April 26, 2023
The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality by Angela Saini was published in February and I’ve been reading it slowly, soaking up the bounty of its pages. It’s incredibly readable and not very long, but it feels so nourishing and important that I feel I need to savor it, like sipping a bowl of healing broth.
In The Patriarchs, Saini argues that patriarchy is not—and was not—an inevitable social structure for humans. Chapter after chapter, Saini outlines the lack of evidence to support patriarchy’s inevitability and instead explains that it is simply a widespread belief that has become self-reinforcing. “Men are on top, so men are stronger and should be on top, so they’ve always been on top, so it’s inevitable.”
Though largely infiltrated by the European colonial interpretation of gender, humans have long experimented with a wide range of social structures. Cultures throughout history have existed with varied gender expressions and social structures, many of them with women being revered and respected as the leaders of households, politics, the economy, and culture. But the result is not just a picture of what we have now in reverse. Saini does a beautiful job of laying out the richness of these other cultural examples. The detailed pictures that she paints feel like journeys into an Ursula K. Le Guin novel about another world, so textured and profound, and it’s comforting to know that these other ways of being were and are part of our world.
Yet Saini takes it further as she also counters a view that is more frequently perpetuated in the Jungian world: that humans progressed uniformly at a certain point in history from matriarchies to patriarchies.
She’s very careful to indicate that while such a linear progression is compelling to consider, it’s an overly tidy story and one that is not consistent with the actual evidence. There is no single line of “progress” in which one form of human society gets wiped out in favor of a new form. The reality is far more complex.
Throughout The Patriarchs, the historical exploration invites a more nuanced exploration of many Jungian ideas like the history of the development of consciousness, the archetype of the Great Mother, and the feminine and masculine. Even in the “pro-feminine” camp, things can get far too tied up with the binary, and Saini emphasizes the dangers of that myth too.
“Men and women are framed as opposites or as possibly complementing each other, but never as varied individuals who might possess overlapping traits.
Western goddess-worshipping myths leave little room for bloodthirsty, violent goddesses like Kali, the Hindu diety. Instead, the strength of female-led societies is pinned on women having virtues that men don’t, and on men having violent natures that women don’t.”
She continues a little later:
“The qualities we define as ‘masculine’ and feminine’ are shaped by social and cultural forces. There’s no basis for assuming that what sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century Western beliefs about gender were held by people living in completely different societies thousands of years ago.
…[E]very feminist wave brings along its own notions of ‘female specialness'… This is understandable in societies in which women have been undervalued. It’s a way of regaining a sense of pride and self-belief. … [But the] cracks appear when this ‘specialness’ proves to be another straightjacket, distancing women from what are considered to be ‘masculine’ traits and defining ‘femininity’ in tight, prescriptive ways. Behind the ‘Mother Goddess,’ after all, is the archetype of the selfless, nurturing woman whose primary role is to reproduce and care for others—a set of expectations that doesn’t fit all women and has proven a burden to many.”
I find this scholarship of critical value as we seek to further understand depth psychology in the context of our daily lives, in particular in the face of widespread gender policing on the streets and in legislatures, be they bans on reproductive care (“women are meant to mothers”) or attacks on basic trans rights to exist (“men should be men and women should be women”).
To me, a better world is one in which the human experience is framed through the lens of individuation, of becoming, and not through the forced adherence to old stories about sex, gender, and power that have actually never been true.
As the most recent example, while writing, Montana House Representative Zooey Zephyr—representing my hometown of Missoula—was barred from the house floor for delivering a passionate speech about trans rights. It was a beautiful and urgent plea for humanity.
The obsession with “masculinity” and “the traditional women” has become the central platform of the GOP and it’s killing people. It’s killing men too, to be sure, through suicide, war, and household violence just as it’s killing women, non-binary, and trans people through the withholding of medical care, bullying, and suicide.
I want a better world for all of us and will continue to fight for a world in which each person can choose their own paths and find their own destiny, not be born into one and tasked with a gendered charter. That’s what fascism asks of us, not democracy.
To support the protestors defending Rep. Zooey Zephyr’s right to speak, click here.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies