Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Origins of the Patriarchy

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Whose idea was the patriarchy? How long has it been a part of our lives? And how do we even define it?For something that's so prevalent in most of our lives, it can sometimes feel like there's an inevitability to it.However, there are so many examples of alternatives, and surprising reasons to its origins.Exploring all of this with Kate today is Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came To Rule.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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and you should be an adult too. I'm very pleased that we could get that little lot out of the way. But before we can go on with the show, we have to press, pause, just take a moment because I have a favour to ask of you, oh, you glorious, glorious betwixta you. If you could possibly take seconds out of your busy day to vote for us for the Listeners Choice Awards at this year's podcast awards, that would just make me so unbelievably happy. It really would. It would give me a very warm, fuzzy feeling inside. And you can do that at www.w.british podcast awards forward slash voting and then searching for betwixt the sheets. And if you've already voted for us,

then you get a gold star, you are in my good books. And if you haven't, then you are letting the side down. And I think that, frankly, you should just press pause on this podcast right now and go and do it. Go and do it right now. For the rest of you, let's do this. Come and grab a sneaky seat at the back of this church with me, the Twixters. I'm crashing this wedding to make an important point about patriarchy. And possibly to steal some champagne, of course, but mostly the patriarchy.

We all participate in a patriarchal system. which is a system of oppression based on gender in millions and millions of little ways. Even if we're trying not to, we're all doing it all of the time. Case in point, there is a father giving away the bride to the groom. The bride is going to take on the groom's name. She's going to be renamed. All of these, and while many people view them are terribly romantic and fair play to them, but they are all small acts which are rooted in the oppression of women.

women. You are being given away and you are being renamed. You get a lovely dress, but that is what is happening. And in today's episode, we are talking about the system of patriarchy itself. How did we get here? All of those, men and women. And what is the future of patriarchy? Will we ever be able to shake free of it? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness, has nothing to do with it, Dary. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. It's one of those words that is bandied around a lot. You see it all over the place. Patriarchy, patriarchy, patriarchy. But what does it even mean? What are its origins? And are there any examples of societies that are not patriarchal. What do they look like? Join me today is the marvellous Angela Saney, author of The Patriarchs, How Men Came to Rule, to Help Us Make Sense of and Rise Above This Age Old System. I am ready to do this if you are. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's

only Angela Sainey. How are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you today. You are the author of the book. Let me get the title, write, the Patriarchs, How Men Came to Rule slash Origins of Iniquity. My first question to you about the patriarchy, whose fucking idea was this then? Because this is shite. I would love it to be a nice, simple answer. And I think a lot of... It was Dave. Yeah, it was just Dave. There have been so many people right throughout history who have tried to look for a very simple answer. Scientists, historians, historians.

archaeologists, and actually like with any other system of social oppression or social inequality, it's much more complicated than that. And it's really a kind of confluence of things, really, different factors, partly to do with how communities organize themselves in terms of marriage, partly also the rise of the state, and I think that's a really important aspect of it, but also how ideas about inequality are exported to different parts of the world. So it's not the case that there was, patriarchy was invented at one time and then the whole world just adopted this system. It's been very gradual. And it's still happening. You know, it's still the case now that people are reinventing it and reasserting it in the present. I suppose we should start with a much more sensible question than my opening one.

What is patriarchy? We hear that word all of the time, hashtag patriarchy. What is it? Again, this is quite complex because I think the way that we use it today, feminists, it's quite abstract. So often you will say something like smash the patriarchy, but what does that really mean in tangible terms? It can be anything from demanding more pay from your boss to campaigning against domestic violence, to changing the laws in your countries so that they're more gender equal. it can mean so many different things.

And I think always there is this kind of niggling feeling that it's almost conspiratorial. So however much we try to chip away at the patriarchy, there'll always be a little bit left at the end or that that conspiracy will bear down on you. And actually, I think it's less of a conspiracy. I think it's more like a grift in the same way that other systems of inequality like class oppression or racial oppression are grifts. They're basically telling groups of people that you are not as good as us and you have to live differently and we will live a better life than you. That is what gender inequality is.

It's telling women, men telling women, we will live a better life than you. But even within that it's much more complicated because often, and I think that's why I pick the title that I did, it's not about patriarchy so much as these elite men right at the top of society, the patriarchs, who have a huge control on our lives. regardless of our gender. So they also make life very difficult for most men. I suppose in its loosest possible sense, we could say that patriarchy is a system that disadvantages one gender over the other. Is that maybe that's too broad? Yeah, it is quite broad. And the problem with that is it assumes that one gender is completely benefiting from it. And they're not. You know, patriarchal power does incredible damage to men as well, to most men. It's only really a small sliver of people at the top who really benefit from this.

I'm going to tie myself up in knots now attempting to define what I think I mean by patriarchy. But given that it's clearly quite a slippery and elusive term, and as you've already said, it's actually very difficult to try and pinpoint where it came about in history. How did you go about writing a book about the history of patriarchy? That must be so difficult. It is. But it's not really the history of patriarchy. it's the story of the origins. And that origin story then, I could quite easily start with attempts to describe those origins before.

And that's really where I began, was looking at, especially in the 19th century, where this became a really big question. In the middle of the 19th century, there were philosophers and ethnologists and anthropologists who were looking at the world and asking, well, how did inequality come about? until then it'd been quite common, at least in Europe or in the West, to assume that things had always been this way, that this was just the natural way of things, that social inequality was just how the world had been designed. And there were also very religious ideas about women being naturally subordinate to men, for instance. But because of the big revolutions that were

happening, for example, in France and the establishment of the United States on these very egalitarian principles and pushbacks against colonialism, which were starting, you know, in the late 19th century, people were questioning these things and asking, well, actually, maybe they're not natural, maybe they're historical. And if they are historical, then there must be a story there to tell. And so there were lots of different explanations for how this might have come about. You still see that today, actually, quite a lot of it, is the assumption that patriarchy, however we want to define that, these systems of inequality, is. natural. You still see that, that it's, that women are naturally supposed to be more maternal

and more empathetic and men are supposed to be hunter-gatherers. You still see that in force today. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very widespread view that there are these kind of essential differences that make us who we are and that provide the kernel for how we live. And actually, when you look at the history, gender depression is, you know, a relatively recent invention in human history. If you take the whole sweep, you know, of hundreds of thousands of years, it's only really within the last few thousand years that you see gender depression in the historical record. Before that, you really don't. So one of the earliest places I went to when I was writing the book was Chattelhoeuk, which is this really famous Neolithic site in southern Anatolia. So this is in Turkey near the border with Syria.

And, you know, when it was excavated in the 1960s, it was described as the oldest city in the world. because it did feel that way. It was occupied 9,000 years ago. So just to get your head around, what kind of time span that is, that is thousands of years before Stonehenge, before the first pyramids in Egypt. It predates writing. It is so much older than pretty much any other ancient site

any of us have ever been to. And here is a site in which gender doesn't seem to have mattered very much. All the archaeological evidence points towards women, in pretty much living the same lives as men. There aren't even really any significant differences in how people worked, you know, how much time they spent indoors or outdoors, what they ate, how they were buried. Every measure of gender inequality that we can get from archaeological data tells us that gender just didn't matter very much in Chattelhoeuk. What is the available data? What are people looking to, from the excavations of that site, to look at gender roles at that time?

Well, it's tricky because, of course, this predates writing, so we can't know how people thought. And all we have is representation. There are a lot of female figurines from that period of time. Oh, the little Venus figures. Yeah, there's the Venus-type figurines. I mean, the famous one from Chattelhoeuk is a seated woman of Chattelhoeuk, which shows what looks to be a kind of older woman, possibly who's gone through childbirth. She has these kind of rolls of fat spilling out around her, these beautiful rolls of skin.

And she's sitting completely upright, hands outstretched, looking very matriarchal, very authoritative. But of course, you know, you can read a million different things into that. We don't know what that object was for or what it was intended to depict whether this was a real person or a goddess. Some people called her a goddess. But from human remains and how people were buried, you can tell a lot about gender relations in a community. So you can tell, for instance, the kind of work that. people did. Lower status people in a society will do different kinds of work and often harder work. And you don't see that. Men and women were doing the same kind of work. They were spending the same

amount of time indoors and outdoors and we can measure that through soot remains on the inside of their lungs, inside of their bodies because they had internal hearts. So they had hearts within their homes. Burial patterns are very important because this was definitely a society that cared about its ancestors and how they were buried, and men and women were buried in pretty much the same ways, pretty much everything that we have. And it's not just that. Also, a lot more evidence has come up from other sites around that same period showing that women were hunting, big game. You know, they were warriors. We have loads of warrior burials and hunter burials that we know now from analysis of females. So this idea that there was this,

rigid sexual division of labor, kind of like the flintstones, you know, that Fred was going out and hunting and Wilma was inside the cave looking after the children. That just doesn't match up with the evidence that we have from that period of time. It really doesn't, not at all. I know we need to be very careful before we look to other species to go, well, and then compare ourselves to it. But if we look at something like primates, is there evidence of patriarchy? or what we might recognize as patriarchy in those societies? Are these groups of animals like, well, the women have to stay at home and just do nice things and do some embroidery? I wish.

If it was that clear, then, you know, my job would have been on an easy word. No, you don't see that. I mean, if we take patriarchy literally, patriarchy means rule of the father, patriarchy, then you really don't see that in my. most other animals. It's very unusual for kin relationships and other species to be organized through fathers. Usually kin relationships, so parent-child relationships are organized through the mothers. And that makes sense because it's very difficult for most other primates to know who the father is sometimes. Unless they're pair bonded, it's very difficult for them to know. But you do have male domination. You have female domination as well in certain primates. So if we just

take the two closest species to us genetically. Chimpanzees and bonobos, they're both a type of ape. And very, I mean, if you've ever seen them in a zoo, it is uncanny how similar to us they seem. You know, they're mannerisms, the way they carry themselves, the way they relate to each other. It's really, it just reminds you that Darwin was right when you see primates in captivity. But chimpanzees are male-dominated. Bonobos are female-dominated. So one species is matriarchal, the others, well, we can't really say matriacal, patriarchal, but, you know, male-dominated and female-dominated. And it's nothing to do with size.

In both species, the male is slightly larger than a female. The difference with bonobos, and there are many differences, actually. Socially, they are very different. But one of the main ones is that female bonobos form very strong bonds, relationships with other females who aren't kin, which is quite unusual for creatures to do that. And that means it's impossible for the male to move up the hierarchy in Bonobo society. The older female is in charge. And I've seen for myself, I mean, when I went to see Bonobos in captivity in San Diego Zoo,

I just got there when an older female had just attacked a younger male so viciously that he looks scared. He was kind of cowering on one side. Wow. I think that when it comes to animals, humans, we do project a lot onto them. I'll give you an example. Lions. There's this whole thing about how like there's the lion who is the head of his own pride and he has got himself a little Harim of lions.

And we looked at the Lion King and all that stuff. But when you actually think about it, is it that there is a lion who's in charge of all these women? Or is it that a group of women picked a male and went, yeah, you'll do for now? It could be that. And lions, you know, female lions hunt. Yeah. They're very powerful with her species.

I do think we anthropomorphize other species, and that has been a real problem for this question of the origins of patriarchy, because for a long time, you know, researchers, primatologists looked at chimpanzees and just thought, oh, well, we are like chimpanzees. They're male-dominated and we're male-dominated. This must be how it's always been. And when bonobos came along and it became clear, increasingly clear, that they were female dominated, that was a shock to some primatologists. They couldn't accept it.

Because the idea of females being in charge would just run so counter to the way that they imagined, not just the natural world, but also how they imagined themselves. So there has been a lot of correction that's happened, not just in terms of how we think about animal behavior, but also having to revisit animal behavior in the light of what we now understand about ourselves. So let's think about the history of when patriarchy is. the power of the fathers get going. What would you say as some of the earliest origins of this? It wasn't started by Dave on a Tuesday and it just really caught on. But if you were going to look

throughout our history and try and pinpoint significant eras cultures points, what would you go for as this was a significant start for us? Well, there was this book that was written around 40 years ago by an historian called Gerda Lerner and she's passed away since then. But It's a very powerful book looking at ancient Mesopotamia and how women in that society over the course of thousands of years became less and less visible. So they started off doing everything, including being in charge and running societies, to just disappearing from the historical record. And learner's argument was that, you know, this was where you could see the emergence of patriarchy. And we've learned a lot more since then. In that 40 years, we have so much more evidence now from archaeology, from different sites, from gender scholarship, but also from genetic evidence.

We have this new tool now that allows us to analyze the DNA of very ancient specimens. So we can look at where people lived, how they were related to each other, how they're related to modern day people. What all that evidence tells us is that the rise of the state was, a kind of critical turning point. It wasn't agriculture, and you know, often we think it was agriculture because in the 19th century this was given as an explanation. But we have agriculture or, you know, plant and animal domestication for a really long time, for thousands of years before we see any sign of gender depression in the historical record.

So just going with the data that we have, not what we assume must be there, but just what we have, that tells us that the rise of the state was a really big, important change in terms of gender relations. And it was top down. It had to be. So the argument I make is that if you think about what do the people who are creating those early states, what is their primary preoccupation? What do they care about most? And it's hard to imagine because, you know, we take the state for granted now. It feels almost natural. You're born into a state. You become a citizen.

You're part of it. You have your passport. But this was a time when states didn't exist. You could live any way you wanted. You could be a hunter-gatherer. You could be a nomad. You could live wherever you wanted. There were no borders or anything.

You didn't have to belong to a state. You didn't have to live in one. So the biggest concern for those elites was population. You know, how do we get people to live in our state, stay here, produce a surplus for us, people at the top. and defend the state if we need them to defend the state. Obviously, that's going to be your number one concern. And to this day, population is the measure by which we decide the size of a state.

It's not territory. It's population, right? That's how we decide how important a country is. And that naturally then, in those early days, early thousands of years, put pressure on families because the family is the unit of population, the basic unit. This is making more people for you. So you see over time pressure fall on the family to have as many children as possible. And of course, this translates into pressure on young women to give birth much more frequently,

to get married and have as many children as possible. And on young men, because they're not the ones giving birth, to fight and defend the state. So you can see where those kind of twin-gendered ideas about masculinity, and femininity first take root. That first of all, women are doing everything. We can see that in the historical record. Everybody is doing everything. Gender is not much of an issue.

Everyone is hunting. Everyone is gathering. Everyone is farming. Everyone is looking after the kids doing everything. But then the state imposes these very rigid ideas about your role in society, how you serve the state. And for young women, that is associated with motherhood. And for young men, that is associated.

with fighting and defense. I'll be back with Angela after the short break. How did these ideas spread? I mean, even if you could make the case that somewhere like Mesopotamia or sort of areas like that is that we start to see the roots of patriarchy, how does it spread? How does nobody go, this is a shit idea? I don't want to do this.

Maybe they do. They do. I mean, there has been inequality in societies predating patriarchy. There's been social inequality. Captive taking is a feature of most human society. all over the world, slavery, you know, this idea that you can create a group of people who you will subjugate and treat differently. And people have always resisted it. But I think one of the mechanisms that kept patriarchy alive was the social practice of patrilocality. So as humans, we know

it's not a good idea to marry people within your own tight community or within your family. We instinctively understand that. And so most societies practice some form of exogenous marriage where either the men leave or the women leave or depending on the family, then one or the other will leave. In patrilocal societies and patrilineal societies, you see generally women leaving their families to go and live with their husbands' families. And this is still very widespread in many parts of the world, for example, in the Middle East, in Asia and parts of Africa, you still see that. And also it survives in marriage traditions in the West too, this idea of your father giving you away. That is the act of you, you know,

leaving your family to go and live with somebody else. So what patrilocality does is it creates vulnerability in that woman who is leaving because you are not with the people who you've grown up with who will put your interest first. You are now with a group of strangers who don't really put you first. They don't need to put you first. They've got each other. And so it's very difficult then for women in those situations to fight back, to resist, because there is no one there to support them. And that's really where power lies. Power is not just in physical strength. In fact, most forms of power in the world are not exercised through physical power.

It's through these networks. Who can you call on? What kind of support you have? You know, how protected are you because of the people around you? And if you have none of that protection, you're obviously immediately vulnerable. Absolutely. We're trying to dismantle the idea here that patriarchy is natural and unavoidable and that it's just the way that things are and that now we are undoing something that always was. Is there evidence around us today of what we might call matrilineal societies where women are in charge?

Absolutely. I mean, there are still lots of matrilineal societies around the world. And also, you know, to some degree, as we have become more gender, equal as states, we've seen a move away from those patriarchal patterns of living. So generally, in Western societies, you see more nuclear families where no one is living with their husband's family, or fewer people are living with their husband's family, or their wife's family, for that matter. But that doesn't mean the kind of vestiges of power dynamics within a family have changed. There is still this lingering idea that the father is ahead of. the family, you know, which is definitely a part of that old system of thinking. But in terms

of matrilineal societies, yeah, anthropologists have documented at least 160 all over the world. There's an entire matrilineal belt across Africa. There are many dotted across Asia, North America. These are examples of societies in which patrilocality and patrilineality are not practiced. So women stay in their mother's home. In fact, everyone stays in their mother's home. throughout their lives, and power and authority is generally shared between men and women in these societies. I read that when you find matrilineical societies today, one thing that they often have in common is that inheritance, if it exists, doesn't go down the patrilinical line.

Is that true? Does that make a difference when it's things like handing along your name or, you know, your children inheriting your money? Yeah, it does make a difference in terms of how. women and girls are seen in a society. So for example, in Magalia, in northeast India, you can see the Inkasi society, which is a very long-standing matrilineal society. Because property is passed down to daughters, people really get excited when a daughter is born, which is not true in other parts of India and also in China. Sex-selective abortion has been so widespread, and feticide has

been so widespread in parts of Asia that there are skewed gender ratios. And yet in this matrilineal society, in Magalia, it's exactly the opposite that people want to have a daughter because then they know that their property will be passed onto someone, that their land will be passed on to someone. And name also, name goes through the mother's side rather than the father's side. And there have even been attempts by some of the men, and not all of the men, many of the men want to maintain these traditions, but some men have pushed back and said, well, we want to inherit property too. And there's this men's rights movement in Carce's and sons. What about something like Native American culture? Do we have evidence there of, I don't know if

it's matriline. It's difficult to define matrilineical and all the things that I've been reading about it. It's not that women are in charge. It's just that men aren't. If that's really difficult to imagine. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it actually. It is like that. You can't say that they're patriarchal, but it's also not the case that men don't have any power in these societies. It's usually that power is shared in some way between, usually in many matrilineal societies, it's the mother's brother. So the eldest woman, her brother, will be kind of the authority, the other authority in the household. In some Native American societies, so for example, among the Haudenoshonee in New York State and beyond, you get. clan mothers who are these very important women who help run government at the local level

and they help to appoint the chiefs, male chiefs, but then they also have the power to ask the chiefs if they want to. So that power lies in their hands. And that has been true for many hundreds of years. In fact, when European settlers first came to the Americas and encountered the Hauden Ashorni, sometimes referred to as Iroquois, they were so inspired by their way of living. It just seems so egalitarian to them. And remember that the United States, at its inception, the founding fathers were trying to create an egalitarian society. And they thought they were doing it for the first time. It was such a shock to them to see that actually there were more egalitarian societies already in existence in the Americas.

That's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, when you're looking at something like the 19th century and you're looking at Europe in particular and what was going on there, evidence of the patriarchy, however you want to define, it seems pretty obvious. You can find texts of scientists going, well, women are smaller, therefore they are by nature inferior. And you get the shift from a religious doctrine, which is like actually, no, God made men and women like this. And this pseudoscience comes into the fray of they're trying to justify it on scientific grounds. And that, to my mind, seems much harder to shift. It is, but it's all related.

I mean, this was the topic of my 2017 book Inferior, was just looking at how much scientists are actually influenced by the politics and the social norms of the world around them. It wasn't the case that they were independently deciding for themselves that women were inferior and that just happened to coincide with what the religious patriarchs were saying. It was that they were also religious themselves and they had grown up in a world in which women didn't have the vote,

they didn't have the right to their own children if they left that. husbands. They didn't have the right to property, married women. In every single possible way, the laws of Europe treated women as the property of their husbands, first of their fathers and then of their husbands. So they were operating within that framework. And they just assumed that these differences would be biological, you know, that you would be able to find an explanation for them inside people's bodies, that women's brains were smaller, so they must be less intelligent or that they're just naturally more frail and weak that they can't do what men do. You know, it's stood a reason for them that it would be that way. And so through that really perverse

mechanism, you get everything reinforcing each other. Society is telling scientists, one thing, scientists go back and say, oh yeah, maybe we can come up with theories that prove that, and then society looks at that and thinks, oh, it must be true then, and that cycle just continues. You see that all throughout history, actually. And when you've got distance from it, like when in 24, we're looking back at the 19th century and looking at what is being written by scientists. It's so obvious that this is nonsense. And what's informing it is social theory and social construction rather than evidence. But to them, this made perfect sense. And what I find fascinating is how do we know that we're not in that trap right now? Oh, we are. We are. For your money,

we are. Yeah, we have to be. We have to be because it's not as though we live in a perfectly equal enlightened society now. And whichever age people are in, they always assume that they know best, you know, that they've transcended the prejudices of the past. But we only have to look around to know that that's not true. We haven't done that. So why would we assume that scientists have necessarily done that? I still read, and I still interview scientists who very firmly believe that there are profound differences, psychological differences between men and women that can explain the world in some way or gender inequality in some way. And the same with race. There are still academics out there who very firmly believe that there are intelligence differences between races,

that biological race is meaningful in some way. I see that being done a lot with evolutionary biology as well, which is, you know, ancient, the oldest history that we've got, but I often see that being bandied around as proof of the differences between men and women. And as soon as somebody says the words to me. But when we were cavemen, I've just, oh, no, no, unless it's actually a biologist or an anthropologist, because I know what's come in and it's going to be this, well, men are hunter gatherers and men need to spread their seed wide and women need to stay at home looking at the babies. And I look at it and it's very similar to the same scientific narratives that get used to justify it. It's this veneer of historical authority. Yeah, and very often those explanations

rely on assumptions about the past rather than how the past actually is. So, for example, if you look at a Stone Age Neolithic site like Chattelhoeuk, it doesn't look that way. It doesn't look like what you have in your imagination about cavemen. It doesn't look like that at all. And if you look at, for example, studies have been done of women hunters or female hunters in the Americas, we have as many burials of female hunters as we do male hunters. We can't say that big game hunting in the Americas 9,000 years ago was gendered because we don't have the evidence for it.

So whatever they are calling on, it is not fact. It is just what they imagine to be true about the past. And I think that's a big problem because that's not scientific, really, is it? We have to work with the evidence that we have. You know, it's very possible that my book in 40 years would look completely different because we have a whole new set of evidence. We've dug up new sites and we've got new data. and our ideas about the past have to be revised. But in the time that we're in, we have to work with the evidence that we have, right?

Not the evidence that we expect to see in the future, just with the evidence that we have. And the evidence that we have tells us that gender didn't matter that much back then. I suppose it's interested, well, we might have to start dismantling the idea that you've got either patriarchy or matriarchy, and that those are your two options that you have to have. There must be a middle ground. There must be an alternative. I think that's something that throws people a lot. It's like when you try and think outside of patriarchy,

it's like, well, what is that? What does that look like? I think it's partly because we're so committed to this kind of binary classification that we can't think of power existing along any other lines, when in fact it already does. You know, power in many societies already runs along age lines, for instance. In most societies in the world, older people have much more power over young. younger people. And status, wealth and status, that's also a big dividing point. So there are lots of

different ways in which power can be exercised. Gender, as we imagine it, is just one of them. But there have been societies in which gender isn't that important. There are still societies in which gender is less important than other factors like age or status or caste or things like that. You know, I think quite often about India. And India, by and large, or, although there are pockets of, you know, huge pockets of difference, but by and large it is traditionally a very patriarchal society. But even within that, you get very many high-cast women in positions of power, in academia, in the professions.

You will never see low-cast men in those roles. So it's not just a simple gender binary that's in operation there. It's also a caste system that is playing out that means that high-cast woman will often have much more freedom and opportunity and rights and live a very different life to a very low-cast man. That's just blown my mind because I've just realised now that if we did get rid of patriarchy, whatever that looks like, we'd still be shits to each other. We'd come up with something. It would be money or it would be looks or it would be age or it would be nationality.

There are so many power imbalances that patriarchy is just one of them. Yeah, but I don't think any of them are natural. I think we build them and we do it deliberately. People do it deliberately in order to exercise control over other people. And always there is pushback. Nobody ever lives in an unequal society and thinks, I'm okay with this. They're always uncomfortable with it and societies themselves are uncomfortable with it. And there have been lots of arguments made the reason why there is so much polarity and tension and violence. in societies today is because they are so unequal. And when we experience that inequality, it creates a visceral effect in us, a psychological effect as well as a biological one. And it makes us feel uncomfortable. We want to push back.

I mean, the really devastating thing about any form of inequality is when we are made to believe that it has to be this way, that we can't have anything else, which is absolutely not true. Of course, it can't be true. But that's part of the, you know, the Machiavellian manipulation of people that we can start to believe it. And I think about this also, especially since I moved to the US and I look at, you know, since I moved here, the queen died and Charles was made king. And how quickly and seamlessly that coronation happened and how excited people were about it.

and how readily in Britain we accept the idea of an aristocracy and a monarchy, even when there are such high rates of poverty that children are going to school and that will be the only meal that they get all day, that we can still accept it. That is the internalisation of class oppression. You know, that is us telling ourselves, they deserve it and we don't deserve it. You know, it's so easy for these things to happen. See, that's the really sneaky one is when not only do we internalize it, but we celebrate it. I was just having this thought today because, you know, I'll confess it, I stayed up the other night to watch the Met Gala because I love watching all the celebrities turn up in their pretty frocks and I love sitting there in my pajamas criticizing the most beautiful people in the world.

But I did have this moment of like, what on earth am I doing? I'm watching billionaires wearing clothing that the amount that it cost could probably feed a third one. world nation, all get together and celebrating how much money they have in a world where people can't afford to eat. And I was like, it's so bizarre the way that we're dancing to this tune of like, yay, it's so pretty. It's like, we are looking at the wrong thing. Yeah, it is a bit hunger games, isn't it? Oh, God, yes, hunger games. See, that's the sneaky way these power things work, isn't it? But with all of your research and you're looking at alternatives to patriarchy, the history and the fact that this isn't a natural state of things, how does that make you think about movements like the 20th century gender inequality movement, which I suppose you must be

sitting there going, we're not breaking free for the first time. This has been done before. No, but also wrapped within those movements was an understanding that they weren't doing this for the first time. I mean, like I said, in the 19th century, when it became clear that there were matrilineal societies like the Hodgneroshone in the Americas, women's rights activists in the US took that as a lesson for themselves. You know, they really were excited about the possibility

that it hasn't always been this way and that they could create something new. I mean, there's a lovely book by my friend, Kristen Godsey, who works at Penn State University, everyday utopia. It's just come out in the UK. And it looks at experiments in alternative living in recent times and still happening. And loads of people have tried to live in different ways. You know, communes and kibbutzies and different egalitarian forms of living or just outside the norm. That is very human. It's so viscerally human to just reject the status quo and say,

let's just try something else. And I think that's what feminism is. It's about saying we don't have to live like this, we can do something else. The issue is always that, of course, as women, we don't all think in one way. We all have different ideas of what that ideal society would look like, what that utopia would be. And I think that's part of the reason that you see factions within feminism or, you know, disunity is because we don't all have the same idea of what gender equality would look like. For me, it would be a society in which gender just doesn't matter, you know, that you could just live as an individual and your gender just wouldn't have an impact on your life. But I don't think all feminists think of it that way. Do you think we'll

get there as my final question? Do you think that it will be, and how will we know? Because something else it's interesting, if you go back through history, you can find records of everyone at every time period going, I think that women have got enough now, guys. It doesn't matter if it's the 1990s or the 1690s. there's somebody going, they've gone a bit too far now. So how would we know when we've done it? The thing is that we have in many societies now, we do have legal equality, which we shouldn't underestimate. That is a huge achievement.

You know, if you think of those really long timeframes, done relatively quickly, if you take history and context, we've done that very, very fast. The problem is that if you think of the motivations of those early states, know, to have lots of children, to increase populations and defend themselves, those twin preoccupations are still there. You know, states are still built around this idea of productivity and growth and defense. And that still puts pressure on people. I mean, you only have to look at how many young men are dying in parts of the world because the state demands that they go and

fight for them. In fact, this is such an issue in Russia because it launched the Ukraine war, that they launched a campaign, the government last year launched a campaign trying to stop young men from leaving the country and to stay and fight. And the slogan for that campaign was be a man. So you can see it already. Still, we are calling on these masculinist ideals for people in order to maintain this idea of this is what a state looks like and this is what it means to serve the state. And at the same time, just earlier than that, the Russian government had released news of a new honor for women, state honor for women, who have more than 10 kids called the Mother Heroin Medal. So this is this idea that you are serving the state by having lots of children.

So again, we are still inthrill to these fundamental ideas of masculinity and femininity, whatever the legal stuff is, you know, and in many ways we do have legal equality. But that fundamental idea that this is what a state is, this is what the purpose of a state is, this is how we organise ourselves, has so many repercussions for childcare and family and workplaces and what we think of as appropriate gendered behaviour. And I think that's where the next battle really lies. And you have been fascinating to talk to today. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I'm not on social media generally, but I have a website. So if you just type my name into Google, then I'm quite easy to find.

Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been. wonderful. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Angela for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. As long as your husband says it's okay for you to do that, that is. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from sex and scandal in UK politics to emperors and scandals in ancient Rome with none other than the awesome Mary Beard, all coming your way.

This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi and produced by Stuart Beckworth. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.