The popular socio-evolutionary view of the changing power dynamics between different groups of people in society tells us that we, the women of today, are the most emancipated in the entire “history of humanity.” But is this really the case? What if our foremothers were significantly freer than we are? Where did the established ideas about patriarchy come from, and how do they influence our reality, our relationships with each other, and our sense of self?
In her latest book, Patriarchs, Angela Saini not only asks these and many other complex and important questions, but also makes a desperate attempt to find answers to them.
The scope of her research is ambitiously broad—the history of patriarchy from its emergence to the present day. However, to deal with such a difficult task, Saini draws on an equally broad range of sources, research methods, literature, and anecdotal experience. Analyzing and dispelling popular (and often harmful) myths about patriarchy, she refers to anthropological, archaeological, historical, and gender studies, philosophical works, and her own interviews with researchers and opinion leaders. The book was first published in 2023, while Nata Hrytsenko’s Ukrainian translation was published this year, so the references and cases that Saini discusses are relatively new and relevant to the present day. In particular, she analyzes the events and preconditions of the contemporary gender context in post-Soviet and former socialist countries, as well as Putin’s Russia.
Patriarchs is an interesting and comprehensive study that departs from the dry format and language of academic texts, instead offering a deep, thoughtful, and emotional reflection. Its publication is an important contribution to the much-needed discussion about patriarchy and its impact on our individual and collective existence, especially now. The intersectional and anti-colonial approach to analysis and selection of material offers a nuanced picture of patriarchal reality. At the same time, the book provokes a number of questions and critical comments, particularly regarding the application of these principles to the experiences of women* in countries with a Soviet or communist past.
The central idea of Patriarchs is a critical debunking of the established, almost axiomatic idea in our society that patriarchy is a universal, “natural,” and eternal phenomenon. Saini offers a view of patriarchy as part of colonial Western European culture, often imposed on colonized communities as a tool for establishing control and submission. Moreover, she argues that contemporary Western “white” feminism, despite its dominant position in feminist academia, intellectualism, and even protest praxis, is often significantly less progressive (even by its own definition) than the conceptions and practices of gender relations in local colonized communities.
In her analysis, Saini traces the entire chronology of patriarchy throughout known (or at least researched) human history. However, rather than attempting a historical reconstruction, she offers something different: a critique and debunking of the historical myths that underpin the dominant patriarchal consciousness. Thus, beginning with a description of theories about gender relations in primitive communities that are popular in academic circles, mass culture, and the “collective unconscious,” Saini proves that none of them is based on sufficient material evidence. She concludes that theorizing about primitive societies tells us much more about us, modern people, than about the studied societies. She traces how the development of archaeology and new findings altered beliefs about the history of patriarchy, and how most of these beliefs ultimately continued to validate the primordialist view of patriarchy as a “natural” and inevitable state of affairs.
In her critique of popular and academic history, as well as the historical myths prevalent in it, Saini refers extensively to the book by anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. In addition, she uses a similar conceptual approach to analyze historical myths, applying it exclusively to gender roles and interactions. This framework helps to reveal one of the author’s key arguments: gender inequality is not inherent, universal, or inevitable.
Conceptually and ideologically, Patriarchs also resonates with feminist classics. In particular, Saini applies some of Donna Haraway’s key ideas in her reflections, such as criticism of essentialism regarding gender identity and its universality, criticism of “neutral science,” and the political disengagement of knowledge. Besides, her understanding of the origins, nature, and attributes of gender inequality is reminiscent of the definition used by bell hooks—“white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
The intersectional approach in Patriarchs helps highlight the diversity of experiences and the non-universality of patriarchy and gender identities. Rejecting the Eurocentric approach, Saini draws on the knowledge and experiences of indigenous peoples and colonized communities, who have often been marginalized and excluded from gender relations debates by “white Western civilization.” The anti-colonial perspective applied by Saini offers an alternative view not only of gender inequality as such, but also of the history of gender emancipation and feminism. Saini supports her observations with engaging illustrations. In particular, she mentions the town of Seneca Falls in the US state of New York, the cradle of American suffragism, where the first US conference on women’s rights was held in the summer of 1848. She notes that even though this event was a major political milestone for white American women, the rights and freedoms they demanded were only “a small fraction of what Native American women had in the same area” before the white colonizers showed up. She describes traditional gender roles in local communities (the Lenape, Onondaga, and other tribes). She concludes that in many cases, the personal and political agency of women in these communities was more significant than that of their contemporaries in Europe or the European colonies. Furthermore, Saini emphasizes that many indigenous peoples did not have a binary view of gender and sexuality, and many of these communities used terms to refer to a third gender—an idea that is still unattainable for the conservative traditionalist majority.
Despite the author’s fruitful and profound attempts to stick to intersectional principles in her research, I find it hard not to criticize the parts where she talks about the USSR and the reality of Soviet women. The pages of Patriarchs present a somewhat romanticized and idealized picture of the Soviet Union, with Saini describing the Soviet communists’ promises of women’s emancipation as reality. For example, while positively commenting on the division of labor and the level of employment of Soviet women compared to their Western European and American counterparts (which was strikingly different in favor of Soviet women), the author fails to mention the existence of criminal liability in the Soviet Union for “parasitism,” which made it impossible for these women to make a choice as such. Overall, it appears that in the sections devoted to the USSR, Saini falls into the trap of sentimentality toward the Soviet Union, something that often allures Western left-wing academia. This approach ignores the experience and reality of women from the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces, for whom “Soviet” did not always mean “emancipatory,” but rather “repressive.”
However, despite criticism, Patriarchs is an important contribution to a necessary discussion. The book offers not only a wide variety of materials, sources, literature, and case studies, but also a lively political reflection on where patriarchy came from, when it will be gone, and how we should cope with it all. Saini’s text is a call to ask difficult questions and reject simple answers, a reminder that if patriarchy had a beginning, it will inevitably have an end.
Yevheniia Kifenko, activist