The roots of male dominance

Angela Saini's book is a thought-provoking exploration of patriarchy, its historical roots, and its impact on society, offering glimpses of resistance and the search for alternatives

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

Author: Angela Saini

Publisher: Fourth Estate/ HarperCollins

Pages: 336

Price: Rs 699

A fleeting image in the opening chapter of Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, contains an unusual narrative. An elderly woman sits in the verandah of her home somewhere in Kerala, scrutinising the morning newspaper through thick spectacles. Viewed through the window of a bus by academic Robin Jeffrey, who was travelling across the state in July 1968, this is an image suggestive of female emancipation, literacy, and the right to leisure. It is conveyed to the reader via a conversation between Saini and Jeffrey: “That moment felt so remarkable to him that he’s never forgotten it. ‘It’s so fixed in my mind,’ he tells me.”

The Patriarchs is a relentlessly inquisitive, and investigative look at patriarchy, the histories and mythologies it spawns, the violence it condones, the activism it kindles. It is also about remarkable moments that seem to overthrow years of misogyny and oppression; moments, such as the one caught through Professor Jeffrey’s bus window, that are emblematic of small triumphs. The book has a Map of Matriliny plotted with matrilineal societies. Ms Saini discusses the Nairs of Kerala who lived together in taravads that were matriarchal. She mentions the Khasi community of Meghalaya, which is matrilineal in the present day, but is under tremendous pressure to adapt to the conventions of patriarchy. She reflects on the Native American Haudenosaunee women, who were physically strong, and wielded authority both outside the home and inside it. But their traditions succumbed to the politics of the milieu: “Believing outdoor work to be unsuited to women, American political leaders, well-intentioned social reformers, and Christian missionaries saw ushering women into domestic roles and men into agricultural labour and leadership as vital to assimilating Native Americans into their ‘modern’ society.”

This fascination with the idea of gendered work, of the family as a unit in which the men venture out to make a living and the women stay at home to cook and take care of the young, is expressed memorably by Germaine Greer in her seminal 1970 book, The Female Eunuch.  “Mother duck, father duck and all the little baby ducks. The family, ruled over and provided for by father, suckled and nurtured by mother, seems to us inherent in the natural order,” she wrote. In The Patriarchs, Ms Saini attempts to dismantle this natural order. She chronicles, and reappraises the views of historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to understand a world underpinned by patriarchal mores. She examines ancient Greek society and its anxiety about women, their sexuality, their stature in the household. She mentions Sarah Pomeroy’s book  Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, which tells of a paranoia wrought by unequal gender equations in Athenian society. She cites the legend of Clytemnestra, who takes a lover and kills her husband, King Agamemnon, but is stabbed to death by her son. She compares the antiquated Greeks with the Egyptians, and their powerful female rulers, Cleopatra and Nefertiti. Her conversations with Egyptologist Fayza Haikal reveal that the Egyptian woman had agency over her life: “She could work, she could adopt anybody, she could inherit, she could run her own business…”

But Ms Saini isn’t preoccupied with the historic preeminence of patriarchy, and its occasional subversion. Her research is rooted in contemporary society as well. She dwells on war, and the prisoners of war, in particular the capture of women and young children. She mentions the abduction of school girls in Nigeria in 2014 by the militant group Boko Haram, who raped and killed their captives, or married them. She also cites the capture of Yazidi women, men and children from northern Iraq by Islamic militants, and cases of bride abductions in Central Asia, Armenia, Russia, and African countries like Ethiopia. She excavates from historical literature blueprints of slavery that reinforce modern-day abduction and imprisonments. For instance, a passage from the Old Testament’s book Deuteronomy is a manual for men who have female prisoners of war. It allows the captor to take a beautiful captive female as his wife, and instructs him to shave her head, trim her nails, and allow her to mourn her father and mother for a full month before marrying her.

Drawing parallels between slavery and the institution of marriage, she writes, “Bride capture blurs the lines between slavery and marriage. It could be seen as an extreme and violent variant of patrilocality:  Women don’t just move to live with their husbands; they’re forced to move.”

The Patriarchs offers stories, data, and analysis in an attempt to investigate male domination and its varied manifestations. Ms Saini travels to the ruins of Catslhöyük in her quest for archaeological evidence of goddess-worshipping societies in Neolithic times. She draws from the ideas of Gerda Lerner and Simone de Beauvoir. She re-examines the tyrannies of control, but does not arrive at conclusions. In a world order skewed towards men, as we are witnessing in the Indian women wrestlers’ fight for justice, the woman’s search for alternatives is perhaps never-ending.