The Patriarchs

Process

	Status	Items
Highlights	Done	See section below
Claims	None
Questions	None
Output	None

Highlights

Page 109

The story of humanity is one of constant movement. We can see that in patterns of migration, back and forth, transporting new ideas and technologies. But it’s also the story of people trying to get other people to do what they want.
The world’s earliest states, entities that these days feel reassuringly solid but once had to be built from scratch, were caught on the horns of this dilemma. The problem they had was convincing people to stay within their boundaries, to not wander off because they didn’t like the conditions…
Without a population, states had no power. And this made people the most valuable commodity of all.

✏️ Taking note of state building. Population is the first vital key and this affects how they look at women (nature’s population builder)
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Page 110

The problem of these early states was population,” Scott says. “How to collect that population under conditions of unfreedom, and how to hold them there and get them to produce the surplus that’s needed for the elites that run the state, the priestly caste, the artisans, and the aristocracy and royalty.” Population maintaining its size and controlling it is crucial to understanding the rise of inequality and patriarchal power.

✏️ This shows up throughout Stalinist soviet union (and any state where population growth declines).. They ban abortion, force women to breed more, and keep them at home as much as possible.
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Page 110

Usually, though, the focus has been on property. Friedrich Engels and other nineteenth-century philosophers thought that men established their power over women around the same time that humans started to take up agriculture. This was when people started accumulating land, cattle, and other things they could own. Elites and the upper castes began to take control of larger amounts of wealth. And it was this, Engels argued, that prompted men to look for ways to make sure their children were their own, so what they had would be passed down to legitimate heirs. This drove them to take control of women’s sexual freedom. According to this version of history, when men started doing agricultural labor, women’s work also became more confined to the home. And that was how separate gendered spheres of public and private life emerged.

✏️ Other than population control, land was the name of the game. That, and securing heirs to inherit said land and keep it in the family
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Page 111

These days, however, archaeologists and anthropologists don’t see agriculture as the sharp turning point for gender relations that Engels and others believed it to be. “I think the old idea that as soon as you get farming, you get property, and therefore you get control of women as property, I think that idea… is wrong, clearly wrong,” I’m told by the archaeologist Ian Hodder. “I think we have to accept that these societies were egalitarian and were relatively gender-blind for a long period after early agriculture.”
The switch to farming wasn’t a sudden leap but a long, gradual process of cultivation.

✏️ Contradicting the last two notes, some say things wouldn’t have happened so fast. There are plenty of examples around the world of women doing their shares of agricultural work (Egyptians, hittites, Persians, Indians, etc).
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Page 112

It’s difficult, then, to pin gender inequality firmly to the emergence of agriculture or property ownership. If there were changes in the balance of power between people in prehistory because of these factors, they must have been subtle, because they left no deafening trace in the archaeological record. Where we really can start to spot a shift in gender relations, the first shoots of overarching male authority, is with the rise of the first states.
The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organizing principle, when entire populations are categorized in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.
It’s when the category a person belongs to overrides the way society thinks about the individual.

✏️ The rise of the first states is potentially where we get the shift in gender relations.
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Page 114

one problem with this account: If there was more power to be had over time, why were men the ones to claim it? Was it only men who made the temple elites, military elites, monarchs, and chiefs from the beginning? Why didn’t women grab any power at any stage?
The easiest explanation might be that there was an incipient natural male dominance and female subservience in these societies that asserted itself more forcefully over generations. Lerner fell back on this reasoning to some extent, employing stereotypes of men as power hungry, physically stronger, and domineering, and women as naturally weaker, in need of protection.

✏️ So this is in reference to a scholar writing about male dominance over time in mesopotamia.. Falling into potential stereotypes and justifications that women naturally become subservient to men. The claim that women’s oppression is built into their nature somehow.
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Page 114

we know that powerful women did exist during that time. Lerner herself observed that upper-class women in ancient Mesopotamia enjoyed “positions of significant economic, legal, and judicial power.” Royal documents from one city north of Sumer showed that women owned were involved in business, and worked as scribes. Male kings were common property, in ancient Sumer, but there was at least one notable independent female king.
The third dynasty of Kish is listed as having been founded around by Kubaba, a woman who previously worked as a tavern keeper. Her position, 2500 BCE as far as we are aware, wasn’t the result of a relationship to a powerful man as a sister, wife, or a daughter. She ruled in her own right. And she was so successful that legend had it that she reigned for a century.
It’s clear that women were neither powerless nor uninterested in power.
Nor did they hesitate to turn to violence in defense of the causes they believed in. When researching her book Women Warriors, historian Pamela Toler set out to collect stories of women in battle. She recalls that “the main thing that struck me when I looked at women warriors across cultures rather than in isolation is how many examples there are and how lightly they sit on our collective awareness.” These women weren’t rare exceptions. Famous female military leaders have been recognized on almost every continent for thousands of years, from the first-century British queen Boudica to the seventh-century Chinese princess Pingyang. According to legend, the Hausa queen Amina of Zazzau, in what is now Nigeria, is said to have led armies to war for more than thirty years in the sixteenth century. The walls she built to protect her cities, some of which survive, are still named after her.
Equally importantly, women warriors don’t just come from the ranks of queens and princesses. Whenever ordinary women have been given the opportunity to fight in battle, they’ve taken it. Toler notes that in the twentieth century, thousands of women joined the revolutionary guerrilla armies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, “making up perhaps as much as 30 percent of these forces.” Starting in 2014, she adds, between seven thousand and ten thousand Kurdish women joined the battle against the Islamist radical group ISIS in the Middle East. Women have also gone to the lengths of disguising themselves as men to be able to fight alongside them. Among the most famous is Deborah Sampson, who fought in the American Revolution in the eighteenth century under the name Robert Shurtleff. Even after her identity was uncovered following an injury, she was given a full military pension in recognition of her heroism.

✏️ Following up on last highlight, here we have many, many examples of powerful women.
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Page 115

we look to the archaeological record to do something magical. We expect it to show us worlds in which every single person followed strictly defined social patterns and never deviated from them.
In this imagined world, everyone is easily classified. Every woman is incapable of fighting in battle or of being a ruler, and every man is born a warrior.
Each person in the past is extruded through the same narrow caricatures. We ourselves become guilty of blindly accepting the gender codes and hierarchies that those in power in the earliest states tried so hard to naturalize.
In 1998, the Assyriologist Julia Assante showed how easy it was for modernday researchers to build these caricatures when she questioned the translation of the Mesopotamian word harimtu, the plural of which is harimatu. Harimtu had been assumed by scholars from the nineteenth century onward to refer to a sacred prostitute who was attached to the temples. Experts at the time often claimed that every woman in antiquity fell into one of two categories, each based on her sexual availability to men. She was either a loyal, faithful daughter or wife, or she was a prostitute attached to no particular man. These barimatu, then, automatically fell into that second category. There was no evidence in Mesopotamian texts that any harimatu actually sold sex.

✏️ Discussing the narrow and strict lens we view the past through. We expect clear categories, despite that being contrary to real life. Truly though, people are seeing what they “desire” to see, which is women in their place, and men as all powerful. It’s confirmation bias all the way down.
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Page 116

When the literature is read more objectively, without the baggage of assumption, the harimatu sound more like single, independent women, explains Budin. “They don’t have a father; they don’t have a husband. They are basically free to do as they want.” These are women who happen to live free of society’s patriarchal bonds. She notes that women in this period also worked as tavern owners, doctors, cooks, and entertainers. Letters sent by women weavers to their menfolk at an Assyrian trading colony in eastern Turkey from around 1900 BCE show one admonishing her husband for not getting her the full price for the textiles she had shipped out to him.
There should be no shame in sex work. Equally, though, it strains plausibility that every woman who left her home to support herself or her family in ancient Mesopotamia or at any other time was a sex worker. It is “as if there were no space for women to inhabit in between the well-todo citizen wife and the woman who sells sex for financial support,” writes the classicist Rebecca Futo Kennedy

✏️ The reality is always less extreme. These women were likely just independent women, loving their lives perfectly fine. Which flies in the face of male sensibilities as well as their preferred view of how the past was, which would confirm the whole “women in their place” desire.
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Page 117

What’s odd is how hard so many scholars even today try to dismiss evidence of working, independent women or powerful women rulers and warriors in the ancient record. It is almost as though history doesn’t make sense to them unless women are powerless and invisible.

✏️ A topic and statement all on its own. potentialpiece
Think about where the burden of proof lies whenever they find stuff. If a man is buried with a royal seal, it’s accepted as common sense, but if a woman has one, it must be that it belongs to her husband. It’s not common sense for her to be a king or leader, so you have to prove it instead.
👓 hypocrisy gender
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Page 118

what else could explain the changing pattern of gender relations in a region like ancient Mesopotamia? One answer might be that power was sweepingly taken away from all women and that categorization by the state was the tool by which women were both classed and systematically disenfranchised. By gradually introducing broad rules and laws, an entire group of people in all their individual complexity could be effectively pushed to the margins and suppressed. We have plenty of historical parallels for this, in the practice of racial segregation in the American South, in India’s caste system, and in the aristocracies of Europe. Gendered rules not only forced people into narrow social roles to better serve the state; they could also allow elite men to grab power, rights, and property from the women with whom these things were previously shared.
Gender is the foundation of patriarchy, according to the psychologist Carol Gilligan and the psychoanalyst Naomi Snider. Categorizing is an exercise in stereotyping. It irons out differences, defining people by their few shared qualities, or by how they might be useful. Dividing people into groups in this way, even when it’s arbitrary, pushes us to look for differences between them. And this is what makes it such a powerful psychological tool. Divisions can quickly become laden with social significance.

✏️ The power of categorization and division in establishing gender relations, for the sake of the state
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Page 123

They’re almost echoing Aristotle, implying that Sparta was more foreign. But of course, it was only ever foreign from an Athenian point of view. To the rest of the world, Athens must have looked equally unusual. “We kind of think of the Athenian way of doing things as normal, and because they cast the Spartans as the polar opposite of them, that creates the impression that Spartan women are totally abnormal,” explains Bayliss. In truth, he says, “Athens is probably an extreme and Sparta an extreme at the other end.”

✏️ Sparta, with its focus on women, threatened the sensibilities of Athens, a place where they always felt unstable about their gender relations.. Fearful it could topple at any time, and enforced it every chance they got.
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Page 129

The state couldn’t function without its suffocatingly narrow set of social rules, ensuring that citizens behaved in a way that maintained the population, its productivity, and the dominance of the elites.

✏️ What drives a state.. What if focuses on usually
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Page 137

“how worldwide this seems to be.” An expert on captive taking in prehistory, she explains that slaves and those captured in war were a fixture of everyday life in the past. For a few ancient states, their very socioeconomic survival depended on it. Forced labor formed the backbone needed to sustain large cities and wage battle, to help religious and cultural institutions grow.
Cameron estimates that captives may have made up to a third of the population of ancient Greece for a while, 10 to 20 percent of Roman Italy, 15 to 20 percent of many early Islamic states, and as much as 50 to 70 percent of Korea before the seventeenth century. In Scandinavia, a twelfth-century farm may have had typically three slaves, she writes. According to the Domesday Book, which surveyed the population of some of England’s settlements in 1086, the proportion of slaves in the country may have been around 10 percent. The first United States census, in 1790, showed that for every one hundred free white people in the southern states, there were fifty-three people who were enslaved.
The historian Adam Hochschild has suggested that by the end of the eighteenth century more than three-quarters of the world’s population may have been living under some form of human bondage, including indentured labor, serfdom, and slavery. Until fairly recently in human history, then, most people weren’t “free” in the modern sense of the word. They took as given that their existence depended on others who had direct control over them, whether it was a feudal lord or master, a pharaoh, or a monarch.

✏️ Population is what makes a state (as we said with last highlight).. So Power came not just in getting land, but getting people.
The last sentence of this highlight implies most people are free now.. But we traded the yoke of lords and Pharoahs for that of capitalism. We’re not free now.
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Page 149

The rise of the patrilineal family as involving the “subversion of kinship relationships,” wresting women from the socioeconomic and religious solidarity of their own clans. Isolating brides within patrilocal families undermines the potential for sisterhood in every sense of the word. While brothers stay together in the same communities, sisters are sent off separately to marry, dropped into uncertain futures. If male-dominated institutions have grown as much as they have in more patriarchal societies, part of the reason must be that it’s easier for men who are related to each other to foster trust and work together, to consolidate their power in fraternal solidarity. For wives isolated from everyone they’ve known since childhood, that kind of solidarity is impossible.

✏️ The act of isolating women thru marriage, forcing her to move to the husband’s community, ensures that women can never form solidarity. Men stay with family and brothers, enabling more trust and consolidation/domination of power among only men
All that the woman has is the bond of slave to her master.
Men have a self, while women are self-less.
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Page 154

Everyone had work. Prices of goods were set by the state, not by mar kets, so life was affordable. But since Western imports were rare, this meant there weren’t always enough of the things people wanted. Supply chains were unreliable. Occasionally, if there was overproduction, there would be a sudden glut of particular products. Writing about her experiences under communism, the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić recalls “the shortages, the distinctive odors, the shabby clothing.” A grown man, writes Drakulić, ate his first banana with the skin on because he didn’t know he was supposed to peel it. That lack of bananas became a popular metaphor for everyday life in the Soviet Union, an existence in which otherwise ordinary goods had the potential to turn into luxuries.
But the worst of communism, as we know, weren’t the shortages. Under the Russian leader Joseph Stalin, life in the Soviet Union was bloody and brutal, a seemingly endless string of purges, executions, rapes, and restrictions. Millions were sent to labor camps. To keep the system intact, there was widespread surveillance, next to no freedom of movement, no space for political dissent. Such was the horror that fascism and communism are today spoken about in the same breath.

✏️ Just capturing the negatives of soviet communism, and Stalin’s fascist take on it all
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Page 157

“In all civilized countries, even the most advanced, women are actually no more than domestic slaves. Women do not enjoy full equality in any capitalist state, not even in the freest of republics,” Vladimir Lenin had declared at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women in 1918, having become head of the Soviet state after the revolution the year before. He would later write about how, for the married woman, “petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery.” Like Engels before him, he saw the struggle against oppression to be inside the home as well as outside it.
“One of the primary tasks of the Soviet Republic,” Lenin announced, “is to abolish all restrictions on women’s rights.”
And that’s precisely what it began to do. One of the first political changes that the communist leadership introduced when it took power in Russia was to put women on an equal legal footing with men, notes the British historian and political scientist Archie Brown. In 1917, all women were given the right to vote, a year before any women in Britain, and three years before any in the United States, Civil marriage replaced religious marriage. Divorce was made easier and cheaper. In 1920, Soviet Russia became the first country in the world to legalize abortion.

✏️ Cool quote from Lenin. Also capturing the hope of early communism and soviet union, quickly adopting full liberation of women.
It doesn’t last, but it’s an amazing start, and shows that change can happen in an instant.
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Page 161

But the end of the war saw a backlash against the working woman. The state needed families to have more children and for the men who had come back after fighting to have jobs to go to. The male breadwinner earning enough to keep a suburban housewife in comfort was now being promoted as the aspirational ideal, centuries after the Founding Fathers had first nurtured it as a cornerstone of American democracy. People were marrying at higher rates in the 1950s than in the years immediately before or after the war. A Gallup poll carried out in 1957, writes Faderman, found that 80 percent of Americans agreed that “a woman who chose not to marry was sick, neurotic, or immoral.” Women’s fashion designers, she adds, began emphasizing small waists and big hips and breasts. Magazines and books advised women on how to become better prospective wives and warned about the potential downsides for the children of working mothers

✏️ I’m capturing this because it shows the different methods states influence their people. In a soviet state, or authoritarian ones, they simply told people how things were now. In the US, the power of the media and organizations and religion and advertising went into full propaganda mode to showcase the new values.
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Page 163

The way Hungary achieved such rapid progress in gender equality, Fodor shows, was through a combination of legislation, propaganda, quotas, generous maternity leave, kindergartens and nurseries that were often located inside factories and workplaces, and social and health incentives tied to work, such as sick child leave and hot subsidized meals. Hungarian socialist state institutions played an important role in “reshaping, reducing, and redefining gender inequalities not only in the short but also in the long term,” she writes. “Neither market forces, a higher degree of economic development, nor a more autonomous feminist movement achieved significant gender equality in Austria.”
If the two countries were seen as cultural laboratories, it’s clear which one delivered faster change: the socialist state that took the lead in introducing bold reforms.

✏️ Looking at the Hungary vs Austria question, we see what the confluence of socialist actions achieved vs the capitalist ones.
Hungary achieved gender parity by 70s, while Austria did so only by end of the century.
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Page 169

The problem for both the East and the West was that women on each side were being forced to subscribe to a particular brand of womanhood, neither regime taking the time to find out what individual women wanted for themselves. While stereotypes of masculinity stayed intact (and largely the same) on both sides of the Iron Curtain, femininity became a battleground.
Each side paraded their version as a sign of their own political superiority. In the Soviet Union, women were portrayed in official propaganda as round and rosy heroines riding tractors into the sunset, the historian Sheila Rowbotham has written. In popular culture in the West, meanwhile, Soviet women were caricatured as being devoid of womanliness, sometimes even sinister. They were “sitting behind desks in uniforms and judging men mercilessly.”
Éva Fodor, like most scholars of the Soviet Union, is cautious of overstating communism’s record on gender. Despite the stereotype of the strong, dominant Soviet woman, widespread misogyny persisted. Male leaders were suspicious of women banding together to demand rights separately from the socialist struggle

✏️ Tempering the idealizing of women in society union.. Each party tried to use women as a form of propaganda, never considering what individual women actually wanted. They had gender parity in soviet union, but they couldn’t be themselves.
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Page 170

Even so, the state neglected the division of labor inside people’s homes for fear of alienating its social base-working men. “East German women came to rate employment as integral to their sense of self,” writes Donna Harsch, a historian of twentieth-century Germany, in The Revenge of the Domestic, her book on women under state socialism. But nearly all Communist Party leaders were men, and “they benefited from the conventional, gendered division of domestic labor.” Their commitment to making domestic work more equitable sometimes turned out to be little more than lip service. East Germany’s Family Law Book of 1965 encouraged partners to take mutual responsibility for the household. But this rarely happened.
“The typical husband did not alter private habits to accommodate an employed wife,” writes Harsch. There was an insistence that women and men be treated the same in their jobs outside the home. Inside the home, though, socialist leaders gently fell back on the belief that domestic gender roles were determined by biology. The socialist dream had been realized only part of the way.
The patriarchy could have been smashed. Instead, it was only dented.

✏️ Socialism did a lot for women, but it didn’t go all the way. It held back when it came to domestic work in the home, forcing women to bear a double burden.
Why didn’t they work on this more?
We get to what I think is a contributing factor of the overall failure of the socialist experiment (and potential reason for its authoritarian twist).. Nearly all leaders in the Communist Parties were men. followup
They benefited from giving women more work opportunities, but they also benefited from them working at home.. They weren’t about to change that nor hurt their social base of working men.
One has to wonder what things would look like if there were more women on equal footing in the leadership.
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Page 184

Under his drive to mod ernize the country, the shah had eventually given women the right to vote, allowed a few to serve as ministers and judges, and legalized abortion. But this wasn’t purely out of a commitment to women’s emancipation. His actions were designed to take the wind out of the political left and “present the possibility of social reform through a secular and authoritarian government.”
He wouldn’t tolerate any kind of grassroots activity, explains Afary, whether around labor rights or women’s issues. Socialist groups had been banned long before the revolution began. Campaigners such as Farrokhroo Parsa, who was made a minister, were brought into government rather than being left to agitate outside of it.

✏️ Sounds familiar, and a overall effective method to stave off opposition
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Page 185

This was the problem with Iranian reforms in the twentieth century. As everyone knew, under the ruling monarchy, women’s rights would always be precarious because they were ultimately the gift of the shah, rather than the product of a society that was fairly and equally organized at its heart. The shah may have felt pressure from people around him to change the system, including from the women in his own family, but all power rested with him in the end. Women’s emancipation would only ever come at his Farrokhroo Parsa may have worked with the shah’s regime to achieve practical change, but that change was always limited to what the shah would tolerate.
He was still the nation’s patriarch.

✏️ More about the previous highlight.
Key sentence is how those rights were ultimately the gift of the shah rather than the product of a just society. followup
👓 ksa
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Page 190

As the Sri Lankan feminist scholar Kumari Jayawardena has written, women “still had to act as the guardians of national culture, indigenous religion and family traditions in other words, to be both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional.”

✏️ Men could modernize all they want, but women had to keep traditions alive.
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Page 196

Ancient texts proved that women had enjoyed power and freedom. They included evidence, she argued, of a panorama of sexual rights women enjoyed in the past. There were unions in which children didn’t belong to their biological fathers, and in which women could have more than one regular sexual partner. There were wives who were free to send away husbands they no longer wanted with simple ritual gestures. There were matrilineal marriages in which husbands stayed with their wives’ tribes.
The anthropologist Andrey Korotayev, based at Moscow State University, confirmed in 1995 that there is evidence of matrilineal lineages in third-century southern Arabia. Texts exist in which the only listed family relatives of men are their brothers, and all the recorded descendants are of the women only. There’s evidence, too, that women in these communities shared leadership with men.

✏️ Potential alternate look of how women had power in ancient Arabia
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Page 204

Patriarchy as a single phenomenon doesn’t really exist, then. There are instead, more accurately, many patriarchies formed by threads subtly woven through different cultures in their own way, working with local structures and existing systems of inequality. States institutionalized human categorization and gendered laws; slavery influenced patrilocal marriage; empires exported gendered oppression to nearly every corner of the globe; capitalism exacerbated gender disparities; and religions and traditions are still being manipulated to give psychological force to the notion of male domination. Fresh threads are being woven into our social fabrics even now.

✏️ Patriarchy isn’t one thing, but many.. Formed in different ways based on the cultures and people in power in each location.
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Page 207

Some still claim that oppression is somehow woven into who we are, that humans are inherently selfish and violent, that entire categories of people are naturally dominant or subordinate. I have to ask: Would we care about each other so much if that were true?

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