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The History of Patriarchy
It’s not about men; it’s a social system that is only 10K years old
Patriarchy is a social system that came into being approximately 10–12 thousand years ago. It is largely recognized to have coincided with the advent of agriculture (see the note at the bottom for an edit). It’s far from being the only system we’ve ever had or an inevitable one. In fact, for most of human history, we’ve lived very differently.
Today, most anthropologists would agree, regardless of their stance on issues such as the universality of male dominance, that an entirely different order of male dominance became associated with the rise of the large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes. The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support. Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands. Protecting unmarried women’s virginity appears to go along with the idea of the domestication of women and an emphasis on a radical dichtomy between the public and the private sphere.
