Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and feminists have been fascinated by this question—and as a science journalist, I’ve been preoccupied with it for years. In 1973 sociologist Steven Goldberg published The Inevitability of Patriarchy, a book arguing that fundamental biological differences between men and women run so deep that in every iteration of human society, a patriarchal system would always win out. Whichever way the pie was cut, men—in his view naturally more powerful and aggressive—would end up with the bigger slice. (The best and worst countries to be a woman.)
The problem with this is, male domination isn’t universal. There are many matrilineal societies—organized through mothers rather than fathers, with name and property passed from mother to daughter—around the world. In some regions, matrilineal traditions are thought to date back thousands of years.
For decades Western scholars have invented theories to explain why these societies exist. Some claim that matriliny survives only among hunter-gatherers or simple agriculturists, not in large-scale societies. Others say it works best when men are often away at war, leaving women in charge at home. Still others argue that matriliny ends as soon as people start keeping cattle, because men want to control these resources—linking patriarchy to property and land. (Read how women are stepping up to remake Rwanda.)
Always, though, matrilineal societies are framed as unusual cases, “beset by special strains, as fragile and rare, possibly even doomed to extinction,” as Washington State University anthropologist Linda Stone puts it. In academic circles, the problem is known as the matrilineal puzzle. Patriliny, on the other hand, is seen to need no explanation. It just is....
...Sociologist Goldberg’s argument was that if a pattern of behavior is universal, it probably has a biological basis, and that given how little political power women have, they must feel themselves to be naturally subordinate. But as Phillips explains, nowhere do women defer to men without struggle. For centuries, from the United States to Iran, they’ve fought for more rights and privileges. Viewed this way, we might ask why matrilineal societies are still thought of as unusually unstable. Globally, impassioned movements for gender equality—sometimes tipping into violent protest—indicate that patriarchy is not as stable as it seems either. Perhaps the real matrilineal puzzle isn’t the existence of some female-focused societies but the bizarre preponderance of male-focused ones. (The roots of International Women’s Day are more radical than you think.)
“I consider the oppression of women to be a system,” sociologist Christine Delphy says. “An institution which exists today cannot be explained by the simple fact that it existed in the past...even if this past is recent.”
If we resign ourselves to accepting our lot as part of who we are by nature, we give up on understanding how it might have come about. When we settle the case for patriarchy on something as simple as biological difference, even though the evidence points to a reality that’s far more complex and contingent, we lose the capacity to recognize just how fragile it might be. We stop asking how inequality works or the ways in which it is being reinvented. (Around the world, women are taking charge of their future.)
The most dangerous part of any form of human oppression is that it can make people believe that there are no alternatives. We see this in the old fallacies of race, caste, and class. The question for any theory of male domination is why this one form of inequality should be treated as the exception.
