder, and Nicole Creanza, A Worldwide View of Matriliny: Using Cross-Cultural Analyses to Shed Light on Human Kinship Systems, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 374, no. 1780, 2 September 2019.

I ve been preoccupied by images of goddesses while writing this book. But theres one to which I keep coming back.

Its a popular lithograph produced in India just over a century ago. Kali, slayer of demons, symbol of death and time, dares us to survey the carnage shes wrought. Eyes wide and tongue protruding, her bright blue skin pops from the page. Wavy black hair falls below her waist, circled by a skirt of disembodied arms. Severed heads are strung like flowers around her neck. In one hand she holds a sword; in another, the head of a demon; in her third is a plate to catch his dripping blood; the fourth gestures, outstretched, to the bloody scene around her.

Ancient Indian goddesses and gods are routinely transgressive, as though theyve been summoned from other universes. But in the era of empire, British authorities and Christian missionaries in India were so terrified of Kali in particular that nationalist revolutionaries adopted her as a symbol against colonial rule. There are depictions in which she wears corpses as earrings, whole bodies threaded through her lobes. What an awful picture! one Englishwoman wrote in a tract published by the Bible Churchmens Missionary Society in 1928. Yet this savage female deity is called the gentle mother!

The paradox of Kali is that she is a divine mother, one who challenges every modern-day assumption about womanhood and power. Whether shes a reflection of humanity or a subversion of it, the fact that she was imagined at all continues to amaze. In the twenty-first century, she has been embraced by womens rights activists from New Delhi to New York, described as the feminist icon we need today. In her, we can still recognize our potential to destroy the social order. We can visualize the unstoppable rage in the heart of the oppressed. We might even wonder if those are the heads of historys patriarchs suspended from her neck.

This is the power the past has over us. Why do we in the twenty-first century turn to a figure from ancient history for reassurance of our capacity to change the world? What does Kali give us that we cant find within ourselves? The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah once asked, in a similar vein, why some of us feel the need to believe in a more equal past to picture a more equal future. Historians, scientists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and feminists have all been fascinated by this question. As a science journalist who writes about racism and sexism, I often find myself thinking about it as well. We want to know how our societies came to be structured the way they areand what they were like before. When we look to Kali, I wonder if were reaching for the possibility that there was a time in which men didnt rule, a lost world where femininity and masculinity didnt mean what they do now.