Origins of patriarchy (2025)

Book Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. By Angela Saini. 4th Estate £10.99.

Friedrich Engels referred to the ‘overthrow of mother-right’ as ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’, meaning that women became subordinate to men and ‘the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude’. This implied an earlier time where women had far more power and authority, in matrilineal or matriarchal societies. The Socialist Party’s 1986 pamphlet Women and Socialism criticised this account on the grounds that there was no universal stage of matriarchy and that relationships between men and women have changed over time to meet the needs of society.

In this book Angela Saini makes a similar point, that early societies varied greatly, and ‘the emergence of patriarchy could never have been a single catastrophic event’. A lot of material, in different places and at different times, is covered, but often it is hard to draw firm conclusions.

Societies where descent is traced through the female line are found in many parts of the world, though rarely in Europe. The Khasi community in north-east India, for instance, is matrilineal, with a child belonging to her mother, and men do not have rights over property or children. But it is not matriarchal, as family authority rests with the mother’s brother, though this power is not absolute. Some men have objected to this system recently, but others have defended it. In North America the Seneca have adopted a patrilineal naming system, but tribal membership remains matrilineal, despite the efforts of missionaries and government agents to institute a more patriarchal system.

Unfortunately, the book’s main claims are let down by an unconvincing chapter on the status of women in Russia and Eastern Europe under Bolshevism, in what is termed here ‘state socialism’. Abortion was legalised in the USSR in 1920, though this was reversed under Stalin in 1936, in order to boost birth rates, and it was made legal again in 1955. East Germany saw a massive increase in the number of crèche places, and by 1959 almost every pharmacist in the Soviet Union was a woman. On the whole, though, patriarchy was ‘dented’ rather than smashed. Saini does not discuss this, but the division into rulers and ruled was of course not even dented (see chapter 3 of our 1986 pamphlet for more on women in Russia.)

In Iran many women supported the movement against the Shah, but the Islamic Republic clamped down on women’s freedoms, with abortion made illegal and the wearing of the veil being mandatory. As this and other examples show, patriarchy is ‘being constantly remade in the present, and sometimes with greater force than before.’ And patriarchy is not a single phenomenon, rather there are plural patriarchies, existing in different ways in different cultures.

Paul Bennett