The Patriarchs - Angela Saini

Last updated Apr 29, 2024

• Author: Angela Saini
• Full Title: The Patriarchs
• Category: #books

Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland (Location 32)

‘When I killed I did it with truth not with a knife … It is my truth which frightens them. This fearful truth gives me great strength. It protects me from fearing death, or life, or hunger, or nakedness, or destruction. It is this fearful truth which prevents me from fearing the brutality of rulers and policemen.’ Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, 1975 (Location 33)

Roughly 300,000 BCE – Our species, Homo sapiens, appears in the archaeological record in Africa. (Location 53)

7400 BCE – Large Neolithic communities in Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia are relatively gender-blind, according to archaeologist Ian Hodder. (Location 57)

5000 to 3000 BCE – A genetic ‘bottleneck’ emerges in Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, suggesting that a small number of men are having disproportionately more children than other men. (Location 60)

2500 BCE to 1200 BCE – A movement of people from the Eurasian Steppe into Europe and then into Asia, bringing apparently more violent and male-dominated cultures, according to archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. (Location 64)

1227 – Death of the Mongol leader Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, whose descendants today are thought to include one in two hundred of all the men in the world. (Location 73)

1994 – Bride-kidnapping is made illegal in Kyrgyzstan. (Location 90)

Ancient Indian goddesses and gods are routinely transgressive, as though summoned from other universes. (Location 108)

in the era of empire, British authorities and Christian missionaries in India were so terrified of Kali, in particular, that nationalist revolutionaries adopted her as a symbol of opposition to colonial rule. (Location 109)

Whether she’s a reflection of humanity or a subversion of it, the fact that she was imagined at all continues to amaze. (Location 113)

That desire for a historical precedent tells us something else, too. It hints at how hopeless our lives can feel at times. (Location 123)

Gendered oppression begins to look like one vast conspiracy stretching all the way back into deep time. Something terrible must have happened in our forgotten past to bring us to where we are now. (Location 126)

It was in 1680 that the English political theorist Sir Robert Filmer fought to make the case for the divine rule of kings by arguing in his Patriarcha that the state was like a family, (Location 129)

In Sexual Politics, a classic feminist text of 1970, the American activist Kate Millett defined patriarchy as the control of younger men by older men, as well as the control of women by men more generally. (Location 138)

The low status of some women has never stopped others in the same society from having enormous wealth or power in their own right. (Location 156)

‘We would do well to think of biological sex, like biological race,’ she suggested, ‘as an excuse rather than a cause for any sexism we observe.’ (Location 183)

It’s not in the big, simplistic accounts of history that we discover who we are, but in the margins where people live differently from how we might expect. (Location 185)

Virtues such as loyalty and honour became recruited into service of these basic goals. Traditions and religions, in turn, developed around the same social codes. (Location 194)

In the parts of the world where brides left their childhood families to live with their husbands’ families, institutions of marriage appear to have been informed by the widespread, dehumanising practices of captive-taking and slavery. (Location 196)

Women’s oppression may not have begun in the home, but it did end there. (Location 198)

There was always resistance and compromise. The changes we see through time are gradual and fitful, stealing into people’s lives over generations until they couldn’t imagine themselves any other way. After all, this is how social transformation usually works: by normalising what would have been unthinkable before. (Location 202)

power is inventive. Gendered oppression was cooked up and refined not only within societies; it was also deliberately exported for centuries, through proselytism and colonialism. (Location 207)

Those in power have worked desperately hard over time to give the illusion of solidity to the gendered codes and hierarchies they invented. Today, these myths have become our convictions. (Location 209)

The biggest challenge has been untangling the mass of assumptions that bog down this subject, disguised as objective knowledge but often turning out to be husks of conjecture. (Location 217)

‘But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?’ (Location 226)

there’s a part of Planet of the Apes that often passes audiences by unnoticed: whether human or ape, males are almost always at the centre of the action. (Location 235)

The thrill of science fiction should be its licence to break with convention. The radical promise of this genre is that it can help us push back against the world we’re in. (Location 239)

bonobos are at least as close to us in evolutionary terms as chimpanzees are, making them one of our two nearest genetic relatives in the animal kingdom. (Location 259)

no bonobo colony has ever been found to have been led by a male, not in captivity, nor in the wild. (Location 260)

Female leadership is seen not just among bonobos, but also among killer whales, lions, spotted hyenas, lemurs, and elephants. (Location 264)

When it comes to understanding how dominance works, ‘there is so much we can learn from bonobos’, (Location 265)

bonobo females form tight social bonds with each other, even when they’re not related, cementing those relationships and easing tensions by rubbing their genitals together. (Location 267)

These intimate social networks create power, locking out the possibility for individual males to dominate the group. (Location 268)

by the start of 2020 fourteen countries also had governments in which at least half the ministers were women: (Location 319)

when animal researchers talk about male dominance, they’re almost always referring to males trying to assert dominance over each other – not over females. (Location 332)

between males, size and aggression don’t necessarily give them the deciding edge. (Location 334)

one of those vivid, vivid pictures that strikes you when it’s so out of keeping with what you expect.’ (Location 362)

Kerala, on the other hand, was wrapped in fable – a place where gender roles were reversed, where women had always ruled, and daughters were prized over sons. (Location 366)

societies with a matrilineal bias are in fact dotted across Asia, parts of North and South America, and a wide ‘matrilineal belt’ stretching through the middle of Africa. (Location 372)

Matriliny doesn’t guarantee that women are better treated, or that men won’t be in positions of power and authority, but it is one part of the picture of how a society thinks about gender. (Location 373)

Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Location 383)

The Village Before Time, the journalist Madhavan Kutty (Location 386)

Women were allowed more than one sexual partner, none of whom would necessarily live with her. This meant that fathers weren’t expected to play a big part in raising their own children, but would instead help to raise their sisters’ children. Born into a huge taravad, Kutty recounts that his was a family tree in which only the children of daughters were listed. (Location 389)

British colonialists who took over the region, together with missionaries looking to convert people to Christianity, pressured matrilineal Keralites to bring gender norms into line with their Victorian sensibilities. (Location 413)

‘In seeking a psychological advantage over their subjects colonial ideology felt compelled to assert the moral superiority of the rulers in many subtle and not so subtle ways,’ (Location 414)

Under the matrilineal system, where the sexes were relatively more equal than in a patrilineal system, ‘the monarch’s gender was of little consequence’, writes Pillai. ‘It was the position and its dignity that mattered and whoever exercised supreme authority in the state and in the royal house was held to be the Maharajah.’ (Location 425)

‘all people sprang from the woman’. Khasis are matrilineal, but, unlike Kerala’s Nairs, their tribal society remains matrilineal to this day. (Location 433)

‘Traditionally, inheritance among the Khasis flows from mother to daughter, with the youngest daughter getting the bulk of the property,’ adds Nongbri. It becomes her responsibility to take care of her parents and any unmarried siblings. She’s the family’s custodian. (Location 439)

When Islam arrived, it again gave men fresh routes into positions of authority that they didn’t have before, this time as religious leaders. (Location 474)

It wasn’t that they were necessarily rejecting matriliny. It was more that they wondered whether life might be better another way. (Location 481)

But the final blow to the taravad would come in 1976, decades after India’s independence from British rule. That year, the Kerala legislature abolished matriliny altogether. (Location 498)

Towards the end, people were carried along, noticing what they had lost only after it was gone. (Location 505)

‘A lot of the hypotheses that we catalogued from the literature didn’t really hold up to a worldwide evolutionary analysis.’ (Location 520)

As much variation as there is now, there would have been even more in the past. In prehistory, social norms were changing all the time. (Location 530)

If the only way of thinking about gender and power is a binary opposition between women and men, it becomes impossible to imagine men sharing status and importance with women, or of the balance of power changing with circumstances. But this is often what we have in matrilineal societies. (Location 534)

Maybe the real puzzle isn’t the existence of a relatively small number of matrilineal societies, but that patriarchal ones have become so common. (Location 544)

memoir The Kingdom of Women, (Location 546)

social equality in our own species doesn’t come easily. It takes complex, ongoing negotiation, keeping power, jealousy, and greed in check, sometimes using criticism or ridicule of those in power. (Location 560)

The most dangerous part of any form of oppression is that it can make people believe that there are no alternatives. (Location 580)

‘Feminism’s search for a ground is a search for the truth of all women’s collectivity in the face of the enforced lie that all women are the same.’ (Location 584)

‘History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other,’ writes the feminist scholar Donna Haraway. (Location 602)

In 2018, the curators of the museum did something unusual. Acknowledging that the diorama was historically inaccurate, they decided that instead of removing it, they would add large explanatory labels to the window in front. (Location 610)

Lenape women held leadership roles and acted as keepers of knowledge in the seventeenth century. Modern-day Lenape women still do. (Location 625)

There were some Europeans who saw Native Americans as savage. There were others who recognised the strengths and beauties of their cultures. But whichever way they were seen, as noble savages or savage savages, depending on the observer’s persuasion, (Location 636)

The past had been rewritten to serve the myth of ‘Manifest Destiny’, a nation-building origin story that claimed Americans of European descent were destined to move westwards and obtain more land for themselves. (Location 640)

European intellectuals imagined a transition from savagery to civilisation, from irrationality to rationality, from immorality to morality, as humans were shifting from being governed by nature to themselves governing it. Male authority, then, was believed to be another marker of humanity’s progress. ‘It was Enlightenment doctrine,’ (Location 648)

European assumptions about race and gender had been imported into the New World by the Founding Fathers, (Location 652)

For ‘white men, Jefferson emphasized unalienable rights, but when he came to white women, Jefferson shifted focus to natural roles and the happiness of society’. (Location 681)

American democracy chose to draw the line at women and the enslaved – for the simple reason that neither group was seen as being naturally worthy of having the vote. Indigenous peoples weren’t recognised as citizens in the first place. (Location 684)

Married women existed as citizens only through their husbands. This meant that as recently as 1922, an American woman could lose her citizenship if she married a foreign man who wasn’t a citizen, (Location 707)

human societies did not slot into neat models of progress from primitive to advanced. Instead, civilisations could be seen rising and falling over millennia, becoming technological powerhouses and then slipping into dark ages, or surviving with simpler, more sustainable ways for tens of thousands of years. (Location 719)

Young Navajo girls would run races to prove their strength of character. Seri women from the Mexican state of Sonora could run more than seventy kilometres in a night, (Location 731)

In 1590, more than 250 years before the famous convention for women’s rights took place at the Wesleyan Chapel on Fall Street, women from across the Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga Nations met to call for peace as war raged between their peoples. (Location 749)

Since Sky Woman is considered a literal forebear, not a metaphor, it’s taken as fact that everyone’s genealogical line begins with her and travels through their mothers. (Location 764)

Clan mothers still help run the local level of government, from which political power radiates out to the federal level. They are the ones who select honorary male chiefs to lead their clans, influencing their decisions and wielding the power to oust them if they do not do a good job. Myers tells me that a chief is nothing like a king or absolute ruler. ‘He’s working for the people. He’s not working above them or below them, but he’s working with them.’ (Location 767)

When Indigenous people began learning English after colonisation, he added, they would routinely ‘speak of a man as she, and a woman as he’. They swapped the pronouns, consciously or subconsciously, because they could see that he represented the most important gender in the English language. (Location 775)

There are others who believe their forebears recognised four, five, or perhaps more manifestations of gender, which they suggest might correspond to something like gay, lesbian, ‘feminine’ man and ‘masculine’ woman. (Location 788)

‘Democracy itself was learned from the Haudenosaunee. A lot of their symbolism within their government was stolen from our peoples.’ Official recognition of this came in October 1988, (Location 797)

when Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World from Spain, the Haudenosaunee ‘already had several hundred years of democracy, organized democracy. We had a constitution here based on peace, based on equity and justice, based on unity and health.’ (Location 801)

How Morgan’s theories were read depended on the reader; in particular, on the reader’s politics. (Location 855)

Smashing the patriarchy wasn’t an affront to nature, but a return to it. This proved to be the perfect origin story for the burgeoning American women’s rights movement. (Location 862)

Are humans really on some ladder of progress, reaching ever upward to some mythical point of perfection? (Location 882)

The trouble with the line of reasoning employed by Johann Jakob Bachofen in 1861, then Lewis Morgan and Friedrich Engels soon after him, is, as Adam Kuper notes in his book The Invention of Primitive Society, human societies don’t all necessarily trace back to one single point, to a time when everyone lived the same way. (Location 884)

None was seeing Indigenous communities for who they really were, only for what they wanted them to be. (Location 910)

Centuries before the Declaration of Independence was written, Europeans had come to believe that patriarchy was the divine order of the universe, from the father with authority over his family, to the monarch with dominion over the nation, and higher still to God Himself. (Location 913)

in Jefferson’s time, Haudenosaunee women were noticeably physically stronger from outdoor work. They tended to have fewer children than white American women, and likely underwent some form of abortion to achieve that limit. (Location 962)

book White Tears/ Brown Scars, (Location 998)

It’s a common strategy, writes Hamad, ‘to align with women of color when it suits, trumpeting a nonexistent sisterhood as a mask for appropriating our work to advance the myth of a better world run by women’. (Location 999)

in the 1865 census, Seneca women found themselves being forced by the American authorities to name their children after the fathers. Hemmed in, they tried instead to name them after their own grandfathers or other male relatives in their mothers’ families. (Location 1008)

Patriarchy, then, wasn’t introduced overnight. It was one battle after another, stretching out over centuries. It slowly chipped away at existing laws and customs, (Location 1016)

In the name of ‘modernising’ women, colonialism placed them within ever-tighter gendered straitjackets, slowly disenfranchising them, and moving property, income, and authority into the hands of men. (Location 1031)

Not only did they lose status within their own societies, but their societies also lost status because of colonisation. (Location 1034)

Even here, in the town at the very heart of the story of women’s rights in the United States, narratives remain incomplete. (Location 1048)

patriarchal ideas are carried within states and institutions to which women have also been committed, from which they have also drawn benefits, and which they have also defended. (Location 1050)

Almost as soon as excavations began in May 1961, Çatalhöyük became a focal point for those who wanted to understand how humans organised themselves in one of the planet’s oldest known settlements. (Location 1085)

an object that would fit along the length of my hand. Now in pride of place in its own glass case at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, this treasure is known as the ‘Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük’. (Location 1089)

The most intriguing aspect of the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is not her gloriously abundant body, then. It is her pose in command of two large creatures. In a society obviously preoccupied with animals, hunting, and death, she looks arrestingly authoritative. (Location 1102)

‘Goddess tours’ of Anatolia continue to make obligatory stops at Çatalhöyük. (Location 1109)

Reşit Ergener, a Turkish economics professor and author of Anatolia, Land of Mother Goddess, (Location 1109)

Mellaart’s excavations ended soon after 1965, when he was banned from the site by the Turkish government following accusations of forgeries and missing artefacts. (Location 1142)

The best researchers can do is make educated guesses about what people in the past may have been thinking based on their artwork or burial patterns. ‘It’s very rare that we can interpret a piece of archaeological data absolutely,’ warns Ruth Tringham. (Location 1162)

The power to decode meaning with limited evidence sits in the hands of the person with the most intimate understanding of the site: the archaeologist. (Location 1165)

1976 book The Paradise Papers, (Location 1172)

The Chalice and the Blade, first published in 1987, (Location 1176)

Belief in a matriarchal past began to blossom in some feminist circles in the second half of the twentieth century, just as it had in the second half of the nineteenth. (Location 1178)

There was the ‘Baba Yaga’, for instance, considered a witch in Russian folklore, whom Gimbutas described as a Slavic goddess of death and regeneration. (Location 1196)

Gimbutas’s last book, The Living Goddesses, was first published in 1999, (Location 1203)

She wasn’t driven by anything other than the evidence, Dexter tells me. ‘What shaped her work was one step in front of the other, (Location 1208)

The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler (Location 1213)

Linguists since at least the end of the eighteenth century have recognised that the languages spoken by billions of people across this vast stretch of the world – including Spanish, French, English, Persian, Hindi, and German – do have words and grammar in common. They’ve been termed the ‘Indo-European’ family. As Miriam Robbins Dexter explains, these tongues are believed to have a single source, a lost language whose traces can be seen in India’s ancient Sanskrit as well as in old Anatolian and Germanic languages. (Location 1235)

‘Greek goddesses … now served male deities’ as wives and daughters, wrote Gimbutas. They were retained by ancient Greek cultures but faded into shadows of their former selves. Now they would be subservient to powerful male gods, Gimbutas argued, eroticised and sometimes rendered weaker. ‘The Indo-European female figures were very naturalistic, weakly personified,’ (Location 1247)

Every Great Goddess in Indo-European culture was indigenous and had great powers that one could see were eroded with time.’ (Location 1250)

The heavens reflected what was happening on the ground. As the goddesses were pushed to one side by the gods in ancient Greek myth, everyday women were losing their authority to men. (Location 1251)

‘In Greek mythology, Zeus rapes hundreds of goddesses and nymphs, Poseidon rapes Demeter, and Hades rapes Persephone,’ wrote Gimbutas. (Location 1253)

Bible’s book of Genesis, which some historians believe was written from roughly 900 BCE, (Location 1258)

There are facts that fit together. If there’s a problem with it, it’s that it feels a little too neat. Social change is rarely this simple, as we know from our own time. (Location 1261)

Joseph Campbell once said. ‘Myths and dreams come from the same place; they come from realisations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.’ (Location 1276)

book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (Location 1279)

a particular brand of beliefs about gender. The focus of so much Western goddess-worshipping literature, Eller explains, is on women as nurturers who are more connected to nature, and on men as the destroyers of nature – and by extension, the destroyers of women. Men and women are framed as opposites, or as possibly complementing each other, but never as varied individuals who might possess overlapping traits. (Location 1301)

What this kind of gender essentialism does, as other feminist scholars have also been at pains to point out, is ignore that women are also capable of cruelty, coercion, and violence. Men, too, can be nurturing and creative. (Location 1318)

The qualities we define as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are shaped by social and cultural forces. (Location 1320)

The cracks appear when this ‘specialness’ proves to be another straitjacket, distancing women from what are seen as ‘masculine’ traits and defining ‘femininity’ in tight, prescriptive ways. (Location 1324)

And throughout the history of archaeology and anthropology, men in these fields have made countless assumptions about prehistory being rigidly patriarchal, some of which are equally unsubstantiated. Yet nobody has ever been quite the easy target of ridicule that Gimbutas has been. (Location 1356)

By the standards of art, aesthetics, and gender balance, she argues, ‘Old Europe’ could in fact be considered ‘a true civilization’, as Gimbutas put it, in ways that societies today are perhaps not. (Location 1366)

Women cannot be dismissed as passive or powerless as long as the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük sits so authoritatively in her own glass case in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, unashamed of her age and her body, her steady hands resting upon the two creatures flanking her. (Location 1371)

Feminist archaeology, an approach that emerged in the 1980s as archaeologists began to recognise the need to think about gender more subtly, (Location 1381)

‘It was the feminist axis which really legitimised thinking about archaeology and prehistory at the very small scale,’ (Location 1387)

‘Archaeology doesn’t give you a true picture; it gives you a picture that you have to interpret,’ she tells me. ‘The way you interpret something is really about how broad is your imagination … Where is your imagination coming from? What are the sources for building a scenario?’ (Location 1391)

The further we travel into the past, the more open our minds need to be. (Location 1395)

figurines are sometimes known to have been roughly handled, and then dumped, possibly with the trash. They’re not always valuable or sacred. (Location 1407)

there has been an uncritical acceptance of binary thinking around sex and gender when it comes to studying the past. (Location 1409)

Putting our assumptions aside is almost impossible. We’re all constrained by our biases. (Location 1419)

If one group has higher status than another, you would expect to find them eating finer food and more of it, to look stronger and more robust, and enjoy more elaborate burials. But that’s not what archaeologists have seen at Çatalhöyük. (Location 1426)

We always start with male and female.’ This is a persistent habit. ‘It’s partly to do with who does the excavating. It is still almost a colonial pursuit a lot of the time,’ she says. And European colonial beliefs were rooted firmly in a binary gendered hierarchy between women and men. (Location 1448)

Among the other unexpected things that researchers have learned from studying Çatalhöyük’s human remains is that people who lived together in the same houses weren’t always related to one another. (Location 1451)

But as big and elaborate as this settlement was, it still resembled a village in many ways. This proves, perhaps, that there’s no single way to forge a complex society. ‘People will create beautiful homes even if they’re just small-time farmers.’ (Location 1461)

Some experts have suggested, based on the phallic shape of the stones there, that this might have been a gathering place for men and boys. Göbekli Tepe is some 2,000 years older than Çatalhöyük. (Location 1472)

As far as Hodder is concerned, the famous figurine of the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük isn’t a goddess. He sees instead, as I do, ‘a powerful image of a woman post-childbirth. She’s got great sagging breasts, and sagging stomach and sagging bottom. I mean, this is a very proud and mature woman.’ (Location 1474)

Someone raised in a rigidly male monotheistic tradition might assume that the only possible religious alternative is a monotheistic goddess. (Location 1483)

In Hinduism, for instance, there are multiple gods and goddesses. But many Hindus also venerate objects and real people, including politicians and movie stars. There’s a mutability about faith, and usually less separation between the sacred and the secular than there is in other traditions. (Location 1486)

Standing on the unexcavated parts of Çatalhöyük, knowing how much more there is under my feet to be discovered, is at once frustrating and exhilarating. (Location 1514)

‘In order to gain mastery, you need to dismantle as much as you put together.’ The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak, 2013 (Location 1529)

Like most countries, Turkey is caught between its liberal and conservative forces. The twentieth century saw a raft of reforms as the Turkish republic sought to break with the Ottoman Empire’s old traditions. (Location 1538)

Turkey’s celebrated novelist Halide Edib, born in 1884, had been a key figure in the country’s independence movement and fought to raise the status of women. In 1934 women secured the right to vote, earlier than in France, Italy, or Switzerland. (Location 1540)

The norms that a society follows are constructed, they are built. (Location 1554)

‘History is protean,’ wrote the late American historian David Lowenthal. ‘What it is, what people think it should be, and how it is told and heard vary with time, place, and person.’ (Location 1556)

‘History no less than memory conflates, exaggerates, abridges,’ (Location 1559)

with considerable effort, it was logistically possible to study the complete sets of genes of long-dead specimens. (Location 1573)

comparing DNA from skeletons at various points in time with each other, and by comparing these samples to the DNA of living people today. (Location 1582)

2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here, (Location 1602)

It’s even plausible, he adds, that Gimbutas was right all along about the people who lived in ‘Old Europe’ being more female-centred and worshipping goddesses before this ‘displacement’ happened. (Location 1610)

The further removed we are from the times – and the less evidence we have – the greater the temptation to dramatise and reduce people to caricatures. (Location 1619)

Indo-European studies remain burdened by an unhealthy interest from far-right nationalists and white supremacists who have never quite let go of this myth. (Location 1631)

For populists all over the world, manipulating history continues to serve politically motivated goals. (Location 1632)

mass migration is never the only catalyst for cultural change. We know that the movement of even small numbers of people back and forth around the world can transport ideas, technologies, religions, and habits. (Location 1650)

‘The horse-riding nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppes may win the prize for being the earliest (and most consistent) cultures to allow women to openly fight alongside their male counterparts.’ (Location 1666)

Some of the earliest archaeological evidence of female warriors comes from a burial mound thought to be roughly 3,000 years old of three armed women near Tbilisi in Georgia, (Location 1668)

There’s an old habit among academics of assuming that one sex alone is truly capable of violence. (Location 1669)

‘Although, continuously reoccurring in art as well as in poetry, the women warriors have generally been dismissed as mythological phenomena.’ Now there was hard evidence that these stories may not have been myths at all. (Location 1679)

there are many examples of societies in which ‘class and rank superseded gender’. (Location 1685)

They suggested that there was something unusual about the migration patterns of those who entered the region from the steppes and spread during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. ‘We estimate a dramatic male bias,’ the authors wrote. They believed there may have been between five and fourteen males migrating for every one female who moved with them. (Location 1693)

Just being physically higher up, he adds, would already have given them a sense of power over others on the ground. (Location 1712)

As well as being a source of meat and dairy, livestock ‘supported a new division of society between high-status and ordinary people, a social hierarchy that had not existed when daily sustenance was based on fishing and hunting’, (Location 1713)

‘Gimbutas was painting it too black and white, and there was too little nuance, too little understanding of the process,’ he says. ‘But she was a pioneer in a way. So, when you are a pioneer, you start off painting it black and white.’ (Location 1719)

What is too easily left out from the big, essentialising narratives of history are the counterbalancing forces of resistance. Changes to how societies were organised must have been challenged, the same way they are now. But this pushback or slow negotiation is hard to spot in the archaeological record. (Location 1747)

Neolithic societies in Europe weren’t always as peaceful as Marija Gimbutas believed them to be. There were massacres. (Location 1757)

The Y chromosome, found in biologically male DNA, is a reliable way of tracking inheritance through the male line. (Location 1760)

the geneticist David Reich has observed that around ‘20 to 40 per cent of Indian men and around 30 to 50 per cent of eastern European men’ may share common descent from just one man who lived roughly 4,800 to 6,800 years ago. (Location 1761)

geneticists can see that living people today share a far broader diversity of female ancestors than they do male ancestors. (Location 1768)

fewer men continued to have more children than most other men. (Location 1781)

The Secret History of the Mongols, the earliest known work of Mongolian literature, written not long after the death in 1227 of Chinggis Khan, (Location 1785)

The Mongols – similar to the early Indo-European speakers who moved out of the Eurasian Steppe – were nomads who expanded outwards from their own grasslands in the east. (Location 1792)

Mongol armies could ride 600 miles in nine days, says McLynn, giving themselves an immediate advantage over others. (Location 1796)

In 2003, an international team of biologists from China, Mongolia, and countries in Europe revealed a Y chromosome lineage so common across an enormous part of Asia that it was shared by roughly 8 per cent of all the men in the region. (Location 1798)

Powerful men do not always have more children (celibate religious leaders are one example). (Location 1806)

linguists who have reconstructed early Indo-European vocabularies have found a kaleidoscope of terms to describe relationships on the father’s and husband’s side of the family, but very few to describe the mother’s or wife’s side. (Location 1819)

One of the most important pieces of written evidence in an Indo-European language to have survived this time is the Rig Veda, the sacred Hindu text thought to have been compiled between 1500 and 1000 BCE, around the same time that Indo-European speakers are believed to have entered India from the north. (Location 1823)

it would be a mistake to assume that just because a society values sons, it must have all the hallmarks of ‘patriarchy’ as we recognise it today. (Location 1829)

In the Mongol Empire, then, the rules around gender and power weren’t the same as they were in other patrilineal societies, neither before nor after. There was no rigid division of labour, there were no separate domestic spheres in which women were confined, and women weren’t seen as necessarily weak or inferior. (Location 1835)

the picture that emerges is one where, even in places where the balance of power was becoming gendered, the way it was gendered could take very different shapes. (Location 1843)

as well as sons, the Mongol Empire valued the high-ranking women who bore those sons. (Location 1845)

a great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, who in one legendary account ‘defeated every man brave enough to fight against her’. (Location 1856)

the more fine-grained evidence we have for how people really lived in the past, the more these binaries break down. (Location 1862)

the cultural differences between the Minoans and Mycenaeans weren’t carried on entirely genetic winds. New social and political ideas may have been brought in the same way they often are, by people meeting each other and learning new ways. (Location 1886)

between the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age in this region, gender relations changed profoundly. Ancient Greek society became deeply skewed in favour of men. (Location 1888)

‘We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.’ (Location 1899)

Ancient Rome and Athens, the centres of power and intellectual life in this part of the world, relied on slave labour. (Location 1913)

present-day Europeans have built their beliefs about the roots of ‘Western Civilisation’ around this particular place and time. For centuries, they have put classical antiquity on a pedestal, worshipped its playwrights and philosophers, drawn life-lessons from their writings, and erected neoclassical columns to mimic theirs. (Location 1921)

‘Classics became a discipline devoted not just to studying the past but to preserving it,’ (Location 1931)

in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, western Europeans looked to antiquity to affirm their racialised and gendered beliefs. (Location 1934)

The historian David Lowenthal observed that Americans go to Europe ‘to feel at home in time’. Europeans, it could be said, go to Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. (Location 1935)

book Women in Ancient Greece. (Location 1940)

The idea of separate public and private spheres comes from this era, from the Greek polis meaning city-state, and oikos meaning family and the household. (Location 1943)

we flatten out the past. We take what we want from it. And those in power have taken just a slice. (Location 1954)

Earlier on, houses were usually one-roomed in open settlements, which couldn’t have allowed for men and women to segregate, (Location 1958)

1975 book on women in antiquity Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. (Location 1965)

When we recognise the realities of everyday people’s lives over time, we can start to see just how precarious gender norms are. (Location 1978)

In ancient Rome, on the other hand, in which women had relatively more rights and freedoms, and certainly tended to be more seen and heard, wife-beating was considered socially acceptable. (Location 1986)

Unlike in ancient Athens, the shame was hers, not his. In the early days of the Roman Republic, a husband even had the right to kill his wife for adultery. (Location 1989)

The classicist Marilyn Katz has observed that scholars in her field have long betrayed a tolerance verging on sympathy for Greek sexism. (Location 1991)

the big trap of looking to the ancient world to understand gender relations is that it can give the illusion of seeing humanity at its most basic – purely because it was so long ago. (Location 2001)

It was established slowly, through attrition; through constant, considered effort. Sometimes violence, or the threat of it, was used, but more often it was formed by the layer-upon-layer creation of social norms, laws, and edicts. (Location 2004)

ancient Mesopotamia, a region in the valleys straddled by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, part of the Fertile Crescent, frequently described by historians as a cradle of human civilisation. This area maps onto parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait. (Location 2015)

‘The problem of these early states was population,’ says Scott. ‘How to collect that population under conditions of unfreedom, and how to hold them there and get them to produce the surplus that’s needed for the elites that run the state, (Location 2023)

Population – maintaining its size and controlling it – is crucial to understanding the rise of inequality and patriarchal power. (Location 2026)

These days, however, archaeologists and anthropologists don’t see agriculture as the pivotal turning point for gender relations that Engels and others believed it to be. (Location 2032)

Poorer women and enslaved women, as well as children, have been expected to work outdoors throughout history, and this is a tradition that continues to this day. (Location 2046)

United Nations data shows that today, women make up almost half the agricultural workforce and nearly half of the world’s small-scale livestock managers in low-income countries. (Location 2049)

Where we really can start to spot a shift in gender relations, the first shoots of overarching male authority, is with the rise of the first states. (Location 2064)

The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose. (Location 2065)

Keeping a population growing was best served by creating conditions in which as many women as possible were having as many babies as they could, raising those children to be useful to the state as future breeders, workers, and warriors. (Location 2073)

In many ways it was like a machine: every part designed for a particular function. (Location 2078)

The very earliest written examples we have of Indo-European languages, belonging to a branch spoken across ancient Anatolia, including Hittite, do not appear to have had a grammatically separate feminine gender, (Location 2082)

Once codes were created and meaning given to categories, they had to be policed for fear of transgression. (Location 2090)

The third dynasty of Kish is listed as having been founded around 2500 BCE by Kubaba, a woman who previously worked as a tavern keeper. (Location 2110)

book Women Warriors, historian Pamela Toler (Location 2114)

‘the main thing that struck me when I looked at women warriors across cultures rather than in isolation is how many examples there are and how lightly they sit on our collective awareness’. (Location 2115)

women warriors didn’t just come from the ranks of the social elites. When ordinary women have been given the opportunity to fight in battle, many have taken it. (Location 2120)

humans are diverse: people come in all shapes and sizes, individuals can have all sorts of traits and interests, and gender manifests in multiple ways. (Location 2127)

book The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity. (Location 2139)

‘Usually, we are finding women have more rights and prerogatives than is generally understood in popular culture,’ (Location 2155)

A woman’s legal gender was changed to give her a different status within her family. This not only proves the practical limitations of gender categories, but also people’s willingness to look beyond them. (Location 2164)

By gradually introducing broad rules and laws, an entire group of people in all their individual complexity could be effectively pushed to the margins and suppressed. (Location 2181)

Categorising is an exercise in stereotyping. It irons out differences, defining people by their few shared qualities, or by how they might be useful. Dividing people into groups in this way, even when it is arbitrary, pushes us to look for differences between them. And this is what makes it such a powerful psychological tool. (Location 2186)

The laws could only have been in service of the state. (Location 2205)

Part of the way ancient Athens achieved compliance was by instilling a sense of loyalty to the city. (Location 2211)

According to historian Frank McLynn, after 1206, Genghis Khan brought in compulsory military service for boys and men aged fifteen to seventy. (Location 2213)

In 2015, North Korea, which already has the longest period of national service for men in the world, extended compulsory service to women. (Location 2216)

The effect of marrying off girls so early to older men is that wives and husbands must have seemed utterly different from each other in their behaviour and temperament. (Location 2222)

These paternalistic relationships fed the impression that women were foolish and immature, and men rational and wise (Location 2224)

a society desperately trying to keep its house in order for fear that everything would fall apart. (Location 2234)

‘These were the nightmares of the victors: that some day the vanquished would arise and treat their ex-masters as they themselves had been treated.’ (Location 2243)

Nothing demonstrates the insecurity of Europe’s monarchies quite as much as their need for pomp and ceremony. In India, there are countless rules for how people from different castes should behave with one another. (Location 2246)

‘The status of women in ancient Egypt is probably the highest in the Mediterranean world,’ (Location 2259)

Religious cults in antiquity often gave women, including lower-status women, opportunities to have a public presence, enjoy genuine authority, and to behave beyond social norms. (Location 2265)

Sparta – a city-state infamous in ancient Greece for the visibility of its women in contrast to the relatively cloistered lives of high-class women in neighbouring Athens. (Location 2270)

Spartan society was more focused on warfare than some others, which meant women were expected to manage property while men were away fighting. It is this particular social situation that may have helped create different expectations for how women and men should act. (Location 2283)

Spartans thought it was important for women to be strong and healthy to bear children, who would then be useful citizens, in the same way that men were expected to be strong and healthy to fight wars. (Location 2290)

‘Spartan women married comparatively later. (Location 2292)

The word ‘laconic’ comes from Laconia, the region of Greece in which Sparta was located. (Location 2296)

‘The most graphic one is the mother who hitched up her dress and said, “Do you plan to creep back in here where you emerged from?”’ when her son had shown cowardice in battle. (Location 2301)

Spartan women appear to have thought of themselves as courageous. This is important because neighbouring Athenians saw courage as a firmly masculine quality, to be prized only in men. ‘The actions of daring women were attributed to tolma, or audacity, rather than to andreia, courage.’ (Location 2305)

‘Courageous actions of women, which were deemed “masculine”, “audacious”, and hence “unnatural” by Athenians, were praised by other Greeks,’ (Location 2309)

Through trade and colonization, Greeks had contact with various warrior women of differing ethnicities, but seem to have subsumed all or many of them under the idea of the Amazons,’ (Location 2314)

Between the lines, in the anxiety and paranoia, is where we can start to see how difficult it must have been for people to stay contained within the state’s rigid classifications. (Location 2325)

Inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writings on sexuality in the 1970s, some experts have asked if the sexual act of penetration, for example, might be seen as ‘the main means of defining gender. Men penetrated; women were penetrated. (Location 2343)

Both are rigidly patriarchal and view men and women as having clearly defined social roles. But while the Catholic Church regards being transgender as a kind of mental instability requiring psychological treatment, the Islamic Republic sees it as a physical issue that should be corrected with surgery. (Location 2351)

‘The idea that biology is destiny – or, better still, destiny is biology – has been a staple of Western thought for centuries,’ (Location 2356)

Only in the heavens could anyone live beyond the walls of social expectation. Only the immortals had the freedom to be themselves. (Location 2382)

There are some childhood experiences that haunt us forever. (Location 2387)

It took until 2015 for the UK to outlaw coercive or controlling behaviour, a form of abuse made famous by the case of Sally Challen, (Location 2400)

There’s a saying in parts of India that girls are paraya dhan, which means looking after a daughter is like watering a plant for a neighbour. (Location 2404)

I realise I had been brought up in a world in which we had learned to accept her suffering. (Location 2414)

What ties their stories together isn’t their social or ethnic background, but their isolation. It’s the isolation that compounds their helplessness. (Location 2421)

At home, the workload can feel endless. ‘There will be a very high expectation of the tasks that fall within her remit, and they will be extensive, and particular to each family member. (Location 2426)

Almost all the members of the family can bring their weight down to bear upon the brides who marry into them. (Location 2434)

harangued or abused daughters-in-law turning into domineering mothers-in-law. Women become the instruments of the same patriarchal forces that previously oppressed them. (Location 2437)

2008 novel The White Tiger, (Location 2442)

Today, Pakistan has some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the world. One of the biggest risk factors identified by researchers is witnessing violence in the family or neighbourhood, which then normalises these behaviours in the home. (Location 2448)

what’s happening to these women bears a striking similarity to modern-day slavery; it has all the hallmarks. (Location 2453)

book The Creation of Patriarchy, (Location 2461)

philosophers and theorists have long drawn comparisons between the legal and social status of wives in patriarchal marriages and the practice of slavery. (Location 2464)

according to UNICEF, 650 million girls and women alive today were driven into marriage as children. (Location 2473)

If there’s one thing, historically, that patrilocal and patrilineal systems have in common, it is that brides are generally the ones being ‘given away’ by their families – and, more precisely, by their fathers. (Location 2477)

It took until 2021 for mothers in England and Wales to see their names included on the marriage certificates of their children, (Location 2478)

Perhaps it wasn’t the subordination of women that originally provided the model for slavery and other forms of oppression. Maybe instead it was the practice of slavery that slowly came to inform institutions of marriage? (Location 2492)

wars of capture were especially wars of capture of women and young children,’ (Location 2500)

Men were castrated to work as eunuchs in royal households throughout the ancient world. (Location 2505)

for all its different forms, there is historical evidence of captive-taking all over the world, from small-scale hunter-gatherer societies all the way up to enormous empires, and right across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. (Location 2509)

Cameron estimates that at one stage, captives may have made up to around 30 per cent of the population of ancient Greece, 10 to 20 per cent of Roman Italy; 15 to 20 per cent of many early Islamic states; and as much as 50 to 70 per cent of Korea before the seventeenth century. (Location 2514)

Until fairly recently in human history, then, most people were not ‘free’, in the strictest sense of the word: they took as given that their existence depended on others who had direct control over them, whether it was a feudal lord or master, an emperor, or a monarch. (Location 2520)

Biological data shows that the families formed between Viking men and their captives went on to help populate the country. (Location 2529)

The legacy of taking captives as wives also survives culturally in the modern-day ritual of bride abduction, seen across the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, in Armenia and Russia, and in parts of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Indonesia. (Location 2534)

in ancient Rome, the name ‘Barbara’ was used to refer to the wife of a Roman citizen who had origins as a slave – as in ‘barbarian’. This word’s roots in turn lie in a racist term in ancient Greece referring to a foreigner who couldn’t speak Greek. (Location 2555)

Perhaps this could go some way to explaining the misogynistic suspicion of women that runs through so much of the literature of ancient Athens. Male anxiety that women weren’t loyal to their families or to the state, that they might someday revolt, may have been grounded in genuine fear because so many of them were foreign captives. (Location 2558)

the possibility that slavery and patrilocality might each have informed the other as societies began to draw up their rules around marriage. (Location 2562)

among peasant families in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, ‘it was customary for the bride’s father to give the groom a new whip so he could exercise his authority if he wished’. Peasant women, she adds, were often sold to the highest bidder. (Location 2568)

Of the factors essential to psychological wellbeing – the need to belong, to have control over one’s life, to be able to trust others, and see people as essentially good – slavery is an assault on all of them, (Location 2574)

‘One of the first thing they do to captives immediately is change their identity, shave their heads, take away their clothes,’ (Location 2578)

Once people were seen as socially distinct, they could be imagined as essentially different. Brutality towards them could almost be rationalised. (Location 2585)

In ancient Rome, slaves were categorised as legally dead – in other words, not human in the first place. (Location 2586)

Enslavement lowered the bar for depravity. It taught ordinary people how to separate and subjugate others, to normalise violence in their own homes and communities, to deny individuals their dignity and agency, and to extract their labour for free. (Location 2590)

The global trade in women has a racial element, too, just like the captive-taking of the past. (Location 2593)

Patterson describes this trade in trafficked women as being as brutal as anything he has seen in historical records of slavery. A woman is used up, he writes. Not just her body, but her ‘entire personhood’. (Location 2599)

Honour and obedience were bound up in this attachment, the master drawing honour from the slave’s obedience. (Location 2603)

When asked why she had taken the fat that nobody wanted, the aunt rationalised her choice by saying that she liked it. Delphy was unconvinced. What caused the woman to carry out this act, she believed, was the deep-rooted conviction that she was there to serve the family, that her contribution to it was worth less than everyone else’s. She had internalised the notion that she didn’t deserve any more than the fat. This ideology of female sacrifice, (Location 2609)

nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labour was unpaid. (Location 2616)

‘My proposition is that marriage is the institution by which unpaid work is extorted from a particular category of the population, women-wives,’ Delphy stated. Marriage in the cases she had studied in France was nothing less than a legal contract that kept a wife in a form of human bondage. (Location 2628)

Submission has become woven into the concept of femininity, (Location 2638)

Most countries began to accept marital rape as a crime only in the last few decades. (Location 2646)

In cultures in which extended families have tended to live nearby or under one roof, a wife’s deference extends to her husband’s parents. (Location 2650)

Submission by daughters-in-law was expected. In some of the more traditional households, it was the wife’s duty to kiss her mother-in-law’s hand daily and call her Lalla – or ‘mistress’. (Location 2653)

The pull of filial and wifely duties can be incalculably strong in some Asian, African, and Middle Eastern societies, especially when compared to the individualism that’s valued in the West. Escape is almost unthinkable. It would mean letting go of all the human connections that root you in the world, both physically and psychologically. But, more than that, it would mean turning your back on the social order. (Location 2661)

The webs of patriarchal obligation, as tightly woven as they can become, work in strange ways. They may be weighted with religion, tradition, or a duty to one’s elders, and loaded with guilt and shame. But they can also be couched in genuine concern for a child’s place in a society that demands they conform for the sake of everyone else. (Location 2664)

female genital mutilation. Widespread in parts of Africa and the Middle East, this practice is believed to date at least as far back as the slave trade along the Red Sea, which saw female slaves sold as concubines. (Location 2668)

Surrender may be morally reprehensible but, when there are few other options, it can also feel pragmatic. (Location 2676)

the term ‘patriarchal bargain’ to describe the ways in which women strategise within the constraints of systems dominated by more powerful and usually older men – those whom we might call as patriarchs. (Location 2684)

even when people are caged, there may be cages within cages. (Location 2686)

the mothers of sons in patrilocal families also need to make sure that nobody breaks ranks by marrying the ‘wrong’ person, splitting loyalties between partners and elders. Arranged or forced marriages have been one way of ensuring that the bargain works for older family members. This is the part that women play in upholding patriarchal control. (Location 2692)

The complexity of the patriarchal bargain multiplies when women find themselves negotiating between different patriarchal systems. (Location 2702)

in reality, most human relationships reflect some degree of ownership of one person over another. (Location 2717)

Even now, all of us are under someone’s authority to a degree, whether it is our parents, our partners, our employers, or the state. It’s the way this authority is exercised through the law and the eyes of society, the amount of agency we have in these relationships, and our ability to negotiate within them that determine how free we really are. (Location 2719)

Our survival and wellbeing depend ultimately on human relationships. Security lies in knowing that we have somewhere to turn to if things go wrong, cushioning us from the hazards of the world. (Location 2732)

The late anthropologist Ruby Rohrlich once described the rise of the patrilineal family as involving the ‘subversion of kinship relationships’, wresting women from the socioeconomic and religious solidarity of their own clans. (Location 2738)

Isolating brides within patrilocal families undermines the potential for sisterhood in every sense of the word. (Location 2740)

Orlando Patterson has described the experience of slavery as ‘natal alienation’, an existence in which family ties of all kinds are rendered deliberately unstable and replaced by the bond between the master and the slave, the oppressor and the oppressed. (Location 2744)

The psychologist Carol Gilligan and the psychoanalyst Naomi Snider have argued that the effect of patriarchal systems has been to push men into believing that they are the only ones with a self. Women are forced to believe that they are selfless. At the extremes, men and women become emotionally detached from each other. Patriarchy persists, they suggest, ‘because it renders the loss of relationship irreparable’. (Location 2748)

To be free, truly free with no ties to anyone at all, can be risky. It can leave a person open to other kinds of abuse or exploitation. (Location 2752)

More than an abstract freedom, people need systems that can lift them up. (Location 2755)

Tradition dictated that the oldest politician elected to Germany’s Reichstag should preside over the parliament’s new session. In 1932, that person was seventy-five-year-old Clara Zetkin. (Location 2761)

1981 book Women, Race & Class, (Location 2785)

2019 book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, (Location 2789)

In this new socialist state, Zetkin was revered as an icon. Her face was put on the ten-mark banknote and the twenty-mark coin, postage stamps were issued with her image, and streets named after her. (Location 2809)

The American activist, Angela Davis, too, was hailed as an anti-imperialist hero and featured on posters. Enormous crowds gathered to see her when she came to East Berlin in 1972. (Location 2810)

That lack of bananas became a popular metaphor for everyday life in the Soviet Union, an existence in which otherwise ordinary goods had the potential to turn into luxuries. (Location 2824)

the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has written, ‘If we don’t feel at least as much revulsion for the crimes of communism as we do for the crimes of Nazism, we will be condemned to misunderstand both our own past and that of others.’ (Location 2829)

the original ideals that Clara Zetkin stood for more than a century ago: for women’s right to vote, to be involved in politics, to go to university, to have legal equality in marriage, to be free of moral double standards around sexuality, and, above all, to not be exploited by anyone at all. (Location 2843)

In North America and western Europe, countries had long ago thrown their weight firmly behind democracy, individualism, and capitalism, accepting some degree of social inequality as the price to pay for these freedoms. (Location 2860)

Until they achieved their radical utopia, communist revolutionaries settled for state socialism, a kind of halfway house in which those at the top of the Communist Party set policies and laws aimed at eliminating inequality as quickly as possible. In reality, as we now know, these leaders ended up steering society with a crushing authoritarian hand, one that would turn out to be unimaginably ruthless. They would end up very far from their original ideals. (Location 2868)

In 1920, Soviet Russia became the first country in the world to legalise abortion. (Location 2881)

the Soviet Union made the most significant use of women soldiers: 800,000 served as combatants with the Red Army during the war – several thousand of them on the front line as snipers, machine-gunners, and tank crews, among other roles. More than 100,000 women were decorated for bravery. (Location 2893)

In the early years of the Cold War, there were few ways for those on the outside to know what was going on inside the Soviet Union. (Location 2910)

These interviews, referred to by some academics simply as the ‘Harvard Project’, would turn out to be one of the most revealing sources of information about the Soviet Union. (Location 2918)

perhaps this makes it all the more powerful that they so openly acknowledged how gender equality did exist for them in the Soviet Union – even when life was harsh in other ways. (Location 2932)

The historian Elaine Tyler May writes that, as paradoxical as it may sound, traditional gender roles were seen to underpin the modern postwar home in the United States. The country championed individualism, she notes, yet most people at that time chose to conform to social expectation. (Location 2941)

The male breadwinner earning enough to keep a suburban housewife in comfort was now being promoted as the aspirational ideal, centuries after the Founding Fathers had first nurtured it as a cornerstone of American democracy. (Location 2949)

Women’s fashion designers, she adds, began emphasising small waists and big hips and breasts. Magazines and books advised women on how to become better prospective wives, and warned about the potential downsides for the children of working mothers. (Location 2953)

She described it as one of the most closely guarded secrets of capitalist societies: ‘the possibility – the real possibility – of radically transforming the nature of housework’. (Location 2974)

The way Hungary achieved such rapid progress in gender equality, Fodor shows, was through a combination of legislation, propaganda, quotas, generous maternity leave, kindergartens and nurseries that were often located inside factories and workplaces, and social and health incentives tied to work, such as sick child leave and hot subsidised meals. (Location 2982)

The international scientific journal Nature reported in 2019 that when judged by the proportion of published papers authored by women, central and eastern European universities were among the best in the world when it came to gender balance. (Location 3001)

because they had been used to having plenty of childcare, these immigrants set up their own network of private kindergartens with longer operating hours than the ones otherwise available. (Location 3018)

1963 book The Feminine Mystique, (Location 3035)

In the United States, the idea of female emancipation had become so enmeshed with communist ideology that leaders were reluctant to concede anything to women’s rights activists for fear of what this might mean politically. (Location 3054)

According to Ghodsee, politics in the United States continues to be affected by the gender politics of the Cold War. (Location 3059)

‘There’s a whole kind of very conservative streak in the United States that thinks the fifties were the pinnacle of American superiority and that somehow it’s rooted in the nuclear family.’ (Location 3067)

The problem for both the East and the West was that women on each side were being forced to subscribe to a particular brand of womanhood, (Location 3080)

While stereotypes of masculinity stayed intact (and largely the same) on both sides of the Iron Curtain, femininity became a battleground. (Location 3082)

humans don’t start from scratch: we start with what we know, with legacies of tradition, honour, expectation, guilt, belief, and bias. There’s only so much change we are able to accept in a short space of time. (Location 3091)

The Revenge of the Domestic, (Location 3106)

There was an insistence that women and men be treated the same in their jobs outside the home. Inside the home, though, socialist leaders gently fell back on the belief that domestic gender roles were determined by biology. The socialist dream had been realised only part of the way. (Location 3111)

Trapped in a world in which they had paid employment and more rights, but few of the freedoms, goods, or labour-saving products available in the West, (Location 3114)

book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, (Location 3125)

if there is a longing for the old days of the Soviet Union, says Fodor, ‘the nostalgia is mainly for a caring state. People expect a state to take care of them.’ They expect pensions, welfare, and healthcare. And they also want some of the old services that brought people together, things like sports fields and canteens. (Location 3147)

Socialism proved that how the state was organised could have a profound impact on how people thought about themselves and each other, (Location 3158)

We cling to our customs, our beliefs, even if we don’t understand why we do. Instituting equality wasn’t just a fight against capitalism. It was also a fight against the past. (Location 3160)

Communism has been replaced by a new ideology, this time not looking to the possibility of a radical future, but reclaiming an imagined past. (Location 3168)

In the process, the struggle for gender equality suffered a reputational crisis. It was too closely linked to the former regime. (Location 3188)

Communist Party policies in Central Asia, for instance, had sought to end old practices of polygamy and child marriage. In 1927, the Soviets had also banned Muslim women in these states from wearing the veil. There was an immediate backlash. Thousands of women in Uzbekistan were killed for unveiling or cooperating with the Communist Party, (Location 3193)

They are expected to work and to have plenty of children. Except this time under a capitalist system. (Location 3208)

They’re not looking to bring back the past as it really was. They’re doing is using the past to strengthen their hand in the present. And this form of control – tinged with expedience and hypocrisy – is one of the enduring themes of patriarchal power. (Location 3210)

It was a movement that drew support from every section of society, from conservative Muslim clerics who already had enormous influence over ordinary Iranians to left-wing students and women’s rights activists pushing for socioeconomic and gender equality. (Location 3219)

People had been encouraged to shed their traditions and embrace Western modernity. But it was too fast for some. Their fear was that Iran was losing itself while the shah squandered money (Location 3227)

like so many revolutions that century, only some ended up getting the change they wanted. (Location 3231)

In 1936, the shah’s father had taken the controversial decision to ban women from veiling in public. After the revolution, veiling became mandatory. (Location 3236)

For the Muslim women who wanted to wear it, the shah’s earlier ban had caused shame and distress, sometimes secluding them further for fear of going out uncovered. (Location 3243)

over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of Iranians ended up leaving the country for Turkey, Europe, and the United States. Many of them were academics and professionals. For some, it was a matter of life or death. (Location 3250)

‘By the end of 1982, after over 5,000 young people had perished on the revolutionary gallows, the back of the revolt was broken.’ It was clear by then that one oppressive state had been replaced by another. (Location 3257)

In 2020, three activists – Mojgan Keshavarz, Yasaman Aryani, and her mother Monireh Arabshahi – were imprisoned after handing out flowers to women metro passengers in Tehran while unveiled. (Location 3276)

without protesting, they have already been punished by the government.’ (Location 3281)

The Handmaid’s Tale, (Location 3286)

Mandatory veiling has become less popular among everyday Iranians, but it’s an issue that still divides people. (Location 3288)

memoir The Wind in My Hair, (Location 3289)

For every step towards gender equality, there seems to be the risk of backlash. (Location 3313)

2018 book about China’s feminist awakening, Betraying Big Brother. (Location 3317)

Republican politicians have leaned into ‘traditional’ family values and railed against the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity. (Location 3323)

The roots of this rhetoric lie in some of the earliest states and empires, built upon the need to grow populations, secure people’s loyalties to the ruling elites, and breed warriors to expand or defend their territories. (Location 3326)

that control over populations has always been unstable. There’s no single moment when patriarchal values decisively ‘won’. Instead, what we see all the way through history is resistance. (Location 3332)

‘Change – the kind that topples social norms and uproots orthodoxies – happens slowly at first. (Location 3333)

even Ayatollah Khomeini ‘was positively received by secular political groups, from the left to the liberals, because of his radical stance against the shah and his Western allies, especially America’. (Location 3343)

Shirin Ebadi (Location 3349)

As Ebadi admits, it may have been a combination of idealism and naivete that allowed them to be misled by the promises of a leader who was as obviously conservative as Ayatollah Khomeini. (Location 3351)

‘The very day he started to implement the new laws on women I realized that even a religious leader can be deceitful,’ she writes. ‘The man who was supposed to be a savior became a dictator instead.’ (Location 3352)

Among the many reasons that Ayatollah Khomeini slipped into power as seamlessly as he did, immediately fashioning the conservative religious state he wanted, was that other sources of political opposition had been almost entirely quashed before him, (Location 3354)

By co-opting the women’s rights agenda in Iran to some small degree, the shah smothered more radical demands. He staved off opposition – but he could only manage it for a while. (Location 3361)

describes the compromises that feminists make within patriarchal states as a ‘devil’s bargain’. Reform from the inside may feel necessary and useful at the time, but the downside is that ‘fresh thinking on sexual and family life is foreclosed’ in the process. (Location 3365)

It becomes harder to push for a bold reimagining of society when people have been pacified with smaller changes. (Location 3367)

according to Afary, the ‘lack of political democracy and independent trade unions in factories and workplaces pushed workers further into mosques and theological seminaries, the only places where grievances could still be aired’. (Location 3381)

Feminism became demonised multiple times over, in part by the clerics, but also because it was seen to be associated with out-of-touch urban elites and despised Western imperialists. (Location 3383)

Woman at Point Zero, (Location 3389)

Shariati’s call, she explains, was for a return ‘not to the self of a distant past, but a past that is present in the daily life of the people’. (Location 3396)

‘Shariati offered a vision of femininity – vigorous, loyal, chaste and companionable – that entranced many Iranian women.’ His was, adds Sullivan, a revolutionary model of Islamic womanhood. (Location 3404)

Shariati died of a heart attack before the Iranian revolution began. Ayatollah Khomeini’s political convictions weren’t quite the same, but Khomeini did choose to pepper his speeches with the kind of language that Shariati had used. (Location 3405)

But in its own way, the Islamic Republic did try to reconcile religion with radicalism, and tradition with modernity. For all the other restrictions women and girls would face, the regime supported girls’ education and literacy. (Location 3412)

In early 2021, the Statistical Center of Iran disclosed that there had been more than 9,000 child marriages registered in the country the previous summer, almost all of which involved girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. (Location 3419)

At the height of the revolution, writes James Buchan, those who had never worn the black chador (a cloak that started to become customary in Iran from around the 1600s, loosely covering the whole body, exposing only the face, and held in place by hand) began to wear it to demonstrate their rejection of Western clothing and how much they identified with women in poorer and more rural areas who were more likely to veil. (Location 3423)

The chador turned into a middle-class statement of solidarity with the working classes. (Location 3426)

Buchan writes that the shah’s twin sister, Ashraf Pahlavi, who had played an active role in advancing women’s rights in Iran, watched crowds of demonstrators on the streets below from a helicopter during the revolution. She slowly realised that a moving black mass below her was actually women wearing the dark chador, like the one her grandmother had worn. ‘My God,’ she thought, ‘is this how it ends?’ (Location 3431)

There were other forces at play. Now the chador was associated not just with sexual modesty or religious devotion; it was also a visible marker of tradition. And at that moment tradition was a symbol of political resistance. (Location 3436)

The stranglehold of patriarchal power lies in how deeply woven it has become into so many of our cultures. (Location 3451)

More than anything, humans are cultural creatures. We feel the need to belong, to have a history, to feel that our existence has some meaning beyond ourselves. Without connections to the past, we would have no reference point from which to build our identities. (Location 3451)

It’s the desire to hold onto something permanent, especially when life feels impermanent, that drives us to defend our cultures and religions. (Location 3461)

conflict and disaster have only ended up making conservative voices stronger. (Location 3465)

2020 book The Future of Difference, (Location 3472)

when women are at once the keepers of culture and bound by it, the devastating consequence is that those who push back may be accused of not only betraying their society, but of betraying themselves. (Location 3482)

1994 memoir Dreams of Trespass, (Location 3490)

Women outnumber the men in their household. But, as she observes, women’s solidarity is a sensitive issue, ‘since the women rarely sided all together against the men’. (Location 3499)

In our personal pursuits of happiness, we make the compromises that work for us at the time, knowing that they may disappoint others with whom we might otherwise find solidarity. (Location 3511)

This isn’t always out of selfishness; it may just as often be about security or survival. However, it can have the effect of aligning with the patriarchal systems around us, accepting tradition for the sake of tradition, selecting which rights we prioritise, negotiating loyalties around family, culture, nation, race, class, and caste. This conflict, perhaps, is what interrupts female solidarity. (Location 3512)

Against White Feminism, (Location 3515)

They imagined that Afghan women would want to be free of patriarchal control above all, when in that moment – like anyone in that moment – what they really wanted was to be free of war. (Location 3519)

‘All we have left is these traditions.’ (Location 3527)

Patriarchy, far from being a return to the past, was in fact being constantly remade in the present, and sometimes with greater force than before. (Location 3532)

‘Women fled aristocratic tribal Mecca by the thousands to enter Medina, the Prophet’s city in the seventh century, because Islam promised equality and dignity for all, for men and women, masters and servants,’ Mernissi wrote in The Veil and the Male Elite. (Location 3540)

if women’s rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Koran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.’ (Location 3542)

like in so many other parts of life, religion had over time become recruited into the service of power, labouring for the patriarchs. (Location 3544)

‘To fundamentalists, women symbolise ethnic and cultural purity,’ (Location 3547)

‘Fundamentalist groups manipulate religion for ideological and political means, and women’s rights issues are a particular focus.’ The trick can be brazenly transparent: tradition is actively rewritten, and women are then supposed to follow it. ‘Obedience to the patriarchal order is looked upon as a sign of commitment to God and religious faith,’ (Location 3549)

As much as religion can feel like a set of beliefs that is fixed and eternal, religious meaning has always been manipulated to suit the politics of the day. (Location 3552)

Part of the privilege of having power is being able to pour your definition of what is moral, natural, or authentic into your own mould. (Location 3559)

Fatema Mernissi became one of the founders of a school of thought known as Islamic feminism. She studied the same texts as the conservative clerics but with different eyes, exposing their misinterpretations and ambiguities. (Location 3568)

Free Thinker, her biography of suffragist Helen Hamilton Gardener, Kimberly Hamlin (Location 3582)

they couldn’t avoid religion if they wanted to pull the broad mass of people along with their demands in a country as religious as the United States. This was why the second half of the nineteenth century saw a string of high-profile feminist critiques and reinterpretations of Christianity, (Location 3587)

2019 memoir Unicorn, the British-Iraqi filmmaker and drag performer Amrou Al-Kadhi (Location 3596)

After attending an event hosted by queer Muslims, they began to learn about Islam’s tradition of critical thinking and independent discussion. It was a revelation. (Location 3599)

‘Liberation starts with images dancing in your little head,’ (Location 3604)

Lewis Alfred Coser, a left-wing sociologist who had fled Nazi Germany for the United States, made the argument that conflict within and between groups in societies, far from being a bad thing, is in fact what fosters social change. (Location 3606)

We’re left with constant struggle. (Location 3610)

What we call patriarchy can be thought of as a set of factors in that ongoing conflict. It’s about people looking to assert dominance over others through their own appeals to nature, history, tradition, and the divine. Their claims are invented, adjusted, embellished, and reinvented all the time, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. (Location 3611)

the women of the revolution laid the ground for generations of women after them to become ‘the most transgressive agents of change’. Though they had been pushed to the margins, they achieved change from those margins. (Location 3616)

she’s old, and she doesn’t want to discriminate, she doesn’t want to hurt you, but this is her nature. This is the environment that she grew in,’ (Location 3624)

Iran’s government remains deeply repressive and still has discriminatory laws in place that favour men. But how individuals choose to live, how they create space for themselves, is another matter. (Location 3628)

2021 book Iranian Romance in the Digital Age, (Location 3638)

The revolution in 1979 may not have immediately delivered the change for which women once fought, but nor could it stop it. (Location 3641)

Instead of rising after a two-child policy was rolled out, since 2016 the birth rate has fallen. (Location 3658)

In 2014, the Indian Supreme Court recognised the official existence of a third gender, following a path already paved by Nepal and Bangladesh. (Location 3661)

In 2013, a twenty-four-acre ‘Gender Park’ was established in the city of Kozhikode, formerly Calicut, with a museum and feminist library exploring women’s history, including the stories of transgender women. Eight years later, a government primary school in one Kerala district introduced a gender-neutral uniform for its children (comprising shirts and three-quarter-length trousers). (Location 3671)

‘I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny,’ he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks. ‘I am my own foundation.’ We already own the tools for creating the world we want. (Location 3677)

As far back as we can see, humans have landed on rainbows of different ways of organising themselves, always negotiating the rules around gender and its meaning. Nothing has ever been static. (Location 3680)

Over millennia, we’ve been pushed gradually into believing that there are just a few ways in which we can live. Our societies have homogenised through colonisation and the spread of a narrow subset of laws and faiths – coalescing into what are now our ‘traditions’. (Location 3681)

As permanent as our ways of life appear to be, as solid as our institutions, our constitutions, our beliefs seem, there was never anything fixed about them. We cooked it up, almost all of it, and we can invent something else. (Location 3688)

There are no natural limits to how we make the future; only our imaginations and our courage. Yet, we hesitate. Standing at the precipice, we look back and feel terrified at what we might lose. Imagine instead everything we could gain. (Location 3689)

At least as far back as antiquity, military and political leaders learned that one of the most effective ways to secure power over people was to employ a strategy of ‘divide and rule’. Separating out smaller groups creates distrust and makes it harder for them to form alliances, so their loyalties shift from each other to those in charge. (Location 3692)

Division is part of what gives patriarchy its power. (Location 3697)

Patriarchal control is, in one sense, no different from any other. What sets it apart is that it operates even at the level of the family. (Location 3702)

States institutionalised human categorisation and gendered laws; slavery influenced patrilocal marriage; empires exported gendered oppression to nearly every corner of the globe; capitalism exacerbated gender disparities; and religions and traditions are still being manipulated to give psychological force to the notion of male domination. (Location 3710)

we are ever going to build a truly fair world, everything will need to be unpicked. There’s no way of separating out gendered oppression from the rest. (Location 3713)

the work of people who have devoted their careers to fighting for human dignity and freedom, who are brave enough to imagine radically different worlds in which nobody is able to exert too much control over another person. (Location 3720)

As much as all of us can’t bear to be treated unfairly, most of us are uncomfortable with others being treated unfairly as well – including strangers we’ve never met. We seem to share in their pain. We feel the need to help. Deep down inside us is a desire to love and be loved, and to extend that love beyond our inner circles. (Location 3721)

If we are ever to repair the damage caused by centuries of embedded patriarchal power, we can do it only by nurturing our shared humanity – this part of us that manages to love even when there are those seeking to divide and rule. (Location 3725)

Some will claim that oppression is permanently woven into who we are. They will say that humans are inherently selfish and violent, that entire categories of people are naturally dominant or subordinate. I have to ask: would we still manage to care about each other so much if that were true? (Location 3726)

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, (Location 3730)

Sabahattin Alkans was my experienced guide through Anatolia. (Location 3740)

The Logan Nonfiction Program fellowship gave me much-needed time away from the pressures of home life, as well as a community of other non-fiction creators in upstate New York. (Location 3741)

I am also indebted to the New York Public Library in Bryant Park for its incredible research collections; (Location 3743)

This book, and my previous two, would have been far weaker without the sharp eye and countless hours of Pete Wrobel, who has a unique talent for collecting information and never forgetting it. (Location 3749)

Every book I write brings me a little closer to understanding the world as it is, and it’s a world I want to be better for each of them. (Location 3753)

Ramayya, Nisha, States of the Body Produced by Love, United Kingdom: Ignota Books, 2019 (Location 3757)

Ramos, Imma, Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, London: Thames & Hudson and the British Museum, 2020 (Location 3758)

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E., They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Yale University Press, 2019 (Location 3774)

de Waal, Frans, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, London: Granta, May 2022 (Location 3786)

Pillai, Manu S., The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, India: HarperCollins, 2016 (Location 3826)

Sanday, Peggy Reeves, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002 (Location 3865)

Stone, Linda, Kinship and Gender: An Introduction, Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1997 (Location 3869)

Graeber, David, and Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, London: Allen Lane, 2021 (Location 3872)

WaiHong, Choo, The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains, London: I. B. Tauris, 2017 (Location 3876)

Suzman, James, Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017 (Location 3877)

Kuper, Adam, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformation of an Illusion, New York: Routledge, 1988 (Location 3890)

Hogan, Margaret A., and Tayor, James C. (eds), My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007 (Location 3895)

Mill, Harriet Hardy Taylor, Enfranchisement of Women, reprinted from the Westminster Review, July 1851, London: Trubner and Co., 60 Paternoster Row, 1868 (Location 3897)

Denetdale, Jennifer Nez, ‘Return to “The Uprising at Beautiful Mountain in 1913”: Marriage and Sexuality in the Making of the Modern Navajo Nation’, in Joanne Barker (ed.), Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017 (Location 3909)

Wagner, Sally Roesch, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists, Summertown, Tennessee: Native Voices Book Publishing Company, 2001 (Location 3919)

Morgan, Lewis Henry, Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1877 (Location 3928)

Engels, Friedrich, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1902 (Location 3930)

Bret, David, Doris Day: Reluctant Star, London: J. R. Books Ltd, 2008 (Location 3939)

Ryan, Melissa, ‘Others and Origins: Nineteenth-Century Suffragists and the “Indian Problem”’, in Christine L. Ridarsky and Mary M. Huth (eds), Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, Rochester, New York; Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2012, pp. 117– 44 (Location 3950)

Griffith, Elisabeth, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. (Location 3952)

Hamad, Ruby, White Tears/ Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Colour, London: Trapeze, 2020 (Location 3953)

Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, London and New York: Routledge, 2005 edition (originally translated into English and published in 1952) (Location 3963)

Balter, Michael, The Goddess and the Bull; Çatalhöyük: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization, New York: Free Press, 2005 (Location 3965)

Stone, Merlin, When God Was a Woman (originally published under the title: The Paradise Papers), London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978 (Location 3978)

Eisler, Riane, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, New York: HarperCollins, 1988 (Location 3979)

Steinem, Gloria, ‘Wonder Woman’, in Charles Hatfield et al. (eds), The Superhero Reader, University Press of Mississippi, 2013, pp. 203– 10 (Location 3980)

Gimbutas, Marija, and Dexter, Miriam Robbins, The Living Goddesses, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 (Location 3981)

Dexter, Miriam Robbins, ‘The Roots of Indo-European Patriarchy: Indo-European Female Figures and the Principles of Energy’, in Cristina Biaggi (ed.) The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins, History and Impact of Patriarchy, Manchester, Connecticut: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc., 2006, (Location 3983)

Eller, Cynthia, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000 (Location 3992)

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999 (Location 3993)

Gero, Joan M., and Margaret W. Conkey, Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991 (Location 3998)

Conkey, Margaret W., and Tringham, Ruth E., ‘Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology’, in Abigail Stewart and Domna Stanton (eds), Feminisms in the Academy: Rethinking the Disciplines, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1995 (Location 3999)

Kandiyoti Deniz, ‘End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey’, in Women, Islam and the State, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991 (Location 4029)

Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (Location 4032)

Kristiansen, Kristian, Archaeology and the Genetic Revolution in European Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022 (Location 4037)

Reich, David, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 (Location 4043)

Toler, Pamela D., Women Warriors: An Unexpected History, Boston: Beacon Press, 2019 (Location 4050)

Bolger, Diane (ed.), Gender Through Time in the Ancient Near East, Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 2008 (Location 4059)

A Companion to Gender Prehistory, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012 (Location 4060)

Anthony, David W., The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, 2007 (Location 4065)

Krause, Johannes, and Trappe, Thomas, A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe, translated by Caroline Waight, New York: Random House, 2021 (Location 4081)

Onon, Urgunge, The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan, London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2001 (Location 4090)

McLynn, Frank, Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy, Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015 (Location 4091)

De Nicola, Bruno, Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206– 1335, Edinburgh University Press, 2017 (Location 4098)

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin, and Auanger, Lisa (eds), ‘Introduction’, Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002 (Location 4102)

Blundell, Sue, Women in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995 (Location 4106)

Aristotle, Politics, second edition, translated by Carnes Lord, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013 (Location 4108)

Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, with an English translation by Hugh G, Evelyn-White, Works and Days, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1914 (Location 4109)

Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, London: Pimlico, 1975 (Location 4112)

Ramsey, Gillian, ‘Hellenistic women and the law: agency, identity, and community’, in Women in Antiquity: Real Women Across the Ancient World, (Location 4114)

Lardinois, André, and McClure, Laura (eds) (2001), Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001 (Location 4116)

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1762), Emile, or On Education, translated by Barbara Foxley, London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1921; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921 (Location 4118)

Davis, Angela Yvonne, Women, Race & Class, New York: Random House, 1981 (Location 4122)

Scott, James C., Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017 (Location 4127)

Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (Location 4130)

Crawford, Harriet E. W. (2013), The Sumerian World, London, New York: Routledge, 2013 (Location 4135)

Budin, Stephanie Lynn, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (Location 4140)

Kennedy, Rebecca Futo, Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City, New York: Routledge, 2014 (Location 4142)

Kennedy, Rebecca Futo, ‘Strategies of Disenfranchisement: “Citizen” women, minor heirs and the precarity of status in Attic Oratory’, in S. Gartland and D. Tandy (eds), Voiceless, Invisible, and Countless (under review at Oxford University Press) (Location 4143)

McCaffrey, Kathleen, ‘The Female Kings of Ur’, in Diane Bolger (ed.), Gender Through Time in the Ancient Near East, Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 2008, (Location 4145)

Gilligan, Carol, and Snider, Naomi, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Cambridge, England and Medford, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2018 (Location 4146)

Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990 (Location 4147)

Rantala, Jussi (ed.), Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 (Location 4153)

Bayliss, Andrew, The Spartans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 (Location 4156)

Penrose Jr, Walter Duvall, Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity and Courage in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 (Location 4158)

Holmes, Brooke, Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012 (Location 4160)

Golden, Mark, and Toohey, Peter, Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, Edinburgh University Press, 2003 (Location 4165)

Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992 (Location 4166)

Oyewumi, Oyeronke, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press, 1997 (Location 4170)

Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett, New York: Modern Library, 1982 (Location 4171)

Surtees, Allison, and Dyer, Jennifer (editors), Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World, Edinburgh University Press, 2020 (Location 4173)

Fletcher, Judith, ‘The Virgin Choruses of Aeschylus’, in Bonnie MacLachlan and Judith Fletcher (eds), Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the Unpossessed Body, University of Toronto Press, 2007 (Location 4175)

Hecuba by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith in Euripides III, University of Chicago Press, 1955 (Location 4178)

Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger, London: Atlantic Books, 2008 (Location 4182)

de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex (1949), London: Vintage Classics, 1997 (Location 4188)

Jayawardena, Kumari, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London and New York: Verso, 2016 (first published 1986) (Location 4188)

Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (Location 4189)

Stretton, Tim, and Krista J. Kesselring (eds), Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013 (Location 4197)

Cameron, Catherine M., Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016 (Location 4204)

Hochschild, Adam, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005 (Location 4210)

Rowbotham, Sheila, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World, New York and London: Verso Books, 2013 edition (first published by Pantheon Books, 1972) (Location 4232)

Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, with a new preface, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, first published 1982, with new preface 2018 (Location 4233)

Patterson, Orlando, ‘Trafficking, Gender and Slavery: Past and Present’, Speech delivered at The Legal Parameters of Slavery: Historical to the Contemporary, Published by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, 2011 (Location 4235)

Delphy, Christine, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, New York: Verso Books, 2016 (first published in English in 1984) (Location 4237)

Folbre, Nancy, Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy, New York: Verso Books, 2021 (Location 4239)

Garcia, Manon, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 4 May 2021 (Location 4240)

Mernissi, Fatema, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, revised edition, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987 (Location 4245)

Afzal, Nazir, The Prosecutor: One Man’s Pursuit of Justice for the Voiceless, London: Ebury Press, 2020 (Location 4252)

Patterson, Orlando, Freedom: Volume I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, New York: Basic Books, 1991 (Location 4255)

Gilligan, Carol, and Snider, Naomi, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Cambridge, England and Medford, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2018 (Location 4260)

Zetkin, Clara, Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015 (first published International Publishers, New York, 1984) (Location 4268)

Dollard, Catherine L., ‘Socialism and Singleness: Clara Zetkin’, in The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871– 1918, pp. 164– 75, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009 (Location 4269)

Davis, Angela Y., Women, Race & Class, New York: Random House, 1981 (Location 4274)

Arruzza, Cinzia, Bhattacharya, Tithi and Fraser, Nancy, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, London and New York: Verso, 2019 (Location 4274)

Drakulić, Slavenka, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, London: Random House, 1993 (Location 4281)

Applebaum, Anne, and Lieven, Anatol, ‘Was communism as bad as Nazism?’, Prospect, 20 October 2020 (Location 4283)

Goldman, Wendy Z., (1993), Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917– 1936, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (Location 4286)

Brown, Archie, The Rise and Fall of Communism, London: Bodley Head, 2009 (Location 4291)

Bauer, Raymond A., Inkeles, Alex, and Kluckhohn, Clyde, How the Soviet System Works, Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1956 (Location 4293)

May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American families in the Cold War era, New York: Basic Books, 1988 (Location 4298)

Faderman, Lillian, Woman: The American History of an Idea, New Haven: Yale University Press, March 2022 (Location 4299)

Bix, Amy Sue, Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013 (Location 4303)

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, New York: Norton, 1963 (Location 4320)

Gosse, Van, ‘Betty Friedan’, in The Movements of the New Left, 1950– 1975: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford Series in History and Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 (Location 4321)

Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: and Other Arguments for Economic Independence, New York: Nation Books, 2018 (Location 4324)

Rowbotham, Sheila, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World, New York and London: Verso Books, 2013 edition (first published by Pantheon Books, 1972) (Location 4332)

Harsch, Donna, The Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic, Princeton University Press, 2006 (Location 4335)

Childress, Diana, Equal Rights is Our Minimum Demand: The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran, 2005, Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2011 (Location 4369)

Buchan, James, Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and its Consequences, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012 (Location 4381)

Alinejad, Masih, The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018 (Location 4383)

Fincher, Leta Hong, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, London and New York: Verso, 2018 (Location 4412)

Beckerman, Gal, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, New York: Crown, 2022 (Location 4420)

Amir-Ebrahimi, Masserat, ‘The Emergence of Independent Women in Iran: A Generational Perspective’, in Janet Afary and Jesilyn Faust (eds), Iranian Romance in the Digital Age: From Arranged Marriage to White Marriage, London: I. B. Tauris, 2021 (Location 4421)

Freedman, Estelle B., Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013 (Location 4430)

El Saadawi, Nawal, Woman at Point Zero, London: Zed Books, 1983 (Location 4431)

Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993 (Location 4440)

Hark, Sabine, and Villa, Paula-Irene, The Future of Difference: Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism, London and New York: Verso, 2020 (Location 4445)

Mernissi, Fatema, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, New York: Basic Books, 1994 (Location 4451)

Zakaria, Rafia, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, New York: W. W. Norton, 2021 (Location 4452)

Mernissi, Fatema, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, revised edition, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987 (Location 4453)

Mernissi, Fatema, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Reinterpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1991 (Location 4454)

Hamlin, Kimberly A., Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, New York: W, W, Norton and Company, 2020 (Location 4465)

Eltahawy, Mona, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 (Location 4466)

Al-Kadhi, Amrou, Unicorn, The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen, London: 4th Estate, 2019 (Location 4467)

Alikarami, Leila, Women and Equality in Iran: Law, Society and Activism, London: I. B. Tauris, 2019 (Location 4469)

Afary, Janet, and Faust, Jesilyn (eds), Iranian Romance in the Digital Age: From Arranged Marriage to White Marriage, London: I. B. Tauris, 2021 (Location 4472)

Kandiyoti, Deniz, Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996 (Location 4474)

Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markman, London: Pluto Press, 1986 (originally published in French in 1952). (Location 4498)

Superior: The Return of Race Science (Location 4912)

She presents radio and television programmes for the BBC, (Location 4913)

In 2022 she was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and a resident scholar at the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin. (Location 4914)

In 2020 Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. (Location 4915)