My attention was first drawn to this book by a recent interview given by its author, Angela Saini, on the BBC radio 4 programme ‘Woman’s Hour’. There, she described the idea for the book as having first come to her when her online enquiries into the origins of patriarchy produced little result. If no one else had treated this important question, she concluded, then maybe she should do so herself!
That’s when my ears pricked up. I dimly remembered having some years ago come across what had then struck me as a very satisfactory – albeit not so recent (1974) – treatment of precisely this question. After much searching of library catalogues, I did at last track down what I was after – a compilation of papers by feminist social anthropologists under the title Woman, Culture and Society (WCS). Curious to know what Saini would have made of the explanations of patriarchy offered in this volume (which, on re-reading, seemed quite as convincing as they had done the first time) I ordered her book.
To my disappointment, Saini’s volume contained no reference to WCS – though it referred to later work by two of its principal contributors, Michelle Rosaldo and Sherry Ortner. On reading the book I began to understand why.
Saini’s methodology
On the face of it, Saini is a good deal more upbeat than the feminists of an earlier generation (WCS). Rosaldo, Ortner et al. seem ultimately resigned to patriarchy (or ‘male dominance’ and ‘the devaluation of women’) being pretty much ‘universal’ in the cultures of the world. Saini appears to resist such conclusions. Not that she rejects their arguments out of hand. Rather she expresses a general distrust in the idea of ‘patriarchy’ being the kind of monolithic thing about which one could say, once and for all, whether it were universal or not. To an extent, this evidently undercuts the expectations aroused by the title of the book: ‘How men came to rule’. One sympathizes with the assessment of an online reviewer who comments: ‘Saini does not answer her own question’. On the other hand, the refusal of any such foregone conclusion as ‘universality’ allows her avoid qualifying the importance of such narratives of female ‘push-back’ and resistance as she chooses to explore. Hence, the impression of greater positivity as regards the ultimate outcome of the woman’s struggle.
The following passage from her Introduction is entirely typical:
We are a species that shows enormous variation in how we choose to live, with remarkable leeway for change. By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is: something more fragile that has to be constantly remade and reasserted. (My italics)
Along with ‘biological’ inferiority, then, Saini, refuses even to engage with the idea (such as we find in WCS) of a devaluation which is cultural, so not inevitable, yet reflects the natural conditions set in most traditional societies by the demands of pregnancy, lactation, and early childcare. Any idea of patriarchy as a predetermined ‘thing’ gives way to the notion of it as the outcome of an ongoing process involving ‘push-back’ and negotiation. It is as though, for Saini, the more straightforward approach consisting in the investigation of a supposedly universal phenomenon would somehow compromise our enquiry through a kind of collusion with its object. Thus, the legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon warns: ‘The subject to be explained – the development of male supremacy – is effectively presumed. Social power is not explained, it is only restated.’
An inevitable outcome of this attitude is at least the implication of considerable hermeneutic suspicion respecting the conclusions of earlier anthropologists such as Rosaldo and Ortner (1974) – even though these authors claim to be feminists, putting the fruits of their anthropological understanding at the service of the cause of woman’s emancipation.
The risk, in my view, is that a certain mode of contemporary discourse turns up its nose at the past without directly and explicitly engaging with what that past has claimed to establish on precisely the matter under discussion (i.e. patriarchy). This strikes me as an evasion that, in the interest of fairness, needs to be challenged. Hence, the immediate motivation for my blog. The confrontation of earlier and more recent feminist approaches to patriarchy also says a lot about contemporary discourse in social anthropology. This can hardly be laid at the door of Angela Saini, who may not even have read WCS. But, for me, it contributes an additional motivation for writing the present piece.
Saini’s narrative
Unfortunately for Saini, a distrust of global explanations and grand narratives proves easier to maintain in principle than in practice. She may seek to observe a scrupulous balance between authority and ‘push-back’ as manifesting respectively male and female forms of power; it remains the case that the systems seem largely to figure on the male side of the balance, and the ‘push-back’ on the female. Why should this be? Why is the discussion never of matriarchal systems meeting ‘push-back’ from oppressed men?
This is essentially the question addressed by WCS. Ultimately, it’s a question that won’t be side-stepped entirely, forcing Saini to hazard a rudimentary explanation:
Nor is there much evidence that women’s oppression started in the home (i.e. as it would, were it an effect of some unalterable aspect of the female ‘nature’). Instead, we can see it in the historical record around the same time that the earliest states and empires began to grow, as they tried to expand their populations and maintain armies to defend themselves. The elites that ran these societies needed young women to have as many children as possible, and for the young men they raised to be willing warriors. It’s at that point that it’s possible to spot gendered rules appearing, curbing the behaviour and freedom of everyday individuals. Virtues such as loyalty and honour became recruited into service of these basic goals. Traditions and religions, in turn, developed around the same social codes.
This explanation is, for all the casual nature of its introduction, surely no less a theory, for not being naturalist. Why would we assume ‘patriarchy’ began at a certain point rather than always having been part of the order of things? Just because ‘male dominance’ is not biologically determined in Goldberg’s sense, we cannot necessarily conclude that it won’t always have been the commonest state of affairs. Indeed, the theory that male dominance is both culturally-determined and has always been a pretty much universal is precisely the one defended by the contributors to WCS. And even supposing patriarchy did ‘begin’ at a certain point, why would we assume that this coincided with the evolution ‘the earliest states and empires’? Not that there is anything inherently implausible about such an explanation. And, to be fair, it turns out to be one for which subsequent chapters provide some kind of historical evidence. But ‘theory’ it is, and should accordingly be treated as such, with discussion of evidence, and reference to sources. Postulating some kind of explanatory narrative – if, despite our epistemic distrust, that is where we end up – involves a measure of epistemic commitment, from which no amount of theorized epistemic distrust can excuse us.
So, given this reluctance to present the historical material of subsequent chapters as evidence of a pre-conceived theory, I shall myself attempt, in the following paragraphs to draw together in a coherent way the argument of the first half of the book.
‘How men came to rule’ suggests a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. In evoking the ‘before’, we begin, not with speculations about primaeval matriarchy – though S. returns in chapters 3 & 4 to a version of that idea – but with contemporary evidence for reduced levels of patriarchal oppression, in societies with traditions of ‘matriliny’. The latter is a system of descent whereby land, wealth, ancestral power, and other forms of status pass, not from father to son but, in general, from mother’s brother to sister’s son. How far this social arrangement counteracts male dominance is a moot point. Other factors of family structure, such as wife’s residence, as well as social and economic factors can play a part in determining the balance of power between the sexes. Nevertheless, it would, I think, be widely agreed, that matriliny grants women a significant place in the social structure, and tends to be consistent with their enjoying certain rights. By contrast, in many patrilineal communities the young woman is, on marriage, definitively separated from her uterine kin, and finds herself a stranger amongst strangers.
S. covers a number of ‘classic’ instances of matrilineal societies described by the anthropologists such the Nayar, Minangkabau and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). To determine how far, in each of these cases, male dominance is in some sense overcome would be a complex matter. It’s the question treated by many of the essays in WCS (for which, see below). S. doesn’t really enter into that kind of analysis. Her accounts of matrilineal communities stress the apparently favourable impact of traditional social arrangements on the status of women in these places today – as compared with places where patriliny has always held sway.
As for the ‘after’, this is most frequently understood in terms of the imposition of social values characteristic of the patriarchal coloniser (i.e. 17th-19thC northern European powers) on traditional matrilinies among the colonized, with its deleterious impact on woman’s rights. The ‘patriarchs’ in question, therefore, include both the colonizing powers of the earlier centuries (Europeans and Americans), and more recent and contemporary native governments echoing those same patriarchal values, generally in the interests of enforcing systems of law and ownership more closely resembling those of the contemporary West.
S’s principal narrative line, then, is that patriarchy begins with Western colonization. However, succeeding chapters (3-5) describe – in terms somewhat unflattering to the modern West – certain potential forerunners of this patriarchal European modernity. First, the Indo-European migrants of the European continent some 4,500 years ago, who, according to the disciples of the controversial archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, disrupted non-patriarchal, goddess-worshipping, peoples such as the inhabitants of the earliest known city at Catalhoyuk in contemporary Turkey. Second, the civilizations, from Sumer to ancient Rome, in which the enhanced political power accruing to religious and political elites would seem to have been monopolized by men to the exclusion of women.
From female slavery to political oppression
In the second half of her book (ch. 6-8), things take an altogether more interesting turn. Tellingly, chapter 6 begins with a genuinely personal reminiscence about extended phone-calls between the author’s mother and Trisha, the daughter of an Indian friend of hers, recently married from India, and currently enduring a life of total alienation in the house of demanding parents-in-laws. This triggers some interesting reflections on the potentially wretched domestic situation of such women and slavery more generally, and the often very blurred distinction between the two. S. further complicates things by citing traditions that dignify the sufferings of victimized young brides as a form of piety freely and willingly rendered, and cases of abducted women who choose to remain with their abductors. The chapter concludes with some observations by the US sociologist Orlando Patterson on what he terms ‘natal alienation’ – observations that are no doubt true of the plight of many non-slave women in patrilineal societies as of slaves on the American plantations:
‘Because a slave was human, she wanted desperately to belong to her parents, her kinfolk, and through them to her ancestors; she wanted her children to belong to her, and she wanted those ties to be secure and strong.’
I believe, coming where they do, these words are revelatory. Their shocking implication is that the object of desire – whether of the plantation slave, or alienated bride, transplanted into her husband’s family – is not qualitatively different from that rootedness which, in the husband’s case, the whole patriarchal system is set up to guarantee. Other, less patriarchal, systems may balance the needs of wife and husband more equitably. But, either way, ‘the antithesis to slavery in societies where the personalistic idiom of power was dominant’ is not ‘abstract freedom’, Patterson argues, but a ‘countervailing power’. Indeed, the sacred ties of belonging and communal identity which are often the source of the oppression we suffer are also the source of our need to oppress. ‘What we need’, concludes S., ‘are other powerful networks that we can escape into.‘ ‘More than an abstract freedom people need systems that can lift them up’.
In the context of cultures deploying Patterson’s ‘personalistic idiom of power’ – the matrilineal and patrilineal societies S. has just been describing – the term ‘system’ falls rather short of the intensely personal, and even religious, nature of the commitments involved. But the passage forms a pivot into the topic of the next chapter, and what S. means by ‘system’ here is also something altogether outside that ‘personalistic idiom’; namely, the attempt in the new egalitarian world of Soviet communism to make a clean sweep of everything resembling it. Perhaps, here too, the term ‘system’ falls short, though in another way, of the element of personal commitment involved, since in communism the rootedness of traditional pieties gives way to another kind of religious faith – namely, in the myth of human progress. Chapter 7 traces the remarkable gains in equality that become possible once the traditional ‘personalistic idiom’ is jettisoned.
Saini vs. WCS: getting the narrative right
Saini’s free-wheeling journalistic style of presentation proves well adapted to those fashionable rhetorics that eschew essentialist concepts and epistemic commitment. It throws up all kinds of interesting stuff in a way that doesn’t appear to be taking sides, yet consistently plays to the kind of views that a bien-pensant reader will already entertain. There are two important respects in which I believe her book to be misleading. First, its narrative is fundamentally wrong.
The basic presupposition of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ story is that of a prelapsarian era when things were better – i.e. less patriarchal – than they are now. By and large, the opposite is the case.
As regards the ‘before’ of this story – i.e. ‘archaic’ (i.e. non-Western) societies of the kind traditionally studied by anthropologists, including matrilineal and uxorilocal ones – the authors of WCS are pretty much united in the view that some form of ‘male dominance’ has been a feature of them all. This can sometimes be a matter of status rather than power. Rosaldo instances East European Jewish ghetto communities:
Women had an extraordinary amount of influence. … they shaped most political events; in the household, a woman kept control of the pocketbook and effectively dictated family spending; and finally, in wealthier families, women and not men were the workers, running the family business usually a small local store. Yet, in spite of all this, … their greatest joy in life was to have a male child. A woman’s work was rewarded by having the son become a scholar, a man whose actual activities might have little influence on the everyday life of the community but who stood, nonetheless, as its source of pride and moral value.
On the source of this ‘male dominance’, Michelle Rosaldo, Sherry Ortner, Nancy Chodorow largely share the view that it isn’t a direct result of social roles derived from biological characteristics (e.g. pregnancy, lactation, early childcare), but of the way such roles set parameters for culture – specifically, for the place of woman in the social imaginary. This is invariably perceived as closer than the man’s role to those natural/biological processes of reproduction & death against which community must struggle through symbolic and ritual work to assert its continuity over time. In particular, there is a symbolic polarization of domestic and public/political sphere as pertaining respectively to female and male.
The idea that ‘female to male stands as culture to nature’ (Ortner) sounds strangely dated these days. Nevertheless, there is, I believe, an undeniable continuity between such theories and more recent thinking in social anthropology – especially in regard to what the latter has had to say on the topic of ‘hierarchy’. This concept broadly corresponds, I think, to what Orlando Patterson terms the ‘personalized idiom of power’. Earlier anthropologists would have identified that idiom with the language of kinship. Their successors, especially recent disciples of the French Indianist Louis Dumont, have tended to lay the stress on social symbolism. Dumont characterizes the traditional symbolic mode of social organization in terms of the priority it gives to hierarchical status as opposed to political power. His recent followers have developed this contrast of traditional and modern in terms of an opposition between ‘totalizing’ and ‘de-totalizing’ forms of social organization.
A full explanation of these theories would greatly exceed the scope of this blog. Yet it is particularly relevant, for purposes of the current discussion, to draw attention to one respect in which this more recent thinking represents and improvement on the theories of WCS. Rosaldo and Ortner are too prone to speak of ‘male dominance’ as ‘universal’ and ‘necessary’. This hardly accords with their insistence on its causes as pertaining to culture rather than nature or with their feminist aspirations to refashion contemporary society on less patriarchal lines – and I am inclined to attribute it to their tendency as anthropologists to identify with the cultures they describe. By contrast, Dumont, Rio et al., no less than Durkheim with his opposition of ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ social organization, make a firm distinction between other societies and our own unique case. This distinction is, of course, one of culture, not of nature or biology; but, nevertheless, in regard to the social and cultural operation of a fundamental hierarchical opposition of male and female it marks us off from all the rest. Our own culture is certainly the first altogether to dispense with hierarchy and the personalized idiom of power. It is therefore also the first in which an altogether non-patriarchal form of social organization has become thinkable.
Saini vs. Rio: getting the perspective right
These considerations bring us to the second crucial issue of where the contemporary West – the world of Saini, you and me – sits in relation to the patriarchy.
S’s book clearly aligns ‘us’ – i.e. the contemporary West – with the patriarchal coloniser. As such we are encouraged to look back in time (principally to the world’s matrilinies), and over the former boundary of Eastern Europe (to the lands affected by the communist revolution) in search of a world before/after patriarchy.
The reflections of those anthropologists mentioned above would suggest this is quite topsy-turvy. The truth, bluntly stated, is that there was probably never a world before patriarchy, because male dominance is a predictable feature of traditional societies characterized by a ‘personalized idiom of power’. Paradoxically, the least patriarchal of these, the communities distinguished by the greatest equality between woman and man, says Rosaldo, are probably not to be found amongst those with highly developed unilateral corporate lineages like the Nayar or the Ashante, but rather the very simplest in which corporate life scarcely extends beyond the nuclear family, such as the Ilongot or Inuit. I say ‘paradoxically’, because in almost every other respect, these are the societies that are furthest removed from our own extremely complex structures.
In reality, we, in the contemporary West, belong in the same area of the anthropological map as the communist East Europeans. (Here too, in placing us amongst the patriarchs and colonisers, S. is misleading.) Our modern societies, and those of East European communism, have both long since exited the world of hierarchical social symbolism and personalized idioms of power, where patriarchy is integral. We are currently both heading into a world without hierarchy, a world of detotalized social relations, where patriarchy is no longer inevitable, and probably no longer desirable. This is the world of the future, not the past.
I think we can be confident of progress towards ever greater gender equality. What is much less certain, in my view, is where the rites of piety and belonging will find their place in that new world. The Communists swapped them for a quasi-religious belief in a collective utopian future – a promised heaven on earth. But what takes their place in the world of the contemporary West – the world of you, me and Angela Saini? Where – to whom and to what – shall we belong, as the last remnants of traditional piety fall away? That, it seems to me, and not gender equality, is the important question raised by the confrontation of traditional hierarchy and the modern West.
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