‘The Patriarchs’ exemplifies a missed opportunity in reconciling women’s rights with queer rights

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule is a book striking in the rigour of its research. Author Angela Saini is a science journalist and the writer of four books, three of which explore themes of inequality; an example would be Superior, which investigates the history of race science. For The Patriarchs, Saini brings her academic and journalistic perspective to a close study of the origins of patriarchy, through an anthropological lens.

The book first looks at matrilineal societies in India and elsewhere as a surviving model of anti-patriarchal ways of living. It then moves to an examination of ancient societies and how our modern-day assumptions about gender roles and presentations can bias our interpretation of their material remains. It follows on to the first feminist movements in the US and feminist principles in practice in the USSR, and finally arrives at the anti-patriarchy movements that are ongoing in many places across the world.

Questions and answers

All the while, Saini continues to ask – what is patriarchy? When did patriarchy as a global system first take root? Why is it so pervasive? Why is it so similar in many senses all over the world? And what can we do to dismantle it?

Saini gives considered answers to these questions. She says that patriarchy is a multi-threaded system of gendered domination by a handful of elites who made a political choice to consolidate power and resources in the hands of a few. She traces the roots of modern-day patriarchy in Europe to the governing system of Ancient Greek city-states and even further back to certain prehistoric civilisations.

She concludes, in the final chapter, that we can dismantle patriarchy by imagining and creating alternative systems, partly inspired by examples of equal societies in our past. She also makes the point that patriarchy survives by forming a nexus with other systems of inequality, and it will all need to be picked apart to make a difference.

Saini’s writing is fluid and lucid; the intertwining of various histories and perspectives never comes across as confusing or confused; and the ideas are accessibly presented. As far as comprehensively answering its central questions goes, The Patriarchs makes a strong attempt. The problem is that the basis on which its answers are founded is simply too limited.

Policing the gender binary

To understand the book, one must first ask how Saini defines the word “patriarchy”. At various points near the beginning of the book, she describes patriarchy as “a system of male domination”, “women’s oppression,” and “gendered oppression.”

What remains unsaid, but what becomes clearer as one reads more and more of the book, is that patriarchy has been examined as a form of oppression that primarily affects only women –specifically, women who continue to identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. This is an inaccurate assessment of the effects of patriarchal oppression.

One can make the case that such women are the group whose suffering is the most visible. But the only reason the trauma of others – of transgender people, for example, or homosexual individuals – is not as visible, is that under this system of oppression their very existence is erased from sight, from history and everyday life.

To understand this, one needs to look at patriarchy more broadly as a system of oppression that operates through the policing of the gender binary – a concept that is actually present in the book but not quite expounded on to its full length. It is only then that the suffering of those who exist beyond the binary becomes visible.

A limited definition of patriarchy, and how it operates, risks perpetuating the power inequalities of the system even within imaginations of its dismantling. The danger is thus the continued marginalisation of people who do not fit into the heteronormative gender binary. This is especially true considering the moment in which the book has been published.

Things have been darker for LGBTQIA+ rights in many parts of the world in many years; Uganda just passed a law in which a person (of any gender) could be punished by death for “aggravated homosexuality;’ in the US a spate of anti-transgender legislation has been enacted since 2022, culminating in bills like Florida’s recent bill that takes away gender-affirming healthcare even from adults. We are in the middle of a moral panic about LGBTQIA+ individuals at this very moment, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades.

An examination of patriarchy cannot be independent of an examination of these events, especially because the book does, in fact, examine very recent events. It includes the 2022 movement for women’s rights in Iran, and incidents leading up to the overturning of abortion as a constitutional right in the US in the same year. It’s a tragically missed opportunity to reconcile the conversation about women’s rights with queer rights. In popular, literary, journalistic and in some cases even academic discourse, there has been a separation of these two into water-tight categories, to the disservice of both. Both movements are, in reality, a fight against patriarchy – against the system that fixes notions of gender and sex into a binary of expressions and roles; which erases and shames all other choices; which oppresses and punishes those who do not follow its bindings; which kills.

Leaving out queer lives

All we get, instead, are a few lines buried amidst other narratives, most of them in the same chapter (called “Resistance”) – intersex people in Greece were killed, sometimes as infants; Roman ideas of gender may have had more to do with active and passive roles during sexual intercourse rather than biological sex; the Islamic Republic in Iran allows sex reassignment surgeries even as the Vatican looks at them as evidence of mental instability; the Hindu deity Ardhanarishwara and the Greek mythological figure Hermaphroditus exist between the binaries of man and woman; Native American societies had many different genders including two-spirit people; a brief acknowledgement that LGBTQIA+ rights in places such as Hungary are under attack.

It’s disappointing that these throwaway threads are not considered to be a vital part of the answers to the central questions of the book – what is patriarchy, where did it come from and how do we dismantle it. It’s even more frustrating because there are entire sections of the book dedicated to carefully portraying alternative systems. These include matrilineal societies in Kerala and Meghalaya, prehistoric societies in which women could be warriors and had equal status to men, or even utopian pictures of peaceful women-led societies before the arrival of violent civilisations led by men.

Surely it would not have been that much of a stretch to put equal emphasis on other kinds of anti-patriarchal norms – to mention long and documented histories of queer and gender non-conforming folks in various societies, such as hijra people in India, and to wholly integrate their erasure, murder, rape, and ostracisation as part of the devastating effects of patriarchy. If one is to get at the roots of patriarchy, it is not enough to focus on the oppression of women.

One must examine the whole gamut of identities affected, invisibilised and brutalised by the rules of patriarchy, by the consolidation and control of power via gendered oppression. One must look at the concept of gender itself, and how it has come to be defined by patriarchy, and how that definition has become a prison, and how to exist outside that prison in any form is often to court death.

Without this holistic outlook on patriarchy, it often feels like a lot of the same things are being rehashed again and again, with an outdated perspective. As far as its scope goes, The Patriarchs is an engaging read that melds thorough research with an absorbing and sometimes quite personal narrative.

But it ultimately remains limited in scope and thus falls short of the moment.

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, Angela Saini, HarperCollins India.