In 1930, when London Zoo announced its baboon enclosure would be closing down, the story made headlines.
For years, "Monkey Hill", as it was known, had been the scene of bloody violence and frequent fatalities. The US news magazine Time reported on the incident that proved to be the final straw: "George, a young member of the baboon colony, had stolen a female belonging to the 'king,' the oldest, largest baboon of Monkey Hill." After a tense siege, George ended up killing her.
Monkey Hill cast a long shadow over how animal experts imagined male domination. Its murderous primates reinforced a popular myth at the time that humans were a naturally patriarchal species. For zoo visitors, it felt as though they might be peering into our evolutionary past, one in which naturally violent males had always victimised weaker females.
In truth, Monkey Hill wasn't normal. Its warped social environment was the product of too many male monkeys being placed with tragically too few females. Only decades later – with the discovery that one of our closest genetic primate relatives, bonobo apes, are matriarchal (despite the males of the species being bigger) – have biologists accepted that patriarchy in our own species probably can't be explained by nature alone.
Over the past few years, I've been travelling the world to understand the origins of human patriarchy for my book The Patriarchs. I learned that, while there are many myths and misconceptions about how men came to have as much power as they do, the true history also offers insights into how we might finally achieve gender equality.
For starters, human ways of organising ourselves actually don't have many parallels in the animal kingdom. The word "patriarchy", meaning "rule of the father", reflects how male power has long been believed to start in the family with men as heads of their households, passing power from fathers to sons. But across the primate world, this is vanishingly rare. As anthropologist Melissa Emery Thompson at the University of New Mexico has observed, inter-generational family relationships in primates are consistently organised through mothers, not fathers.
Among humans, patriarchy isn't universal either. Anthropologists have identified at least 160 existing matrilineal societies across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in which people are seen to belong to their mothers’ families over generations, with inheritance passing from mother to daughter. In some of these communities, goddesses are worshipped and people will stay in their maternal homes throughout their lives. Mosuo men in southwestern China, for instance, might help raise their sisters' children rather than their own.
Often in matrilineal communities, power and influence are shared between women and men. In matrilineal Asante communities in Ghana, leadership is divided between the queen mother and a male chief, who she helps to select. In 1900, the Asante ruler Nana Yaa Asantewaa led her army in rebellion against British colonial rule.
The further we dive into prehistory, the more varied forms of social organisation we see. At the 9,000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, once described as the oldest city in the world for its size and complexity, almost all the archaeological data points to a settlement in which gender made little difference to how people lived.
"Most sites that archaeologists dig, you find that men and women, because they have different lives, they have different food and they end up with different diets," according to archaeologist Ian Hodder at Stanford University, who led the Çatalhöyük Research Project until 2018. "But at Çatalhöyük you don’t see that at all." Analysis of human remains suggests that men and women had identical diets, spent around the same amount of time indoors and outdoors, and did similar kinds of work. Even the height difference between the sexes was slight.
Women weren't invisible, either. Excavations of this and other sites dating to around the same time have unearthed an abundance of female figurines, now filling the cabinets of local archaeological museums. The most famous of these is the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük, today behind glass at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. It depicts a woman sitting upright, her body deeply indented with age and glorious rolls of fat spilling out around her. Underneath her resting arms appear to be two big cats, possibly leopards, looking straight ahead as though she had tamed them.
As we know, the relatively gender-blind way of life at Çatalhöyük didn't continue forever. Over thousands of years, social hierarchies gradually crept into this broader region, which spans modern-day Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Thousands of years later, in cities like ancient Athens, entire cultures had developed around misogynistic myths that women were weak, not to be trusted, and best confined to the home.
Anthropologists and philosophers have asked whether agriculture could have been the tipping point in the power balance between men and women. Agriculture needs a lot of physical strength. The dawn of farming was also when humans started to keep property such as cattle. As this theory goes, social elites emerged as some people built up more property than others, driving men to want to make sure their wealth would pass onto their legitimate children. So, they began to restrict women's sexual freedom.
The problem with this is that women have always done agricultural work. In ancient Greek and Roman literature, for example, there are depictions of women reaping corn and stories of young women working as shepherds. United Nations data shows that, even today, women comprise almost half the world’s agricultural workforce and are nearly half of the world’s small-scale livestock managers in low-income countries. Working-class women and enslaved women across the world have always done heavy manual labour.
More importantly for the story of patriarchy, there was plant and animal domestication for a long time before the historical record shows obvious evidence of oppression based on gender. "The old idea that as soon as you get farming, you get property, and therefore you get control of women as property," explains Hodder, "is wrong, clearly wrong." The timelines don’t match up.
The first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men appear much later, in the first states in ancient Mesopotamia, the historical region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Around 5,000 years ago, administrative tablets from the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia show those in charge taking great pains to draw up detailed lists of population and resources.
"Person power is the key to power in general," explains political scientist and anthropologist James Scott at Yale University, whose research has focused on early agrarian states. The elites in these early societies needed people to be available to produce a surplus of resources for them, and to be available to defend the state – even to give up their lives, if needed, in times of war. Maintaining population levels put an inevitable pressure on families. Over time, young women were expected to focus on having more and more babies, especially sons who would grow up to fight.
The most important thing for the state was that everybody played their part according to how they had been categorised: male or female. Individual talents, needs, or desires didn't matter. A young man who didn't want to go to war might be mocked as a failure; a young woman who didn't want to have children or wasn't motherly could be condemned as unnatural.
As documented by the American historian Gerda Lerner, written records from that time show women gradually disappearing from the public world of work and leadership, and being pushed into the domestic shadows to focus on motherhood and domestic labour. This combined with the practice of patrilocal marriage, in which daughters are expected to leave their childhood homes to live with their husbands’ families, marginalised women and made them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in their own homes. Over time, marriage turned into a rigid legal institution that treated women as property of their husbands, as were children and slaves.
Rather than beginning in the family, then, history points instead to patriarchy beginning with those in power in the first states. Demands from the top filtered down into the family, forcing ruptures in the most basic human relationships, even those between parents and their children. It sowed distrust between those whom people might otherwise turn to for love and support. No longer were people living for themselves and those closest to them. Now, they were living in the interests of the patriarchal state.
A preference for sons is still a feature of traditionally patriarchal countries today, including India and China, where the bias has led to such high rates of female foeticide that sex ratios are grossly skewed. The 2011 Indian Census showed it had 111 boys for every 100 girls, although data suggests these figures are improving as social norms change in favour of daughters.
Exploitation of women within patriarchal marriages continues. Forced marriage, the most extreme version of this, was designated a form of modern-day slavery by the International Labour Organization in its statistics for the first time in 2017. The most recent estimates, from 2021, indicate that 22 million people globally live in forced marriages.
The lasting psychological damage of the patriarchal state was to make its gendered order appear normal, even natural, in the same way that class and racial oppression have historically been framed as natural by those in power. Those social norms became today's gender stereotypes, including the idea that women are universally caring and nurturing and that men are all naturally violent and suited to war. By deliberately confining people to narrow gender roles, patriarchy disadvantaged not just women, but also many men. Its intention was only ever to serve those at the very top: society's elites.
Like Monkey Hill at London Zoo in the 1920s, then, this is a warped system, one that has fostered distrust and abuse. Movements for gender equality across the world are symptoms of the social tension humans have been living with in patriarchal societies for centuries. As the political theorist Anne Philips has written, "Anyone, given half a chance, will prefer equality and justice to inequality and injustice."
As daunting as the struggle against patriarchy may feel at times, though, there is nothing in our nature that says we can't live differently. A society made by humans can also be remade by humans.
*Angela Saini is a science journalist and author of four books. This essay is based on her latest, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, which was recently shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.
