Angela Saini: The Origins of Inequality

Written By Alexandra Brockman

 Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist who is one of my favorite guides through topics that are sticky—and sometimes icky—and also defining, like the origins of highly problematic race science, and the way the scientific field has come to understand and codify what it is to be a woman. In her first appearance on Pulling the Thread, she talked about science as fact—and then “science” that becomes ripe with human bias and interpretation. As humans, we can really mess things up. 

Angela has written two books interrogating the divisive politics embedded in the science of human difference, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story and Superior: The Return of Race Science. I’m most excited about her latest book, though: It’s called The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality and it’s about the origins of inequality. As she explains, patriarchy was not our predetermined fate. It’s not biological, or natural, or inevitable. And women have been resisting our oppression ever since. Her book is loaded with fascinating insights, many of which we explore. Let’s get to our conversation.

ELISE LOEHNEN: You're one of my favorite guides through research and you really find that, for one, I don't know how you covered so many forms of patriarchy in different parts of the world in not very many pages, but you do it in a way that checks an academic box, but feels really accessible for a lay reader like me. So thank you.

ANGELA SAINI: Thank you. It doesn't feel like it's not that many pages. It's actually almost 50% longer than all of my other books.

ELISE: Really?

ANGELA: Yeah. But I've had that feedback from other people is that it feels short, but it's actually not. It’s 100,000 words and my other books were all 70,000 words.

ELISE: Okay. My book is a hundred thousand words too, which was a feat, it has 25,000 words and end notes, but compared to, you know, you mentioned Garda Lerner in the book, like the creation of patriarchy is like a 600 page slog, like heavily, highly academic read. It's really hard to process that book. So yours feels like bedtime reading in comparison. It moves very fast.

ANGELA: Oh, good. Okay. I'm glad to hear that and I can't wait to read your book.

ELISE: Oh, thank you. I mean, I do one chapter that I call a brief history of the patriarchy because as you know we treat it as a monolith and it is not. And just trying to sort of ground people in what your work is really about: What's culture, what's nature, how the two get entwined in our minds? And this idea that maybe where we are now is not pre-ordained or predestined, but is a function of culture over time that has come to look like nature. And it's so lodged in people's brains, right? Like, this is the only way, this is how it is. All of our forebears would indicate that this is no other way. And as you point out throughout the book, all of this emerging evidence that it's not that simple, right? And so I'm excited to talk to you about that. And I'm also excited because I think that what your book does, which is a line that I try to find and hold, as exciting as it is, I think for women to imagine, I hear this all the time, you know, we, and we'll talk about this as well: Oh, it used to be a matriarchy, or once women are in power, the world will change. And it's like, why are we replacing one dominance scheme with another? And what would it actually look like to do things differently? And we can talk about the matriarchies that you do, write about the matrilineal culture and how that actually isn't the reversal of patriarchy. So let's start, and it's hard to write a book about patriarchy, right? Because it's a bogeyman in our culture and people, and they use it. But how do you define it? You define it quite simply, but how do you make this something that people aren't just like, oh, I'm gonna turn off.

ANGELA: It's actually a very difficult one to, to define because I think we have, in our popular imagination, we use it to mean everything to do with male power. So in every possible way that male power seems to be exercised or women seem to be disadvantaged, we call that patriarchy or the patriarchy. But if we are being precise about it, then really it means literally the rule of the father. And it was Sir Robert Filmer who was an aristocrat many centuries ago in England, who, in his book the Patriarchal, kind of defined how it was natural for the father to rule over his family in the same way that it was for a king to rule over his state, that the king was like the father of his state.

So in that sense, male power works in layers. It starts at the family and it works outwards. And really that has stood as the kind of definition we have at the back of our minds ever since. When we think about dominance, we often assume that it begins in the family. And that's one of the things I wanted to challenge, that I actually think it began with the state and then filtered down into the family.

ELISE: Yeah. You quote the legal scholar, Catherine McKinnon, she says: “the subject to be explained, the development of male supremacy, is effectively presumed, too.” And that's sort of where we find ourselves, right? Like, this is what we're, we're buffeting ourselves against, is the presumption of, well, this is just natural, right?

And as you just said, actually it's socially engineered, and can you talk a bit more about that? I love this moment where you say, “from here it appears almost conspiratorial as though it was cleverly planned out from the start.” You're talking about patriarchy, “when in truth, that has always been a slow griff.” Can you talk a little bit about how you see it? I know this is a huge question, but at it’s most basic, how it started with the state and trickled down into family?

ANGELA: Well, you know what I found remarkable when I started researching this topic is how little has been written on it. You would imagine there to be countless, hundreds, if not thousands of books looking at the origins of patriarchy. In fact, there are hardly any. It was a really popular question in the 19th century. This is why you see people like Friedrich Engels who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto. He was fascinated by it. There were some anthropologists in the US who were fascinated by it, mainly because they wanted to know why it was that some societies weren't patriarchal and they were trying to figure that out. And then it became popular again in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, with the rise of a new wave of feminism, in which women were again asking themselves, well, how did we come to this? And if we can understand the roots of it, can we start to tackle it? But again and again, often what you see is this sense of inevitability being attached to patriarchy as though even if it wasn't natural, and a lot of people do assume it is is natural. But if it wasn't, then somehow it was always going to happen. As soon as states got big enough, as soon as you know, societies advanced, that they would naturally fall into. And we don't really have a good reason for assuming that we don't, you know, the evidence doesn't really support it. Just because it is common, that doesn't mean it is necessarily inevitable or natural in the same way that just because democracy is common, that doesn't mean it's inevitable or natural or states or money or, you know, so many of the other things that we have invented and, and have become popular all over the world.

And that's where I wanted to start is just even in feminist literature, you see this kind of assumption from which people then start to talk about the profound issues that women face. Of course, a huge amount of gendered inequality that exists in the world. But almost as though if we were to have equality that would be going against some grain, that that would be pushing back against something that is a stable natural force and that we are introducing something almost unnatural onto how we live and often, you know, I'm a science journalist, often I go back to asking, you know what, again, deep in our evolutionary roots, what basis do we have for that? We certainly can't see that throughout human history. We can't even see it in other primates. If you look at the two closest primates to us, genetically, chimpanzees and bonobos: One is male dominated, the other is female dominated. And even in among male dominated primates, you don't get this primacy of the father. Kin relationships in most creatures are organized through mothers.

It's not as though they have nuclear families with fathers at the top. That just doesn't happen. You still have females with power, they just have it over other females if in a male dominated society. So, you know, in so many ways there are holes in this and yet we don't interrogate it. Why is there not a bigger literature on that? And that, you know, that process of kind of forensically like a detective almost picking away at all those different assumptions and once you've picked away at them, then asking while if this isn't natural, if it's not inevitable, then how did we get to here? That's the next stage. And that's when I started looking at the development of the earlier states, those first shoots of male power and how they emerged. And what you see is, at least this is what I argue, is that gendered oppression begins when gender becomes an organizing principle. When it becomes important for states to think about men and women as separate and having separate roles, that's when the elites start to treat us fundamentally differently, which really goes counter to what may be our individual wishes. You know, we know, we know, we look around us. We can see for ourselves that everyone has different talents and needs and desires and perspectives on the world. What a gendered order does is tell us that, no, you have to behave like this and you have to behave like that, and this is your role and this is your role. It is limiting in every sense, but it's limiting only because it serves those in power. Because what those in power essentially wanted in those early states was two things: One, population—they needed to keep up their population because otherwise, how do you have a state? And that's still a concern. Now, you can see that whenever birth rates start to fall, you can see in the news there's a rising panic, you know, that this threatens the future of our country or our state. And the other thing was defense. We needed people to keep having children and for those children to be loyal to the state in order to defend the state in times of war, which of course, throughout history has been a kind of eternal preoccupation.

ELISE: Yeah, it's interesting just listening to you talk to, and the way that, the lack of evidence in primates and then the inevitability that we see in how we are. And I feel like there's also, and this is what my book is about, is how our programming becomes invisible to us. We can be programmed, we have the most edible of species to create, to quote E.O. Wilson. And so we can be told stories, we can be told who we are, and then we enact it and call it nature or call it biology, but teasing those things apart, and I thought Chattle Hayek, that research project, that evidence is fascinating. Just in the fact that there wasn't such a conception of gender, can you talk a little bit about what was found?

ANGELA: It's a fascinating place. It was the first place I went to travel after the pandemic started. So it was very isolated, very desolate, which is remarkable for a UNESCO World Heritage site. When it was discovered in the 1960s, it was described as the oldest city in the world. It is very, very old. It was inhabited 9,000 years ago, so 7,000 BC and possibly earlier. So it's older than the pyramids. It's older than Stonehenge, older than most other archeological sites. And when it was first discovered it was excavated by a British, a very kind of controversial British archeologist called James Mear, Dutch British archeologist.

And he immediately believed because he kept finding female figurines, that this was proof of what in the 19th century was believed to be the matriarchal hypothesis that the, here was a city in his imagination built around female power that worshiped this kind of goddess, this great goddess. Um, and that in the 1960s helped to revive the goddess myth, this idea that in pre-history human societies were matriarchal and that something happened then afterwards to create patriarchy. In some ways you can see why he made that leap. Because when you look at the site, men and women are not treated particularly differently. You know, archeologically, there are only a few ways to notice gender differences. One is the way people are buried, one is what they eat. So you can see from the state of their bodies and the inside their remains, what they ate, wear, and tear on their bodies. You know, the kind of artifacts are left behind.

And in all of those ways, men and women seem to live very similar lives. In fact, even the heights of men and women were very similar in that particular site. But because of all these female figurines found, not just there, but also in other archeological sites around that time period, that kind of fueled this matriarchal myth again. Now I interviewed Ian Hoder, who's an archeologist who since then has done further excavations and more careful ones, looking in more fine grain detail with his colleagues at actually what we can see. And his view is that this was not a particularly gendered society. You know, as much as we might want it to be, we might want to believe it must have been, you just don't see very many differences in how people lived.

Even children were not raised necessarily in their own household. So often they, they are found the remains of children are found far away from their parents. So it's a very confusing place. It predates written language, so we can't actually know what people were thinking. All we have left are these kind of vivid red frescoes on the wall, and they tend to show hunting scenes. Again, not particularly gendered. It's very hard to tell if there is any gender to the people who are doing the hunting and death scenes. So people's bodies being picked apart by vultures or big birds afterwards. So the preoccupation throughout this settlement is death, which is again understandable. That is, you know, what many cultures around the world think about a lot life and death, but not gender very much.

I found that really remarkable because often when we imagine the past, we imagine it in a kind of Flintstone's way, that prehistoric neolithic people must have lived in these kind of nuclear families in caves where the man went out and hunted and the woman stayed at home and cared for the children and cared for him. And actually that doesn't tally at all with the evidence that we have from prehistory.

ELISE: Yeah. And aren't there so many theories about those goddess figurines, right? That they might be birthing talismans, they could be dolls, and alsoI think, I think Wengrow and Graeber were like, maybe they were effectively Barbies.

ANGELA: We just don't know, and I dunno how we can know, but do you know what is really fascinating is, so I've seen it myself, it’s in a museum now, but the most famous artifact from chat Holyoke is a seated woman. And this is a small figurine. It's about as high as my hand and it shows a woman, a large woman with rolls of fat sitting on a seat, are her back completely straight in this kind of position. Almost like a queen, you know, sitting with her arms outstretched. And what looked to be two big cats or animals underneath her hands, staring straight ahead. And that has mystified archeologists because if, you know, in our own cultures these days, dolls and goddesses tend to be exaggerated ideals of beauty. And yet here is an image of someone who is clearly older. You can tell by the kind of wrinkles and the roles of fat that she's older. She has clearly lived, you know, of heart long life. And we don't associate her in, you know, in modern day culture with beauty. And yet she's clearly, in this image, a picture of authority. You know, when you see it, it's just mind blowing. I mean, even how small it is, is completely mind blowing. You desperately want to know what this means, you know, what does she represent? What was she there for, who created her and why? And we still can't know. But what that does show is that the likelihood is, I would think, and this is just conjecture on my part, because obviously we have no idea. She looks like she might have been a real person, that this was a depiction of a real person. And if it was, then she must have been a figure authority because her pose is so much a figure of authority and that, um, that might tell us something about, you know, her position. It doesn't necessarily tell us about all women obviously, but it may tell us something about that one individual.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, it's a different paradigm too. And you know, I am, I am not a science journalist, so I would say, too, that even in the, the creation of those figurines that there was a certain reverence for not seeing women as sort of reproductive vehicles or enslaved procreative devices, but as magicians, I mean, an ability to bring forth life, I think, is something that we think of as so ordinary. And it feels like there at least was an acknowledgement of the alchemy of the amazing creative potential of a woman's body, which I don't think any of us think about enough. It's amazing. And you mentioned other moments in archeological history, which again, just dispute this story, just they're enough to call into question all of our thinking, i.e., men were hunters, women stayed at home and took care of children. There's evidence all over the globe of female warriors, right? Whether they're Viking or live in the Andes. There's tons of evidence, new and emerging, that societies were far more complex or creative and I love how you make the very basic argument that if this type of hierarchy, if if male supremacy were a natural, given a natural law or order, why would women chase against it, right? Why would we find it so unnatural and questionable?

ANGELA: Yeah, and we've always done that. People have always fought against anyone trying to impose power on them or trying to assert their status on them. That is true right throughout history, from written records onwards, certainly, you know, we have evidence of it, even in some of the most misogynistic societies on the planet, like ancient Greece, for instance. You can still see in legal records, for instance, or in written records, this tension, male anxiety, and women pushing back, you know, that is a kind of constant all the way through. And, not least, we have societies in which women do have more power and that is not seen as remarkable or weird in anyway by those societies themselves.

ELISE: Yeah. I want you to talk to us about Gimbutas, and maybe it's because I was reading for this in some ways, but we think about even just how careful you are, and I know you're a careful science journalist regardless of what you're talking about, but this aversion, which I understand, but this desire to get it completely accurate and right, because any theory that puts forth, you know, people mock and derive that new wave feminism that was arguing that, you know, there was a great mother, like that's been disparaged publicly. And yeah, some it has fallen apart or turned to dust, but it speaks to the patriarchy within anthropology and archeology and Wengrow and Graeber talk about this too, that what happened to Gimbutas was patriarchy, was misogyny—that so many men have put forward these grand myths about what might have happened in our pre-history and they were venerated for it, even as their theories have fallen apart. And women and any pro-women theory has to be so carefully guarded and tempered. And can you talk a little bit about her and her legacy and the way that she's actually right about some of her theories?

ANGELA: I find her life story so fascinating, and I wish she was still alive because I would've dearly loved to have interviewed her for this. The closest I got was interviewing one of her close friends, the person who helped finish her final book before she died. I think you are right. There is a lot of misogyny in archeology and not just that. When we study the past, we start with a present. So often we extrapolate the past from the present, so it's very easy to accept theories that chime with what we already experienced or we already know. It's very difficult for any theory that might challenge that, and that's essentially what Gimbutus did—she was this larger than life Lithuanian archeologist who, as I said in the 1960s when these, when the matriarchal hypothesis became popular again, she commandeered the kind of myth and mythology and folklore of Eastern Europe where she was from, which often had tales of witches and powerful women, magical women, and the abundance of female figurines that we see in pre-history, as I said, right throughout the Neolithic, we see many, many different types of female figurines. If you go to the museums in Anatolia, for instance, they are everywhere. They are so preponderant, it's astounding.

ELISE: And a dearth of male figurines, right?

ANGELA: Yeah, you know, again, we're projecting because they're female shaped, so we have to assume that they're female, but there is always an ambiguity there. And I know that myself, cause if you go to Hindu temples, I'm of Indian heritage, if you go to Hindu temples, sometimes it can be ambiguous. The representation of breasts or hips can appear on both men and women, so as far as we're aware, these are female figurines. And because of that and all this evidence, also in folklore, she built this theory that argued that old Europe, but she described it—this is kind of Europe before antiquity—had been female focused, not matriarchal. She didn't use that term. And in fact, she didn't even call herself a feminist, even though she was very popular with feminists. But female focused, and that people worship this great goddess and that these figurines and lots of different representations of symbols and things in these ancient sites were representations of this great goddess. And this was very popular among feminists and women's rights activists, as you can imagine in the 1970s and 1980s. Because she was saying, you know, a newspapers reported this, New York Times mentioned she is telling feminist what they want to hear. She is giving them a history that really makes them feel better about the past because it gives a precedent to this idea that women had power once upon a time.

But as she became more well known in those circles, she became increasingly criticized by fellow archeologists. And again, yes, this is not just a male dominated profession. Even women, archeologists within the profession, were criticizing her because there was a certain narrative, you know, about the world and they felt legitimately, I have to say in some respects, that she tended to overemphasize her evidence that sometimes she would read more into things than it might have been possible to read.

You know, she would see a symbol V and she would assume that represented, you know, female anatomy, female genitalia, or she would even see the representation of a penis and she would associate that with the male force binding with the female force. So there was always a way back to her original theory. And increasingly she became more and more ridiculed throughout her career. Although her friend Miriam Robins Dexter, who like I said, I interviewed, said she wasn't bothered by it. I don't know if that's true or not. I would be bothered by it, but I don't know. She didn't seem bothered by it. And she said before she died, she did say people would change their minds in 20 years and remarkably after her death that is exactly what has happened. So one of the big parts of her theory was that something like 5,000 years ago, patriarchal invaders came in from the Russian steps. So these are these big grasslands towards the east and that these kind of male focused militaristic invaders came into Europe and changed society, irrevocably. That what were female focused societies became patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal societies, female gods were replaced with male gods.

Everything changed, and people doubted there was some doubt among archeologists whether this invasion actually happened. And we know now from genetic evidence, which we have from ancient DNA, which is a very new technology, that actually it is likely an invasion, not an invasion, but a big movement of people did happen from east to west into Europe and parts of Asia and Africa. Earlier than she mentioned. So not quite the dates that she came up with, but it did happen. And there were social differences. The problem is that her timeline of cultural change doesn't necessarily tally with the timeline of when these migrations happened. So there were social changes. There is no doubt on that, she’s absolutely right. There was, there was, there were big social changes towards male domination and more patriarchal attitudes and patriarchal religions that happened in those couple of thousands of years before antiquity. But, changes, social changes were already happening before that mass movement of people happened. It continued and maybe it wouldn't have continued, but we can't really know that. But what I find fascinating now is that all these male archeologists and geneticists are now quoting Gimbutas and venerating her, When once they had ridiculed her and revisiting her theories and asking, well, maybe, was she right?

ELISE: Yeah. What was interesting and this might be from different time periods as well, but I feel like at one point you mentioned that some of these waves of people who did come down were predominantly male, unknown why. And that then there are these evidence, and again, this speaks to a certain event cause I think you cite it in around Mongolia and also, in maybe the UK that there are these instances when we look at DNA now and we trace it back, across a huge stretch of Asia, roughly 8% of all men in the region. So that's 1 in 200 of all men in the world have a single source, that is wild. And then there's one another instance of this in the UK, right? And they think it might be Genghis Khan, that one in 200 men are descended from Genghis Khan. Is that accurate? That is wild.

ANGELA: Well, what we do know is that between around 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, what we see in parts of Europe is, a contraction in Y chromosomes. So Y chromosomes are passed only from father to son through generations, in the same way that, you know, you get maternal DNA passed through mothers. And, what this indicates is that around that time, and this again predates when Gambuts was talking about this is way in advance of what, when she is referring to, but what must have happened was that fewer men were having more children than most. And there are lots of different explanations for this. We can't possibly know why. One theory, which was put forward by Stanford University researchers was that, just recently, was that there were these warring clans in which men would be killed. So they would go out on these kind of militaristic quests. All the men in the community would be killed, and the women and children would be kept, and the women would then marry the men within that community.

So obviously, you would have fewer men, but all the number of women would stay the same, which tallies with the genetic evidence. Another explanation might be that there's an uneven access to women because of an emergent elite of men. You know, it might be that a small number of men were just having more children than most men, which is something you also see in patriarchal societies, that very powerful men like Genghis Khan, for instance. And of course, Genghis Khan. The Mongol Empire is very much later. This is thousands and thousands of years later. But what we do know is that, for instance, as you say, according to the genetic evidence we have at the moment, one in 200 of all men in the world are descended from one man that lived around a thousand or so years ago. And who lived in this part of Mongolia. And the assumption is that he could have been Genghis Kahn or one of Genghis Khan's relatives. And the reason they say that is because Genghis Kahn, we know through written evidence and we have quite good written evidence about his life and his family had many wives and many concubines who had lots of children.

And his sons also had many wives and lots of children. And that continued over generations. So it is very likely that they would've left lots of descendants then even into the present. And that is perhaps one feature of patriarchy that we can identify a history's patriarchs through the number of children they had and left into the present. Is that what was happening 7,000 to 5,000 years ago? Possibly. We can't really know, and I very much hesitate when it comes to speculation here. But what we can know is that there was social upheaval happening. There must have been of some kind because otherwise you wouldn't see those genetic patterns. We don't know what form that took and what role that plays in the development of patriarchal systems later on. But certainly what we can see in later patriarchal societies is patterns of residents in which women leave to go and live with husbands. So they leave their own communities, go and live with husbands, and in which warring raids involve the murder of men and the taking of women as wives. And that's not universal, but it is very common in history.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, you're saying that very nicely, but isn't there a lot of isn't the intimation that, in many ways, women and children were, were first slaves. They were the first enslaved people, and maybe we can't say that maybe they willingly married or went into relationship with warring tribes, but they were taken as property. Right? They were the spoils often of conflict and, I don't know. I guess we don't know.

ANGELA: That's a hard one to say because like I said before, if the earliest indication of social change we have is of a small number of men having more children than most men. That would mean that most men are socially lower down the ladder. And it could be that some of those were slaves, some of those men were slaves. And that is why we see this uneven distribution. We do later see of course, women taken as captives and slaves and, and today finally we do recognize in today's society we recognize forced marriage as a form of slavery. Forced marriage, which has been practiced in lots of patriarchal societies around the world.

But I think it would be a huge leap and not a leap, I would be comfortable making to say that women were the first slaves. Cause we really don't have evidence for that. What we do have evidence for is that slavery is a very old institution involving all kinds of people in lots of different ways. And certainly the institution of slavery later on came to underpin institutions of marriage. So, there was a lot of borrowing in patriarchal societies, at least from institutions of slavery in drawing up the rules around gendered marriage.

ELISE: But isn't slavery, whether it was primarily women and children or all people, isn't it one of the foundational building blocks of patriarchal culture and the end property?

ANGELA: Again, I don't think it's just about patriarchy, it's just about property. I mean, this is what Engels argued in the 19th century that what underpins patriarchal control, the power that men accumulated was all to do with land and property and women as property. And actually, I think it has more to do with population state control of how populations. Keeping their population up and imposing rules on how families should behave, the kind of norms within families and the norms within society. Telling people what they should do sometimes against their own wishes, often against their own wishes, I would imagine, in to serve their own interests. So, again, I don't think, I don't think gender depression predates all other forms of oppression, gender depression comes later. We definitely see social inequality before that.

ELISE: Okay. So let's talk a bit about some of the, the maternal lineal parts of the world that you talk about, some that don't exist anymore, some that are still culturally existent and why, I can't remember exactly how you put it, but effectively you're like, there's also are the equivocation between well matriarchy and patriarchy, and that when we look at cultures that are look more like a matriarchy, they often lack some of those dominance themes that are evident with patriarchies. Is that right? Am I saying that accurately? That they're just different?

ANGELA: What we see about matrilineal societies is a huge degree of social variation. So there are lots more different kinds of matrilineal societies, whereas patriarchal societies tend to be more alike with each other. And I think there's a very good reason for that. And that is because patriarchy, as it's spread, was spread by empires and powerful forces. And so they were spreading it through their own systems of doing things, their own religions. And these provided templates for how people should live, whereas older societies like matrilineal ones, of course predate that and would've emerged in their own way and weren't borrowing necessarily from other neighboring cultures, so they wouldn't have followed just one template. And actually that tallies with what Graeber and Wengrow write in their book, when they argue that there would've been a lot more social variation in the past, of course, because humans, the further back you go into history, they're constantly trying out different forms of living.

ANGELA: You know, if one thing doesn't work, they try out something else. If this doesn't work, cause you know, if there is some social tension, then they give up on that and try again, or they move away, or people break off and, and move somewhere else, we tend to do that less now because of the way societies work. You know, you're born within a society. You are created, you are a citizen, and you live within the rules of the state to try and challenge that is a huge undertaking, to try and say, actually I don't like the way the United States is organized. I think we should just all get together and change radically how we do it. We just can't do that. But that would've been very common in the past. I think we forget that as time has gone on, as states have got bigger, as systems of doing things have hardened, we've become less socially nimble. It's become less easy to change things. Even, you know, if you look at how the Supreme Court operates or how legislation is passed by government, it is remarkably difficult even to get small changes made. Even the tiniest things take huge amounts of time and effort, and that flexibility that early human societies wouldn’t had. We just have lost, and that's one of the thing I, things I ask for at the end of the book is that can we rediscover it? Can we, can we allow ourselves to imagine worlds beyond the worlds that we have created right now? Because this isn't it, you know, we don't have to settle for this.

ELISE: Yeah, and it's interesting, we recognize the way patriarchal culture has cloned itself and colonized the world. Right? And so much of that is, I mean, particularly Judeo-Christian patriarchy, it’s a stamp that then has been carried across multiple cultures. And it's insidious in the way that it has captured our imagination and in so many ways, our moral imagination, right? Like that was also quite a trick to make patriarchy not only a function of state and civic society and how things were organized and the legal systems emerge, but then to make it, oh, it's a patriarchal God and in a way that I think becomes harder and harder to push back against.

I loved the book because I've spent a lot of time trying to think about Judeo-Christian patriarchy for the context of my own book, but then to watch you explore all of these corners of the globe was so interesting. Will you talk a little bit about socialism, which I know is a bad word, but like what that social experiment, at least for women, how it changed culture in ways that it would be nice to bring some of that forward, right?

ANGELA: Yeah, it's actually been interesting for me. So I moved to the US about a year and a half ago, and you're right, the word socialism, or dare I say communism, is a conversation stopper, not so much in Europe. So of course, most European countries are actually in some forms for soft socialist states. They have, you know, very high levels of welfare free education. Until recently, the UK had free higher education. So you, you know, in the generation before mine, you didn't have to pay to go to university. I didn't have to pay very much at all, free healthcare in most countries. And part of the reason for that is that in the 20th century, of course, the biggest socialist experiment, the Soviet Union when it was created, was very much built on this principle that we will abolish the state, we will abolish the family, we will start all over again.

And part of the part of the ideal was gender equality in a nominal way. In some ways it wasn't achieved fully, but certainly those, when the Soviet Union was created, it was the first state in the world to l legalize abortion in 1920, it very quickly brought women into the workforce, very quickly, brought women into education. And it does mean that even now in parts of Eastern Europe, and I've traveled in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, east Germany as well as West Germany, you can see the difference, that women in Eastern Europe find it absolutely given that they will work. In fact, there is still a stigma associated with not workin even in Hungary under Victor Orban, he has very gendered ideas about the world, but his policies don't require women to stop working. What they do is expect women to keep working and have more children, which is fascinating. So there's still this very much a social idea in former socialist states that women should work and that women generally can do the same work that men do. Not in every respect, but most respect, and you certainly saw that in the middle of the 20th century, there was a project at Harvard University where people who had fled Soviet Russia were interviewed by American researchers, and again and again, what you see in the transcripts of those interviews is what was the gender situation like, what was it like for women? And however much they disliked living in the USSR? Of course, because it was authoritarian, it was terrible and awful. Human rights atrocities happened, of course.

But one thing that comes clearly through those transcripts is that women did have a very high degree of equality with men in lots of respects, and that made the US very nervous at the time. You can see that anxiety in the transcripts, this idea that well, what if women were to choose that instead? What if women were to move towards socialism or want that system of government instead of what we have because they feel that would be better for them? And that led to this kind of ideological gender war within the Cold War. You could see it in the Kitchen Debate, the famous kitchen debate between Nixon and Khrushchev in which, you know, one is arguing that in the Soviet Union we don't treat women as property and we allow our women to work. And Nixon is saying, well, we give our women these amazing appliances that make their their work easier at home. And actually, both of those spoke to women because we do want good appliances and we want to work.

The thing is, this dichotomy was created and the US almost put itself in opposition to the USSR, ideologically. And in so doing, it began to conflate feminist demands with socialism. And that did a lot of damage, I think, in the second half of the 20th century to the progress of women’s rights in the US because to call for that degree of gender equality was seen as aligning yourself with an ideology that was seen as un-American, that to be an American in the 1950s was to be a housewife whose husband went out to work and you were content being a housewife. And if history was different, let's just say the Bolshevik Revolution had never happened, it’s possible that given the high rates of women that were going to university in the US before the Second World War, that that trend might have continued. But it's almost as though by pitting itself against the gendered equality of the USSR or the socialist states, the US was saying, no women, if you want to be truly American, you have to be domestic. That is what a true American wife is. That is what a true American woman is. You have to be married and you have to be domestic, and you have to not work once you're married. And that's why after the second World War, you see these plummeting rates in the US of women in higher education and this huge degree of social conformity in that couples just get married, you know, in very high numbers. Very high numbers of people getting married, very low divorce rates. Whereas in the socialist states, the divorce rates are much higher and of course, since 1990 and the fallen Berlin War, a lot of those things have leveled out. Things are not, you know, obviously we can see in Eastern Europe, in countries like Poland, which has very recently pushed back against abortion rights in Hungary where it's becoming almost like an authoritarian state now in terms of how it thinks about gendered rights. Not just women's rights, but also LGBTQ rights and the introduction of more welfare policies and so soft socialist policies throughout Europe means that we don't think about things in that dichotomous way anymore. But certainly I think there is still in the US, I think in some parts, this idea that a real woman, you know, a natural woman is one who stays at home and looks after her children, and that's her natural role. And that is also not just natural, but also American.

ELISE: Yeah, that’s certainly where this idea of nature continues to emerge, that somehow men are not equipped to be caregivers in the same way. Even though science, it's like actually they're oxytocin soars and men clearly look at all of our same sex couples and all configurations and people are perfectly capable of parenting regardless of gender and loving and caring. But it is one of those ideas that has incredibly long teeth. And I think that what we're going for, and maybe this is a good place to end, is societies of choice where people can sort of express their masculine and feminine in whichever ways that they want, and that we also resist the myth making. You're quoting, I think feminism for the 99%, this is a quote: “What good is a feminism so diluted into the broader political landscape? They argue that the best we can hope for is that a few women will smash glass ceilings and have as much power as the wealthiest men while watching immigrant working class and lower cast women clear up the shattered glass on the floor underneath them.”

And so I think it's also a consciousness, which I think has, is certainly much stronger in these last 5 to 10 years of, let's not just look at the, the makeup of companies, yes, those things are important. We need balance, we need representation. But that's not enough. This isn't about like, oh, you're a woman, you'll do, and you're a man. You must be patriarchal. This is about a shift in consciousness, right? This is a paradigm, and this is a new creativity in the way that we think about our world and the way what we're doing isn't working. I think it's quite clear to see we won't have much of a planet left if we continue in this way. And it's not a rubber stamping. It's not a question of just like the right parts make up the right thing. It's deeper work.

ANGELA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree with you there. And it is hard to kind of, when you understand the depth of the change that's needed, it can be very disorienting. You know, often when we talk about gender equality, we say, well, men and women should be treated the same and everything. You know, all laws should be in favor of everyone, and that is what equality is. Actually, it's much deeper than that. It is about when you consider that these patriarchal beliefs are woven into not just gendered laws or pay differences or anything like that, they're woven into our very systems of power: religion, capitalism, the way the state is organized, the fact the state itself exists, all of this, the idea that there should be elites or that there should be some people with more power than others or imbalances of all kinds—gender has become woven into that over time. And not just that, those systems of oppression have informed gender depression as well. It's gone in both directions, so we can't fix one and hope that everything else can stay intact. It can't work that way. You have to kind of reform everything, fix everything, and if I'm honest, and this is why I end the way I do in the book, I'm not entirely certain that everybody actually wants that. As much as we say we want equality, if you follow that thought experiment to the end, do we actually want that? Because it would mean changing everything, every single thing about how we live, and I'm not sure we are ready for that.

ELISE: Yeah, I think that people say that they want that within the context of, yes, I would like to be representative of the quality within this existing power structure or paradigm, we see this, right?

ANGELA: And we're getting that, we're moving towards that, but that's not going to fundamentally change everything.

ELISE: But part of it is an acceptance, which I think so much of your book is about that, this is where we are, because this is where we are, not because of any predestiny. And I feel like so much of what we see right now is lip service. Oh, you want, you want something different? We'll do equality, but that's not really how it's supposed to be. Right? We're going against nature somehow by instituting a different idea, and so this work is deep, but of just actually tapping back into that creativity that Wengrow and Greaber talk about like, we are here because we're here, but we can do a different story. We could, we could live in a different paradigm, it just requires an acknowledgement that that's what needs to happen.

ANGELA: Yeah. And, and maybe that tipping point is closer than we think. I don't know. I really don't know. Possibly.

ELISE: It feels that way. Yeah. It feels like we’re, and part of it feels like by pushing past binaries, a refusal, an understandable refusal by people to be classified in any way and acknowledgement of fluidity, it seems like it's just happening. There's just a groundswell of I will not abide, like I don't wanna live in this binary structure. And that it's more about the energy than it is about the identity. And which I think speaks to this isn't checking boxes. This is a reconceptualization of who we are and what we need in order to survive.

ANGELA: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I do think you've got, kind of got to the heart of it that part of how patriarchy was instituted or patriarchies were instituted was by introducing these very rigid gendered principles through classification and categorization. And when we push back against classification, and you do see that at the margins of society becoming more mainstream, that is the ultimate anti patriarchal act. That is saying, I refuse to live within the boundaries that you are, that you have set for me and I will live my way, which is exhilarating, really. When you see it happening. It's really exciting. It's not always happily accepted, but it is exciting.

ELISE: And it's happening, undeniably. Well, thank you as always for your work.

I'm here for any Angela Saini romp through science. I love her book Inferior, which is about the science of gender inequity. And she also wrote a book called Superior, which is about the way we have come to understand race and all of those incredibly insidious and terrible ideas, where the roots of those are in our "scientific" literature. She does really important work and, yes, I am very interested in patriarchy, but I think anyone would get so much out of her latest book, it's full of interesting stories insights from all sorts of cultures. Really she covers the span of the globe. I'll leave you now with how she closes the book, because we talked about it without talking about it, she says: "At the end of this journey, one that has taken me from deep time all the way to our turbulent present, I’m left wondering if the radical societies we create now could some day form the basis of tomorrows habits and customs. How can we rediscover our capacity to be socially nimble? We’ve developed an inertia when it comes to bold social and political change. We resign ourselves to systems and institutions we have, even when we know they are not working. Standing at the precipice, we look back and feel terrified at what we might lose, imagine everything we could gain.” I’ll see you next week.

Alexandra Brockman
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