The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule
In this interview with award-winning science journalist Angela Saini, based on her bold and radical book The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, we explore the roots and complex history of how patriarchy first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present. Angela discusses how gendered roles, pronatalism, and militarism – key features of patriarchies – are very recent phenomena, which emerged with the rise of the early states and empires, with pressure on women to have many children for the state and on men to defend the state. By detailing the diversity of human arrangements, including the prevalence of egalitarian and matrilineal societies around the world – past and present – Angela reveals that male-supremacy is neither natural nor immutable. However, she notes that as long as nation states remain committed to valuing productivity and growth – primarily by maintaining control over women’s reproduction and over nature – achieving gender equality and ecological justice will remain illusory goals.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Angela Saini 0:00
The idea of a gendered division of labor is actually a relatively recent one. The big turning point comes with the emergence of the first states. That's at least where we can see it in the record very clearly. You can imagine in those very early states what were the big concerns of the elites who were trying to form those states. Obviously, population must have been very high up that agenda. Because if you're creating a society in which you need people to create a surplus for those at the top, in which you need people to be available to defend the state and die for it, if necessary, then you need people. They are the number one valuable commodity right throughout history. So, of course, over these thousands of years, you see pressure fall on young women to have as many children as possible, which in hunter gatherer societies otherwise they do not do, and also pressure falls on young men to be available to defend the state.
Alan Ware 0:54
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll learn more from author and journalist Angela Saini about the origins and manifestations of various patriarchies over time, across different societies, and the many ways in which people have resisted them.
Nandita Bajaj 1:19
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:43
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address the combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals. And now on to today's guest. Angela Saini is an award winning journalist and author based in New York. She teaches science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presents radio and television programs, and her writing has appeared in National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and Wired. Her latest book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule was published in spring 2023 and was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Her last two books, Superior: The Return of Race Science and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong have been translated into 14 languages and are on university reading lists across the world. Angela's two part television series for the BBC about the history and science of eugenics aired in 2019. An Undark magazine series on race science she co-edited was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2023. As the founder and chair of the Challenging Pseudoscience Group at the Royal Institution, Angela campaigns around issues of bias and misinformation.
Nandita Bajaj 3:12
Welcome to our podcast, Angela, we are so very happy to have you on. So much of our work at Population Balance is premised on the fact that a key feature of patriarchy, or patriarchies as you argue is the more appropriate term, is the control over women's reproduction and the entrenchment of deeply pronatalist norms. At Population Balance we see pronatalism as the oldest form of reproductive control, and a key driver of population growth. And your book, your latest book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, which is the subject of today's interview, offered not only a reinforcement of our work, but also a deepening of our understanding of how these practices have been taking place over millennia. And what we've most appreciated about your work is the nuance about the many different forms patriarchy has taken and the many different ways across place and time that people have resisted it. So thank you, first of all, for writing it.
Angela Saini 4:14
Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it. And I'm so glad that we're able to do this because I do feel that the work I've done so neatly dovetails with the kind of research that you're doing.
Nandita Bajaj 4:24
Thank you for saying that. We really appreciate that. So let's dive right into the book. In your research for The Patriarchs you go as far back in history as the current archaeological evidence might allow. And it took you several years of traveling and research to write this book. So we appreciate the depth of work that's gone into this. What can we learn from archaeological evidence about the existence of gender inequality in prehistoric times?
Angela Saini 4:54
It's such a fraught question because we project onto the past obviously, and we do that even with the recent past, but we do it even more so with prehistory because there's so little we know. The archaeological data is ambiguous. And especially when you go as far into prehistory as I've had to go, which is more than 9,000, 10,000 years, this is prewriting, or as far as we know, prewriting. So we can't know what people were thinking. We have to infer so much. And that inference involves, of course, a lot of guesswork on the part of the researchers. And when researchers are biased or loaded in the way that they're looking at history, then it can give us vastly different perspectives on what is happening. And I was conscious of that throughout when I was researching this. And, in fact, I had to keep checking myself to make sure that I wasn't falling into the trap of drawing these big brush narratives about history based on what I would like to be true. And as soon as I stopped doing that, and just taking more of a sober look at what we do know, and how ambiguous that evidence is, then the picture you get is one of huge social variation - so many differences in the way people lived and could live, changes even within settlements over generations. So they would decide on something. It wouldn't work for them, and then they would choose something else, a variety of different ways of producing food.
So for example, even hunter gatherers and farmers living with each other, or choosing whatever systems work for them, depending on the local environment at the time or the seasons, and also in gender relations. So the oldest settlement that I was looking at was Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. So this is in Turkey, near the border with Syria, near the Fertile Crescent - so a very famous and well studied part of the world in terms of understanding prehistory. And Çatalhöyük, when it was first excavated in the 1960s caused waves, understandably, because here was a settlement where thousands of people must have lived, which is very sophisticated. You know you see houses of the type that we might recognize with walls and windows, or not windows as we might recognize it now, because actually people entered and left their homes through holes in their roofs. So they had ladders, and that would be how they got in and out of their homes. But there were big frescoes on the walls, beautiful, vivid frescoes of hunting scenes and vultures picking over dead bodies, bullhorns embedded in the walls, quite elaborate burial rituals that also involved people sometimes disinterring the dead, plastering their skulls, and then those skulls being passed around. So much we can recognize. So much that we don't recognize.
But in terms of gender, what is very clear and has only become clearer over time, is that there doesn't seem to have been a huge difference in how men and women lived. As far as we can tell from the evidence that we have, and it's not exhaustive, it may well change as more of the site is excavated. But from what we can see, so far, men and women did pretty much the same kind of work. They ate the same kind of foods. They spent the same amount of time indoors and outdoors. Children didn't necessarily live with their parents. So we can see that children aren't buried with their biological parents always. And even the height difference between men and women was slight, which I think is important because I write a lot about biology, sex difference, and how that's mediated by how we live. And I think we sometimes underestimate how much sex differences are made more profound by the ways in which we live, in the food we're expected to eat, and the quantity of food we're expected to eat. I mean, even to this day, sometimes I'm surprised that nutrition guidelines, just today I was reading how much water you should drink is divided by men and women. So women should drink this amount. Men should drink that amount - without any real consideration to the size of the human being. Surely that would be the most important factor. So we live in an age in which we think about this very binary way of imagining gender. But as far as we can tell, in Çatalhöyük, people just didn't think about it that much, because it doesn't seem to have been a big part of their lives.
Nandita Bajaj 9:25
Yeah, the one that fascinated me the most was this kind of non-blood tie notion of family - that family was just kin and biological children were brought up by lots of people and you weren't necessarily related to be living together. And that's something you talked about also as seen as like a really futuristic notion, but people were living like this thousands of years ago for such a long time. I wonder if it's a way of patting ourselves on the back to believe that we're somehow on the leading edge of some kind of feminism that has never existed before, and we're much more futuristic than past societies have been.
Angela Saini 10:10
Yeah and history shows us again and again increasingly that so much of what we think of as novel now in terms of equality is not novel at all. Because you can see it in different societies throughout time, at various moments and various geographical locations, and even into the present, which is why I was so keen to open the Patriarchs with mention of matrilineal societies because I think there is still this widespread misunderstanding that patriarchy is universal, that we all live this way, that there was some single moment in history at which everything changed. And now we're just living with the effects of it. The existence of so many matrilineal societies which we can't, with any conviction, say are truly patriarchal, because generally, in these societies, power and authority are shared between men and women, and often run along age lines rather than gender lines. We know that there are non-patriarchal societies out there. There are some societies that are less patriarchal than others. And patriarchies take on so many different tones and tenors, and they're still being reinvented in Afghanistan right now under the Taliban. Patriarchy is being reinvented for the 21st century. Some of that is drawing on religious ideology or conservative ideology, ideas about tradition in the past, but a lot of that is the manipulation of what we imagine history and tradition to be in order to be suited to the 21st century.
Alan Ware 11:39
And I think it's interesting in the book that you note, Christopher Boehm in his book Hierarchy in the Forest, which is about the best we can do to kind of imagine pre-Çatalhöyük, how hunter gathering societies may have lived based on ethnographic studies of current hunter gatherers, that there's often quite a pushback against perceived unjust uses of power. And as you mentioned, it's a complex, ongoing negotiation keeping power, jealousy, and greed in check using criticism or ridicule of those in power. And you mentioned a political theorist Ann Phillips, that subservience does not, on the whole come naturally to people, that there's always some kind of pushback and renegotiation, and that that has to be imposed. And you make a good point, in your research, you found that that systematic oppression of women really comes about to the emergence of early states and empires about four to five thousand years ago. So not necessarily agriculture, as many of us were taught, but it was a state imposed oppression or systematic dynamic. What were those dynamics that you discovered in the early states contributing to patriarchy?
Angela Saini 12:54
Well, as you mentioned, the agricultural shift doesn't coincide with the shift in the change in gender relations that we see in the historical record. So again, I also grew up on this idea that it was the shift from hunter gathering to agriculture that was a big difference, and that it had something to do with body size, or strength or something. And again, and again, anthropologists and archaeologists were telling me, the timelines don't match up. And I do think we impose expectations on the past that we don't impose on the present. No one would dream of saying today in 2024, that women can't be farmers. It's obviously not true. There are millions and millions of women farmers around the world managing small scale farms and large scale farms. So why do we assume that 10,000 or 2,000 years ago, it would have been any different? Why do we imagine that women wouldn't have been able to do farming then when we can see for ourselves that they do it now, whatever their size or shape, because they have to, because that is the nature of having to stay alive. And that would have been even more true in the past that that need, that survival instinct. The closer you are to a subsistence lifestyle, the more everyone in the community needs to pitch in and do everything, children included, men and women included, of course everyone. That's how most of us lived for most of history.
The idea of a gendered division of labor is actually a relatively recent one. We have thousands of years of plant and animal domestication of agriculture before we see any sign in the historical record of big, whole scale change in gender relations, or gendered oppression. The big turning point, as you say, comes with the emergence of the first states. That's at least where we can see it in the record very clearly. And it's not even as soon as states emerge. It's thousands of years into that. So you can imagine in those very early states, what were the big concerns of the elites who are trying to create those states trying to form those states. Obviously population must have been very high up that agenda. Because if you're creating a society in which you need people to create a surplus for those at the top, in which you need people to be available to defend the state and die for it if necessary, from attack and also to expand borders, then you need people. They are the number one valuable commodity right throughout history.
And so, inevitably, those states which in the early days were, you know, the elites would have comprised men and women. And the historian Gerda Lerner who wrote The Creation of Patriarchy around 40 years ago, she detailed how in ancient Mesopotamia, you could see women disappearing from the historical record. So whereas at the beginning, in ancient Mesopotamia, in Asyyria, you could see women doing pretty much everything, right across the board. Over time, they became more and more relegated to carrying and household work. And eventually, by the time you reach antiquity, in places like Greece and Rome, there's this ideal of the domesticated housewife, that there is a separate place for men and women. There's this really rigid division of labor. And it's quite obvious, I think, that population would have driven this concern about what men and women are doing. What is happening inside the family? Is the family producing enough people? And are those people loyal enough to maintain the state? How loyal are you to the state? How much are you serving the state? So, of course, over these thousands of years you see pressure fall on young women to have as many children as possible, which in hunter gatherer societies, otherwise they do not do. Children are quite well spaced out otherwise. It's really only in settled states that you see women having babies at the rate that we have seen relatively recent in human history. And also pressure falls on young men to be available to defend the state, because they're not having those babies directly. They're not giving birth to those babies.
So you can see the roots of this gendered division of labor then start to emerge, and also the gendered stereotypes we associate with men and women now. This idea that a woman's place is as a mother, to be caring, to look after her family, to produce as many children as possible, which is a stereotype I think that still plagues women to this day - this idea that if you're a childless woman, you're somehow letting down society, which is quite a perverse way of thinking about it. You're letting down society by not having children. And that masculinity is all about bravery and stoicism and being able to fight and be strong when, of course, we know that not all men feel that way. Not all men are able to fight or want to fight. But the patriarchal state by then doesn't care. It's not its business to care about how you feel. Its business is to make sure that you keep having children, and that those children are loyal to the state.
Alan Ware 17:57
Yeah, you quote James C. Scott, who is author of Seeing Like a State, and was a political scientist and anthropologist talking about the problem of early states was population, how to keep them under conditions of unfreedom and the ability to produce a surplus for the elites, and the priestly class, the artisans. And I think I'd heard him talk to about disease, death in a lot of the urban areas, so they had to constantly replenish. And I think maybe until the 15th 16th, pretty late in the history of cities, were they even able to maintain their population. They had to keep taking in captive slaves or other ways of getting people into the so-called civilization. And I like how you mentioned Scott and the need for the state to categorize for purposes of taxation and keeping track of property. And I've heard, Scott also mentioned the way that forestry in Central Europe was very mono crop plantation type of form of forestry that they then exported to the US and all over the world as a way to, for the monarch to be able to tax and create maximum forest products. And even the French government creating the metric system, having a way to tax and have a weights and measures that can increase state power. So it is congruent with everything you're saying about what you've discovered about these early states, gradually increasing oppression over women.
Angela Saini 19:25
Yeah, and I am fascinated. I mean, when I was speaking to Scott, I remember when I was interviewing him on this, I mean, I don't go into capitalism so much or into kind of the categorization or quantification of property and wealth, which is a an important part of this story, but not so important to the story that I was trying to tell about population at that point in the book. But certainly I was fascinated by what he was saying, he having studied those very early states, at how concerned they were about measurement of people. You know quantifying people. How many people do we have? What are these people doing? And of course, if you marry that up with a way that we think about how states operate today, I was just reading David Graeber's book recently on bureaucracy, you know how important bureaucracy is to the running of the state, the operation of the state. And part of that bureaucracy is census taking, quantifying. How much do we have this? How much of this person do we have? Is that person productive, which are ideologies also that we have absorbed into our own sense of self worth, that how productive are we? I moved to the US only a few years ago, but the US really is a perfect example of a society that lives by that mantra of productivity, individual productivity and state productivity. And if you're not productive, you are really not a good citizen, that you are a waste to society, which is not the case in some other countries and certainly in Europe, there tends to be more of a soft socialism, more of a caring, welfare oriented approach. Not that this doesn't exist there as well. It does. But there is this recognition that productivity is not the only thing that defines you as a citizen. But in America, sometimes it really feels that it does.
Nandita Bajaj 21:16
It certainly does. I mean, even in the current political and media narratives, that we see how the decline in fertility rates is being reported as a panic, because all these older people who are no longer productive are now being seen as burdens to society. And then women are measured in their ability to reproduce. And as you've you know said, the way motherhood has been internalized by so many women, because it's been pushed for so many thousands of years as the norm. But then you also talk about the first Roman emperor who actually legislated marriage under the guise of well, that's just what's natural. Women just want to have children, and they need to be under the control of their husbands. But the question you posed at the end of that was very interesting is, well, if it's natural, why do we need to legislate something, unless it's for the state?
Angela Saini 22:18
Yeah, you're right. I mean, again, and again, what you see in antiquity, so antiquity comes after all of this. So here in ancient Greece and Rome, we see the final effects of a state that is deeply preoccupied by what's happening in the family, and really takes it to its absolute limits. And I think in ancient Athens, you see that most of all, the emergence of this idea of the oikos and the polis, that whereas humans before would have just lived in a quite casual, communal way that now there are spaces for women, and there are spaces for men. There's a domestic and there's a public. And there's this gendered division, in terms of who occupies which space, at least for certain classes. And of course, this isn't really true for the working classes who were still living the same way. But the literature from ancient Greece is deeply misogynistic. It is so like dripping with this hatred of women, suspicion and fear. And we have to ask ourselves, why? Why would societies be so afraid of half of their own populations? Why would they have that kind of dripping misogynistic fear or anxiety, which is the way I prefer to see it in ancient Athens, this anxiety. And, of course, an unequal society is always an anxious one. It has to be because it is predicated on keeping a certain group of people in their place, telling people what to do, knowing deep down that they are imposing rules on people that perhaps they don't naturally occupy, that they're not naturally comfortable with. Slave-owning societies are the same. They've always been anxious, uncomfortable, you know, wrestling not only with their own moral anxieties, but also the understanding that things could change, that the slaves could uprise and things could be very different. And you certainly see that in ancient Greek literature and in ancient Roman literature. In, for example, myth of the Amazons, you know a race of women who are stronger than the men, who are more powerful and could easily overtake them. But you see that in other cultures, too, there are so many cultural myths about the power that women used to have that was then taken away and the need to put women back in their place. Why would you do that unless you were anxious, unless you felt that this was an unnatural way to organize yourself?
Alan Ware 24:41
And it's interesting. I had no idea as you mentioned, Egyptians, Spartans, others, were not nearly as strong gender defined and oppressed as the Greeks and that the Greeks then influenced the Romans, which then influenced Europe. And then the fact that the polis, the public part, actually, you mentioned, ends up oppressing women more, right? That the division between the oikos, the house or domestic.
Angela Saini 25:10
Yeah, it is fascinating. And often in western societies, at least we draw on Ancient Greece as a kind of template, a model for how a perfect society should be organized. Although we do that selectively. We don't take everything. We only take certain things. And some of those certain things, for instance, our democracy, and famously, Ancient Greece was the birthplace of democracy, which is to forget that these were democracies that deliberately excluded of course, slaves, certain classes of people and women. Although when we recreated democracy later in modern states, we borrowed that, you know. We didn't have to, but we did. And I think that speaks to the way that power works in every generation, in every society and civilization, is that those in power almost always try and take from tradition and history. But they're always selective in the way that they do it. Why did they not borrow, for instance, from ancient Egypt, contemporary to ancient Athens, a society in which women had a lot of power. They worked in the professions. They were medics. They were very well educated, very well read. We know that there were famous Egyptian pharaohs, Queens, who were women. But no, that's not what we brought. The men deliberately chose to borrow from what was perhaps one of the weirdest societies even by the standards of its time.
Nandita Bajaj 26:35
And speaking of the different ways in which that tension exists, the anxiety exists in trying to keep certain people in their place, you discuss specifically the role that patriliny and patrilocality have played throughout history in creating patriarchy. You've shared several personal examples of how patriarchy shows up in India, many of which rang true for me having grown up there, and seeing it firsthand within my own extended family. Of course, India is just you know, one example there are so many across the world. Can you describe the power of those in entrenching and maintaining patriarchy?
Angela Saini 27:15
Well, as I said before, there's not one single explanation for why patriarchy exists. The rise of the state is not a necessary condition. And it's not a sufficient condition either. I think patriliny and patrilocality combined with those other pressures led to the development of patriarchal societies. Because what is patriliny and patrilocality really? It's about saying to women that when you get married you will no longer live with your childhood kin. You will live with your husband's family. That's the case in modern day patrilocal societies. And immediately that creates an imbalance of power, necessarily. It has to. There's no way that it can't. Because if you're being taken away from your natural sources of support, and becoming alienated in a community or society in which you have no more natural sources of support, you are immediately vulnerable. And that's what we see, you know. We see in India, famously, but also across the region, across the Middle East and Asia. This is less true, I think, in the West, because people tend to live in nuclear families. But certainly in societies where extended families are still common, not as common as they used to be but still common, the inlaws are an incredibly important vehicle for the perpetuation of patriarchy, especially mothers-in-law. We neglect the role that women play in the perpetuation of these deeply damaging ideologies, I think because it doesn't fit well into the way that we imagine gendered oppression. We tend to flatten it out. We think that all men are oppressing all women, but it doesn't really work like that. There are layers to this. And they operate in different ways.
But as the sociologist Denise Candiotti wrote in the 1980s, what you see within the patriarchal family are these bargains happening, these patriarchal bargains, where the older women know that in order to make the best for themselves, after the situation that they're in, their only real source of authority is over the new younger women coming into the family. So what did they do? They exercise that control over them in the same way that would have been done to them. And as Candiotti writes, the daughters-in-law, endure this in the knowledge that one day they will have sons. Their sons will marry, and then they will be the mothers in law. And then they will exercise the authority and power over that next generation. And that power can be immense. I mean Fatema Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist wrote, this as many decades ago, how in traditional Moroccan families, the mother-in-law was such an important figure, such a figure of authority in her household that the mother was like the only person a man is allowed to love at all. He's not really allowed to love his wife, because that would mean splitting loyalties. It would mean exchanging that power, giving her more power than his mother might have. Daughters-in-law were expected to kiss their mother-in-law's hand and call her lalla, which means mistress, which is again, the language of slavery, of ownership. So that dynamic, I think, is important for us to understand, how within patriarchal societies in which women are disadvantaged women can still lobby and negotiate for power, knowing that it disadvantages them at certain stages in their life, but really having no other choice.
Nandita Bajaj 30:45
Yeah, you give the example of female genital mutilation, right, that is instigated often by mothers and aunts on to these young women, and that's, I think, also an another really great example of how layered the oppression is.
Angela Saini 31:03
Yeah, and it's wrapped up in like I said, age. Age is a very important axis of power that we sometimes don't think about that much. Because we all age, okay. So you know, we all acquire that sense of authority and respect as we get older, or to some degree we do. But also tradition is bound up in so many different aspects of our life that become interlinked, and tradition is a very powerful one. This is part of the reason that FGM continues is because it's seen as a traditional practice, and just to be seen as an authentic or traditional person, you have to be seen to keep doing that over generations. So these mothers and aunts who are encouraging their girls to get cut - knowing how painful it is, knowing how traumatizing it can be - are doing it because it will be easier for them to get married then, because they are then fitting into society.
But to some extent, we all do that all the time. Don't we all instill things in our children that we know are maybe not the very best for them, but we know will help them fit into society, that will smooth their passage through life, given the society that we're in? You know the fact that until relatively recently, people were so dismissive and judgmental of gay people. Mothers and fathers themselves would disown their own children for being gay, because they wouldn't fit into society, because then they wouldn't fulfill the pattern that was required in order to be part of the world in the way that they needed them to be part of the world.
And all of this for me, it comes back to this fundamental question of who do we exist for? What the patriarchal state has done is made us believe that we exist for the state, that we exist for an entity that doesn't really ultimately care for us that much necessarily. I mean, it may, depending on the state, be more benign or less benign, but we will forego our own relationships with the people we love. We will sacrifice those relationships because of the sense of duty to the state. And that, psychologically, is why patriarchy continues to have so much power, because it has wheedled its way in to our minds to make us believe that we owe the world a version of ourselves that may not be true to who we are at all, just because we've been told by the state that that's how we should live.
Alan Ware 33:34
And looking back at that history of the early states in the creation of patriliny and patrilocality, you talk about captive taking, which should be the ultimate kind of pulling someone away from everything they know and all the social supports they have. What is the current knowledge of the role that violent conflict and warfare played in establishing more patriarchal norms?
Angela Saini 33:59
Well like I said it was crucial for those early states to be able to defend themselves and to expand their territory if necessary. So that of course involves some degree of having a military or having people available to be able to do that. And because of this imperative on younger women to be available to have more children, then of course the weight of that has traditionally fallen on men but not exclusively. So there has been lots written, and especially recently, on women warriors throughout history. There have always been women warriors, right throughout history and across all territories, including women military leaders. So it's not as though women are incapable of fighting or they don't have a biological wherewithal to be violent. Of course we do. But it's about where society places that weight of expectation.
And we can see it even now, I think. If you look at modern day Russia, here is a state that is still waging this war against Ukraine. And you can see these gender tensions play out, because modern day Russia under Putin is an incredibly, deeply patriarchal state. In fact, it's a model of patriarchal power for other populist world leaders. So Putin is committed to this idea of the masculine warrior, and a woman who has lots of children. Just recently I wrote this piece for the FT last year about how the Russian government had released this announcement of a new honor for women who would have more than 10 children known as the mother heroine medal, which sounds almost like a military honor, right, the sound of it, a medal for having lots and lots of children, because in a way it is. You are serving the state by having more babies, which hopefully you will raise to become warriors, or producers for the next generation. And at the same time, just shortly after that, the Russian government put out an advertising campaign because, of course, there are all these young men who don't want to fight who have been trying to flee the country, because they don't want to be conscripted into the war effort. So the Russian government said in its advertising banners, be a man. You know, if you want to be a man, then your job is to join the military and be part of this war effort. So again, you can see the gendered nature of how people still think about what is appropriate for each person to be doing within a family. Although different states manage this differently, the problem of recruitment into the military has been addressed very differently in other countries. In Israel, for instance, for a long time, they've had national service for men and women. So women also fight on the frontlines.
And we've seen that in the recent conflict with Gaza, that Israeli women, combat persons, have been very important to that campaign. In many parts of the world, women have taken up not just military roles, but sometimes frontline roles in action. And it's more accepted that they will do that. And again, that is because of population pressure, because there aren't enough men sometimes to fulfill this. So the state naturally has to look more broadly. And sometimes it can do that in an ungendered way. But that doesn't mean that this is some kind of feminist ideal. The real ideal would be that we wouldn't need militaries at all. But as long as we have them, we have to understand that both men and women are capable of doing this.
Nandita Bajaj 37:25
And in this case, as you were saying different countries are using different creative ways of pushing women to have larger families, you know, and I still remain really shocked at the lack of the liberal left critique of pronatalism. A lot of it is now hiding under the veneer of feminist family friendly policies. Of course, policies should be family friendly about the way the state supports family friendly policies is very narrow. A lot of people who don't fit the dominant narrative don't have any support, right. In fact, not only are they neglected, they're often stigmatized and marginalized and ostracized in society. So the fact that even so many feminists, I find have remained neutral to the power of pronatalism, to the origins of it that fails to see how much foothold the state has on women's reproduction, even though it's now being touted as an individualistic lifestyle choice. To me, it's very interesting, the different flavors that nation states will take, depending on where their population is to sell an ideology.
Angela Saini 38:48
Yeah, I mean whether they're socialist states or conservative states or populist states or authoritarian states or communist states, they all care about population. They have to because the state's existence is predicated on your people having more people and at least maintaining itself, if not growing. That's what you see in China, and, you know, I hesitate in calling China still a communist society, but even in China they lifted the one child policy. There is this desperate need on the part of the state for people to now have more children and women aren't having them. And this is real nervousness. How do we encourage people to have more kids, when of course we can see countries in which women tend to be better educated, in which they work, they are less likely to have as many children, not least because it's so expensive to have kids these days. And if you want to, there's this phrase about quality of quantity, or whatever. However you want to phrase it, you know, we tend to have less children given the choice. And so there's an inevitably however progressive a nation believes itself to be, there will always be this tension between wanting women to just have more kids and wanting gender equality. And I don't think we've really resolved that. Even in the countries that we think of as the most gender equal in the world haven't really resolved that fundamental tension. And perhaps we never will. As long as we are concerned fundamentally with productivity, then I don't know how we can get beyond that.
Alan Ware 40:16
You do mention the alternative, the matrilineal belt of 160 societies that don't buy into the primary, gendered patriarchal norms that we have right now. What struck you about the treatment and autonomy of women in those matrilineal societies that makes them really different from standard patriarchal societies?
Angela Saini 40:40
Well, patriarchal societies are also different. They seem more homogeneous, because patriarchal norms have been exported over very many centuries. So societies have become much more flattened out. There's far less social variation than you would have seen in the past. Matrilineal societies have maintained that variation, just because they they're dotted around a lot more. They haven't exported in the same way their ways of life. And so they're all very different from each other. There are some in which there is goddess worship. There are some in which marriage in the way that we might understand it isn't really practiced. So for example, among the Mosuo in northwestern China, how anthropologists have termed it, western anthropologists, is a form of walking marriage. So a girl when she comes of age is given a chamber in her mother's house, everyone lives in their mother's house, into which you can invite a man and he leaves the next day. So it's not really marriage as such, and her children are raised within her family. So her brothers and her sisters, and her family will help raise their children. The father of that baby will be raising his own nieces and nephews. He won't be, necessarily be, so involved in his own children's upbringing. There are so many permutations, which is exactly what we should expect, because humans are able to live in so many different ways.
The evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, whose work on women in evolutionary history, including primates - so females in evolutionary history - really shows us that if there is one thing that sets us apart from other primates is that we don't have one model of how we live. It's not the case that you can take humans to another planet, and they will suddenly adopt the very same behavior as humans living on another bit of the planet. We invent new things all the time. We're always experimenting. And that is intrinsic to who we are. And in a sense, the ways in which we resign ourselves to patriarchy today, the reason I think sometimes we feel that it's so insurmountable is because these capitalist patriarchal societies, that we've created, these modern states in the form that they're in now, which we know don't work perfectly for us, which we know that most people are not completely comfortable in, we can't imagine anything else because it's so rigid and ossified. You know, the systems are written into laws and constitutions. They're inside these institutions now, which are so difficult to change that if you even want a tiny bit of legislative change, it takes years. It takes so much effort. We are not nimble or responsive the way that small scale societies in the past or even today might have been. That inertia I think just leads us to raise our hands and despair and just say, well, it's always going to be this way.
Alan Ware 43:41
It is encouraging. The matrilineal societies show there is another way to do things. And you talk about Kerala, India and their long history of having less gender oppression compared to say northern India. What did you see in Kerala and how do women and girls do better there than other parts of India?
Angela Saini 44:01
So matriliny was outlawed in Kerala in the 1970s by the Kerala legislature, but in terms of how the legacy of its matrilineal traditions lives on, is most clear, I think, in literacy rates. So Kerala has always had literacy rates, between men and women the gap has always been very small, and they've always been very high as well. So very high rates of literacy for both men and women, traditions of educating girls. It's much easier as a woman to travel in Kerala than it is in other places if you're on your own. You know, you don't feel the same tensions that you do sometimes in some of the northern states. So that still survives. And it's interesting, you know, as I was saying before about tradition, what do we draw on to justify the societies that we want to create? In the 19th century, one of the justifications for overturning matrilineal societies in Kerala by the British who were the colonial governors in that region at that time, was that this was backwards. That matriliny was strange like a perversion. This idea of women having so much authority or sexual freedom was just unacceptable. And now of course, we're in the 21st century, in which equality is seen as progressive and modern, that this is seen as the future. And so now Kerala, having succumbed to that patriarchal pressure from the 19th century onwards at the hands of the colonial British Empire, now is recovering some of those ideas and ideologies and framing it as part of its tradition - that we had equality before you did. This makes us better.
Nandita Bajaj 45:43
Yeah, that was probably one of the more surprising and least known aspects of the spread of patriarchy globally for us was that it was deliberately exported by European colonizers. Before getting into the particulars like of just what customs and laws and practices the colonizers were promoting, why were they driving this notion of what's more progressive, this kind of a patrilineal versus a matrilineal society was more progressive. What was driving that?
Angela Saini 46:18
I don't know if they imagined it to be more progressive, but they certainly imagined it to be more natural. There were very rigid ideas about what was normal and natural, the ideal way for civilized people to live. And at the birth of European empires, of course, they looked at themselves and thought we are the peak of civilization. We've got it right. And we have borrowed from the great civilizations of antiquity that we're patriarchal, because this is the normal, natural way to live. This is how God designed everything, a certain place. And if you live this way, then not only are you civilized, but you'll also live a more kind of moral and healthy life, that this is the ideal. You'll feel naturally more comfortable this way. So when of course, they encountered societies that didn't live this way of which there was so many, they didn't know what to make of them. And this became a particular tension in the middle of the 19th century, when the women's rights movement was first kind of becoming active in the United States.
So one of the places I visited when I moved to the US when I was still writing The Patriarchs was Seneca Falls, which is in upstate New York. And of course, this little town is a testament to the women's rights movement in this country. It's where Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all these heroes of American feminism, did their work. But of course that same region, Seneca Falls, is where Haudenosaunee Native Americans lived, and they were matrilineal, very egalitarian, extremely egalitarian. Women had immense authority. They're understood to be the kind of the main authorities in their families and their households. Power was divided between men and women. There wasn't this kind of, you know, patriarchy was just completely anathema to the Haudenosaunee.
And those women's rights activists then, who had convinced themselves that European civilizations including the United States, which this was an offshoot, you know, this kind of, was engaged in a modern progressive project. And for it to be modern and progressive, to be at the forefront of it, it needed to offer women gender equality. But how could they make that case, as long as the Haudenosaunee had far more rights for women than they were asking for? More than they were asking for in the same region living among them? And this created a real paradox, a dilemma for not just women's rights activists but ethnographers and philosophers in that day. And Engels, Friedrich Engels, was deeply informed by this. If you read his work on family property and the state, he has a lot on the Haudenosaunee - then called the Iroquois or referred to as the Iroquois - in his book about their matrilineal customs. And what you can read from that and the other contemporary western writing from that time is that the way they squared that circle for themselves was to tell themselves that we were all matrilineal once, that all societies were matriarchal. And then with civilization, they became patriarchal. So and this was read in different ways.
You know for those people who wanted patriarchal societies, they could say, well, if you want to be civilized, you have to be patriarchal. And women's rights activists could look at that and say, well, patriarchy hasn't always been around forever, so you can't tell us this is natural, because it wasn't this way at the beginning. So people used it to serve their own purposes. This idea, which is a ridiculous idea, because it's not as though Native Americans belong to the past, and Europeans belong to the future. These were just different societies that had organized themselves in different ways that worked for them. They're all contemporary societies. They're all modern. But you know, the way that they were imagined by European thinkers set up this kind of line through history, which still persists in feminist literature, which still persists in a lot of literature on Europe. And you know, the way we imagined world history, and does so much damage to the facts on the ground, which are essentially that Europeans couldn't stand the fact that there were more egalitarian societies than their own, already existing that had existed for many centuries, before they invented this idea of gender equality.
Alan Ware 50:45
Yeah, there must have been quite a bit of denial if it's true, what Graeber and Renfrew in The Dawn of History talk about the US Constitution, appropriating all kinds of checks and balances, separation of powers, from the Haudenosaunee - that we developed a lot of our ideas of governance from them.
Angela Saini 51:03
Absolutely. And, in fact, when Obama came into power this was so widely accepted as an idea that there was a statement made, acknowledging the impact that the Iroquois had on those forms of government at the inception of the United States, because they did. They had a profound impact on how the United States imagined itself, even if we've forgotten that now.
Alan Ware 51:26
I think another element that the colonizers brought with them that was really harmful is that ecology and nature become associated with the feminine also. So the masculine partly becomes, well, a productionist, we've got to turn that forest into wood, as Bacon had talked about, right? A feminine, and the masculine is sort of a subjugation and a rationalization of it. Did you find that true in your study?
Angela Saini 51:54
Yeah, there is that. I mean, in my earlier work, looking at sex and gender in the way that scientists imagined it from the Enlightenment onwards, there was certainly this idea within European enlightenment thinking that rationality was a male preserve, that women were more natural, that they belong to nature. And there was also a racial divide here, you know that white Europeans were more civilized, because they were distanced from nature and able to control it, and other societies were closer to nature and more part of it, you know, not able to control it. And so you do get these binary divisions emerging, that then shape how people of that time imagine who is able to lead and who isn't, who is able to do what and who isn't, which then get absorbed into stereotypes about men and women or different races, which again, we still live with to this day, you know. It's still quite common in popular culture, for instance, for women to be painted as these kind of hysterical creatures who don't quite understand what's going on, that are liable to fly off the handle, and men are the serious ones that you can trust.
Nandita Bajaj 53:05
But also, I wonder to what degree kind of the Judeo Christian values of the European colonizers drove some of these ideas of patrilineal societies being more normal. So to the point of this, appropriation of nature, of course, does date back to the domestication of animals when we started making them property. But then there is this idea that the enlightenment that came after, was challenging the narratives of the time, and that they were purely secular. And they were very rational. To me, it's very interesting how even the secular scientists of the time were so much influenced by the Judeo Christian values of human supremacy of anthropocentrism that they couldn't see, you know, how much of those values had entered scientific literature which even now we see so much of science is very ecologically blind and not in tune with what we would see as a lot of traditional cultures who were very much living been balanced with nature.
Angela Saini 54:27
And still are. Yeah, so there are wonderful indigenous scientists who are challenging that paradigm, and asking for science to think differently about its relationship to to the natural world. You know I studied engineering myself. I've been a science journalist for a long time. I can't tell you how huge a shift that would require. It would require a change in the way that we measure things, tag things, use of animals in testing. Every single part of science would have to be rethought the way that we do research would have to be rethought in order for that to happen. And just the way that we think about our place in society, and what science is for. I do a lot of work around eugenics and how we understand eugenics in history. And part of eugenic ideology was about being in control of society in such a way as to improve it, to make it better and build on it.
And that fundamental ideology of improvement, that we are here to harness who we are and drag out something better from it, which is quite a strange way of thinking about what science is for. But you know, it's not just about understanding the universe, it's also about improvement. And that idea, I think, really does have its roots in the same ideas as eugenics. For instance, in the fact that the Nobel Prize was given to CRISPR-cas9 gene editing technology, which is a huge thing. I don't doubt that it has amazing medical repercussions. But part of the reason that we feel so excited about this is because it gives us the ability to tinker with our genomes, to change who we are. And implicit in that is this idea that we aren't enough as we are then. We need improving. We're not good enough as we are. We're never going to be able to come to a place where we never die, and we're never sick. But that seems to be what science is still kind of trapped in, that idea that we are improvable. And our job on the planet is to just improve it and ourselves for the sake of the species. And that has never been challenged. To this day we still work within that ideal.
Nandita Bajaj 56:41
I really appreciate that point. Because I think so much of that narrative, and the other fundamentalist narratives around technology and the use of technology to tinker with nature, to tinker with our bodies, to tinker with our biology, to tinker with our reproduction, to tinker with the land, the food productivity, all of it comes from this notion that we are godlike creatures who can defy everything and anything that's existed and evolved over billions of years in this beautiful and immaculate and interconnected way. And it's the ultimate form of human supremacist worldview, to just continue to think we can defy nature.
Angela Saini 57:35
And maybe it's an inevitable product of the fact that we are so skilled as a species in changing our environment, that we don't just adapt to the environment, we change the environment to suit us. And there is really no limit to what you can do once you're able to do that. So we keep pushing that all the time, pushing that further and further. And, you know, is there a way out of that? I really don't know. I don't know if gender equality would necessarily get us there. I don't know what would necessarily get us there, if I'm honest.
Alan Ware 58:08
Yeah, you state at the close of the book that we've developed an inertia when it comes to bold social and political change. So what would you offer up as a way to best challenge the power of, of the different patriarchies? Or is it a general pushing back against inequality and the desire within ourselves that creates inequality? I'm not sure how you would frame it.
Angela Saini 58:35
I don't know if I have the answers here. But what I do know is that we have to understand that every single one of us, as much as we may care, or say that we care about equality, what does it really mean to have an equal society? Truly equal society means one without hierarchies, without status, without some people having more than others. And if we're honest with ourselves - and I see this also in feminist movements, and antiracism movements, in anticapitalist movements - it's not always that we want everybody to have the same as each other. We just feel that we want a little bit more for ourselves compared to the person who has a bit more. Status matters to every single one of us. It's a very human thing. You only have to look online. Look at social media and how desperate everybody is for followers and influence and status. We care about these things. And those psychological drivers I think are important to understand in the fight for equality, because it is what provides a counterbalance to the societies that we really want - that we have to constantly ask ourselves, well, actually, is it really equality that I want or do I just want a little bit more power for myself? I mean the approach that I take to this is very much a long view.
So when you take the whole sweep of history, when you look at things cross culturally, and you start to understand the fundamental drivers that got us to where we are, these are things that we can do something about - whether it's at a policy level, in terms of how we structure and incentivize certain ways of living, and whether we can be more broad in the way that we do that. There's a wonderful book that's coming out this year by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who I mentioned earlier, called Father Time, which looks at fatherhood, and just how, in terms of social revolution, fatherhood has become much more visible than it used to be, you know, just within her lifetime. She grew up in 1940s, patriarchal Texas, and within her lifetime, she has seen men pushing buggies, carrying their babies and slings, doing childcare, where they weren't at all doing it when she was growing up, when she was young. And we can incentivize that as societies. We can support that to even out the kind of childcare burden. Make it more of a communal activity. Make it easier for people who do choose to have children to not feel the weight of that so heavily.
And then on a personal level, I think, learning to care and love for each other, which again, I think is a very instinctive human thing, that we feel such empathy for others, even those that we don't know. And just recovering that and rediscovering that and making it more central to the way that we think about our own personal relationships, but also the way that we plan societies. This politics of division that we're in now can't get us to a good place. We can't get to a better society by hating each other. It's just not possible. We have to understand that we are all damaged by inequality. Men are also damaged by patriarchy. Like I said, these are state systems that disadvantage men as well as women. So we have to be able to sell the idea that this is good for everybody. And nobody has to lose out necessarily. And we can have good relationships within the system. We don't have to have fraught, damaging, negative ones.
Alan Ware 1:02:06
Thanks for this interview. And thanks for your writing. It was a joy to read. You're so clear and thorough and engaging in your writing and your speaking. So thanks a lot.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:17
Yeah, thank you so much. It's been an absolute delight, reading your work and meeting you and talking to you. And I hope we get to do more of that.
Angela Saini 1:02:27
Thank you so much. And if there's anything I can do to support your work in the future, please just let me know. Like I said, our goals are very much aligned. So I appreciate it.
Alan Ware 1:02:36
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. And we couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you, and we hope that you'll consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:08
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
