A VERY VERY VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF PATRIARCHY

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Imagine the world where genders have swapped  places. Men have no say in who they marry.

[00:00:05]If a woman chooses you, that's it. You cannot  refuse. Everything you own becomes hers. The moment you read, she decides how many children  you have. And actually, if she leaves you, children will stay with you just because they are  considered father's responsibility. You cannot study a law or medicine because universities do  not admit men. You cannot become an engineer or businessman. These rules are considered too  rough and demanding on men. You earn less than your female colleagues doing exactly  the same job because economy considers you a secondary earner. When you come home after a  full day of work, the home still needs cleaning, dinner, cooking, kids put into bed because  that's what men do. Your body, your time, your future, everything is decided by others  and justified by your gender. For centuries, this has been the reality for the women in  the most of the world and in some parts it still is. Hi, my name is Alice and I'm happy  to see you again on my channel in Call where I'm answering questions nobody asked. Today I'm  not going to answer a question. Maybe I will.

[00:01:18]I often hear the argument that it was always  this way. It's the natural order of things that God created women to obey men and follow  them. But here is what science actually says.

[00:01:30]For most of the human history, for hundreds of  thousands of years before cities, agriculture, private property, people lived in small  kinship bands with shared resources and no formal hierarchies. Roles existed. Men hunted  more, women gathered more, decisions were made together. It was not a perfect equality. More  skilled individuals earned more respect. But these huntergatherer societies were far more  egalitarian than the farming civilizations that came after them. And the idea of one gender being  superior to another simply didn't exist yet. And because children were raised communally, passed  between caregivers, fed by the group, belonging to everyone, paternity barely mattered. But that  would change at the moment. There was a private property to inherit. The transition from hunting  and gathering to farming triggered a fundamental shift in the power dynamics between genders.  Farming created surplus stored food, livestock, land, things that could be accumulated, owned, and  passed down. And surplus created something that nomadic life never had, inheritance. Suddenly,  it mattered whose children were whose. Suddenly, controlling a woman's body meant controlling the  bloodline and the property that flowed through it. At the same time, farming communities needed  more children than nomadic ones. Better nutrition meant more surviving births, but also meant more  pregnancies. Now, a woman could spend 20 or more years of her life being pregnant or nursing. Bound  to the home, her mobility severed. Men, meanwhile, monopolized spaces that required movement, the  fields, markets, and war. The more mobile you were, the more political power you accumulated.  and women by biology and circumstances were increasingly immobile. Another factor was  patrioality. Patrioality is a pattern where women left their families and moved to their  husband's households, losing their network of mothers and sisters while sons stayed home and  accumulated land across generations. Male lineages became continuous. Female ones were constantly  interrupted and continuity in the agricultural world meant power. War compounded everything.  As settlements grew and resources became worth fighting for, men's physical advantages in upper  Buddhist strength became military decisive. Men formed the warrior coalitions that defended and  raided communities. Violence wasn't just a symptom of patriarchy, but one of its engines. Finally,  ideology arrived to justify what economics and physical power had already built. It took  different forms in different civilizations, but the function was always the same. In  ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, women were bared from public life and confined  to inner rooms of the house. In Rome, the law placed women under the absolute authority of her  father. In the earliest form of Roman marriage, she passed directly into her husband's control  at the wedding. And in the later imperial period, most women remained tied to their fathers  rather than their husbands. But they were never independent legal persons. Tertilian, one  of the founding fathers of the western theology, addressed women directly and his words  were not metaphorical. You are, he wrote, the devil's gateway. Woman was a descendant  of Eve, the source of sin and seduction. Too easily corrupted by the devil to be trusted  with authority over herself, let alone anyone else. Confucian China codified the three  subordinations. A woman abidden to her father before marriage to her husband after and to her  son in a widowhood. The Hindu Manusi prescribed the same dependency from cradle to grave. And the  do in Muscovite Russia spelled out a wife's total obedience in a household manual. There was a  list of prescriptions how to behave, how to treat your wife if she's not respectful enough to  you. Concept of cover in Victorian England made a married woman legally invisible. A wife had  no legal existence separate from her husband.

[00:05:30]She couldn't sign contracts, couldn't be sued,  couldn't keep her own wages. If she walked away, she couldn't keep her rights over her children  either because children were considered her husband's property. All these paradigms emerged  on different continents in different centuries, but they all share the same underlining structure  that a woman belongs to a man and that the order of things, natural or divine, requires her to  remain so, canonizing the existing hierarchy.

[00:05:55]But patriarchy was not a biological necessity for  human survival. Hunter gatherer societies survived for hundreds of thousands of years without it.  It emerged when agriculture made accumulation possible. Surplus beyond immediate need, private  property that could be passed down and wealth that could compound over generations. Once accumulation  was possible, the competition for it began. And in that competition, physical strait and control  over reproduction became decisive advantages.

[00:06:24]Patriarchy emerged from the world of subsistence  farming, constant warfare, and reproduction as the only way to secure the future. But that world  no longer exists. Technology replaced muscle in the fields a century ago. Contraception decoupled  reproduction from destiny. The economy no longer runs on physical strength and hereditary land.  Every material reason that once made patriarchy a functional adaptation has dissolved, and what  remains is a pure inertia propped up by those who benefit from it. Just to be clear, I'm not trying  to say that people who created the system were villains. Patriarchy wasn't driven by malice.  It was driven by survival instinct operating rationally within the conditions available.  Accumulate resources, control reproduction, secure the bloodline. Under agricultural  conditions, power and wealth were simply the most reliable mechanisms for ensuring your  descendants survived. The drive wasn't apparent.

[00:07:19]It was logical. But here's what the science  of cooperation tells us. The individualistic strategy was never actually the optimal one.  As biologist Edward Osbborne Wilson put it, within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic  ones. But groups of altruists consistently beat groups of selfish individuals. Humans are not  strongest or fastest species on the planet.

[00:07:41]We survive because we cooperate. This is our  primary evolutionary advantage. and cooperative groups consistently outco compete individualistic  ones over time. Hunter gatherer bands that shared resources had better collective outcomes than  those who didn't. The more egalitarian the group, the more resilient it proved to be, which  means patriarchy was not just made obsolete by technology. It was arguably never the  optimal strategy. Only the dominant one are the conditions that temporarily rewarded individual  accumulation over collective survival. Personally, I see the patriarchy as an evolutionary stage  that humanity has simply outgrown. And the next stage must be the one built on equality, on  the interests of everyone rather than dominance of some. And it seems not just possible, but  also obvious. The direction is clear. Today, in the countries we call progressive, it can  look like the work is done, but scratched the surface and the structure is still there. And in  much of the world, it never left. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has systematically erased women from  public life since returning to power in 2021.

[00:08:47]Women cannot work, cannot travel without male  guardian. There are written government decrees stating that a woman's voice in public is a  form of immodesty. More than 2 million Afghan girls are banned from secondary education. And  this is not history. This is today. In India, the devodas system persists despite being outlawed  in 1988. Young girls predominantly from the lead communities, the lowest cast, are dedicated  to temple deities in religious ceremonies and subsequently enter a life of sexual exploitation,  basically slavery. Over 48,000 Devodasi remain documented in country today with girls as young as  12 being pushed to prostitution. The daughters of Devadasi become devodasi themselves and it's not  because of religion but because authority leaves no other road. These girls are born to the system  built to consume them. In Africa, female genitalia mutilation has been inflicted on over 230 million  women and girls alive today, according to UNICEF.

[00:09:44]In Somalia, the rate is 99%. In Guinea, 96%. Every  year, approximately 4 million girls more are at risk. It has no medical benefit. It exists for one  reason only, to control female sexuality, to mark a girl as belonging to the system before she's old  enough to question it. And these are not isolated footnotes. They are present tense of a story as  old as civilization itself. And even in the west, the system has not disappeared. It just became  more polite. The gender pay gap persists in every country on earth. No exception. Women perform  approximately 75% of the world's unpaid care work. The expectations haven't go anywhere. They  have been added to. A woman is now expected to be a full-time professional, the primary caregiver,  and the household manager. Women come home from work to more work. And when they cannot do it all  perfectly, the world calls it a personal failure rather than a structural one. The World Economic  Forum estimated last year that at the current pace of change, full global gender parody is still  123 years away. And there is another argument that feminism doesn't always get enough credit for  making that patriarchy is not just bad for women, it's actively harmful for men, too. Not in the  same way, not with the same severity maybe, but the damage is real and measurable. The same  system that stripped women of agency told men that they must be strong, dominant, and in control  at all times with no exceptions. You are either an alpha, a provider, protector, a winner, or you're  nothing. There is no room for vulnerability. No space to say, "I'm struggling." Globally, men die  by suicide at more than double rate of women. Men are less likely to seek help for depression  or trauma. Not because they do not suffer, but because this culture told them that suffering  is weakness. and they suppress what they feel until it has nowhere to go. Toxic masculinity  doesn't serve most men. It only serves those at the very top of a hierarchy. Those who benefit  from everyone else staying in their lane, staying silent and compliant. For every other man, it's  a cage. It sends them to wars they didn't choose, makes them die earlier, drink more, be alone more  than they want to be. Patriarchy doesn't liberate them. It conscripts them. But we can already  see what the alternative could look like, and it works. In Iceland, both parents receive six months  of paid parental leave, the majority of which is specifically reserved for this parent and cannot  be transferred. Researchers show that fathers who take parental leave are more involved in child  care for years afterward and their relationships with their kids are more stable. As a result,  their children have better outcomes in life.

[00:12:18]Sweden introduced shared parental leave in 1974  and they were the first country who did that. In Norway, the earmarked father's quarter has driven  uptake to 90% of fathers. Japan now offers fathers 12 months of paid paternity leave, the longest  entitlement in the world. When boys are raised with permission to feel, are taught emotional  intelligence instead of emotional suppression, encouraged to ask for help, to name what they  experience. They grow into men with healthier relationship, lower rates of depression, and  better outcomes across almost every dimension of well-being. They grow into men who see women not  as competition or territory but as equal partners, people to build a life with without the crushing  weight of being in charge for everything and never allowed to fall apart. Gender equality is not a  redistribution of power that leaves men without anything. It's a liberation for everyone. Women  pushed back from the moment the system existed.

[00:13:12]But it wasn't until the early 20th century  that organized resistance became global and impossible to ignore. carried by women who were  imprisoned, force-fed, mocked, called unnatural and hysterical, and who kept going anyway. They  didn't leave to see the world they thought for, but they changed it. The progress is real. It is  astonishing actually how much it has changed in just a century. But we owe it to them, to these  women, not to forget that and not to waste it.