Cinderella Was a Worker

Then one morning, I caught her admiring herself in the mirror in her new Cinderella outfit, and she said, “This dress makes me look so pretty.” Almost robotically I added, “And brave and smart and strong.” My three-year-old then turned to me and with utter matter-of-factness asserted, “But mommy, princesses are not strong.”

I stared at her. This was one of those moments when I had to stand up against an entire social milieu that pigeonholes female-identifying children into stereotypical roles of weakness and submissiveness.

I panicked at first, but as a social scientist, I understood that what this aspiring princess needed was some empirical evidence. Thankfully, the two of us had watched the animated Cinderella movie many times, and I remembered the scene where the young heroine washed floors with a large bucket of soapy water.

I rushed down to the basement and found a five-gallon bucket from Home Depot. I took the bucket outside and filled it about halfway up with water. “Cinderella doesn’t have anyone to help her carry the bucket when she washes the floors,” I said. “So she has to be strong enough to carry the bucket, right?” My little three-year-old nodded and dutifully tried to lift the bucket. Her eyes widened at the weight of it. Point made.

Today, my daughter is almost twenty-two years old. I recalled this specific moment in her childhood as I started reading Angela Saini’s brilliant new book, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. As I found myself drawn into Saini’s deep history of male domination, I realized that my spirited effort to redefine the princess trope faced thousands of years’ worth of indoctrination. The great value of this slim and accessible volume is the sweeping story it tells about how “men came to rule” in a world that was once much more diverse in its social structures.

The Construction of Patriarchy

Too often, the American left is characterized as being dominated by “brocialists” and “manarchists.” But there is a long tradition of socialist and anarchist feminism that interrogates the myriad ways in which our economic systems are intertwined with older forms of domination.

Saini is an award-winning British science journalist who discusses the latest biological, anthropological, and archeological evidence available to reveal the contingency of patriarchy as a system of power and domination. She is the author of two previous books, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story (2017) and Superior: The Return of Race Science (2019), both of which investigate the way science has been complicit in perpetuating structural forms of discrimination.

In her latest book, Saini explores a rich diversity of cultural contexts and historical epochs in which patriarchal forms of power were not hegemonic. She writes:

This is the story of individuals and groups, fighting for control over the world’s most valuable resource: other people. If patriarchal ways of organizing society happen to look eerily similar at opposite ends of the globe now, this isn’t because societies magically (or biologically) landed on them at the same time, or because women everywhere rolled over and accepted subordination. It’s because power is inventive. Gender oppression was cooked up and refined not only within societies; it was also deliberately exported to others for centuries, through proselytism and colonialism.

Through her own reporting in the field and in conversation with experts across a wide variety of disciplines, Saini has penned eight powerful chapters with one-word titles like “Domination,” “Destruction,” “Restriction,” “Revolution,” and “Transformation.” The key project of the book is to trouble the reader’s understanding of male domination as somehow hardwired into the human species.

Saini celebrates the remarkable diversity and creativity of different societies and shows how relations of power and production were always flexible and hotly contested by different groups in society. “As far back as we can see, humans have landed on rainbows of different ways of organizing themselves, always negotiating the rules around gender and its meaning,” she writes.

Man-Made Hierarchies

Appeals to human nature always contain within them specific worldviews that help justify certain political and economic arrangements, usually for the benefit of the elites with the most to gain from those arrangements. Over the millennia, Saini writes, “we’ve been pushed gradually into believing that there are just a few ways in which humans can live — to the point where we now feel that the social patterns we follow must be natural rather than man-made.”

As toddlers internalize the idea that “princesses are not strong,” they also accept a specific set of ideas about women as being unable to defend themselves and therefore in need of different forms of male protection — whether from fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons. It means their primary goal should be to seek out this type of protective arrangement through the deliberate cultivation of comportments and behaviors that will enhance their value (and therefore implicitly ensure their safety) in a world dominated by men. Girls become obsessed with beauty and sweetness, thinness and grace, or whatever particular constellation of characteristics that their societies deem desirable.

This kind of stealth socialization is not only embedded in Disney films. As Saini argues so eloquently, it also deeply permeates entire fields of scholarly and scientific inquiry. One wonderful example in the chapter called “Genesis” is the story of the Lithuanian-born archeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), who initially had a successful academic career and was widely considered one of the most prominent specialists in the material cultures of Bronze Age Europe. In the 1950s, she introduced what is called the “Kurgan hypothesis,” which identified the linguistic homeland (or “Urheimat”) of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe to the north of the Black Sea.

For almost thirty years afterward, Gimbutas oversaw several major Neolithic excavations in southeastern Europe and painstakingly documented vast arrays of spiritual and secular objects left behind by the earliest Europeans. Combining her knowledge of archeology and linguistics with the rich folklore traditions of Eastern Europe, Gimbutas proposed that the migration into mainland Europe of the violent, warrior Kurgan culture of the steppe displaced a unique culture of “Old Europeans” whom she believed were once peaceful goddess worshippers.

Gimbutas rooted the origins of patriarchal power in Europe in these westward conquests. As Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels had proposed before her, she argued that early human societies practiced a form of primitive matriarchal communism. For these latter hypotheses, Gimbutas became an outcast within the discipline of archaeology; even otherwise sympathetic colleagues considered her something of an eccentric feminist trying to invent out of whole cloth the myth of a gynocentric past.

The Kurgan Hypothesis Vindicated

Saini’s own research into the life and legacy of Gimbutas reveals just how hostile academia could be to anyone who dared to challenge the idea that European prehistory was male dominated. Stereotypes about gender roles get projected back in time. If physical human remains are found with weapons, the bodies are assumed to have been male. If found with jewelry, the automatic assumption is that they were female.

All of this changed with the advent of genetic testing, when archeologists working together with biologists began to analyze samples of ancient DNA. In place of speculation based on certain persistent gendered assumptions, DNA evidence reveals that our prehistoric ancestors did not have the clear sex-based divisions of labor imagined by previous generations of archeologists.

These new studies have rehabilitated Gimbutas’s reputation and sparked renewed interest in her work. For many years, her Kurgan hypothesis remained a matter of fierce debate. Tracing ancient migrations and their impacts on the indigenous populations they encountered, replaced, or assimilated into was painstaking archeological and linguistic work.

Today, the examination of the dispersion of different Y-chromosomal haplogroups in different geographic areas allows researchers to clearly see ancient migration patterns. It turns out that on this issue, Gimbutas was right: there was in fact a violent, male-dominated culture living in the Eurasian Steppe which swept into Europe, bringing with them the Proto-Indo-European language and perhaps patriarchal forms of power.

Saini concludes:

Marija Gimbutas wasn’t right about everything. But where she was correct in her analysis was that between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, gender relations changed profoundly. Ancient Greek society would become deeply skewed in favor of men . . . Whatever brought about this social shift — whether it was cultural interaction, proselytization, forceful coercion, environmental change, social disruption seeded by a small number of people, or some combination of factors — a certain form of gendered oppression was gradually established in Europe and parts of Asia.

Varieties of Patriarchy

From here, Saini continues with her project of interrogating the continued workings of patriarchal power around the world, with some particularly fascinating chapters on gender-based oppression in India and Iran as well as an examination of various experiments to undermine patriarchy in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. After a fascinating survey of how exactly different patriarchal forms of domination came to insinuate themselves into different societies and then proceeded to masquerade as both natural and inevitable, Saini reminds us that we have the ability to resist its power:

Patriarchy as a single phenomenon doesn’t really exist, then. There are instead, more accurately, many patriarchies formed by threads subtly woven through different cultures in their own way, working with local structures and existing systems of inequality. States institutionalized human categorization 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. . . . If we are ever going to build a truly fair world, everything will need to be unpicked.

In the end, this great unpicking only becomes possible if we realize that patriarchal power is fluid and precarious, always needing to reassert itself when faced with challenges to its authority. These challenges can come in the form of DNA evidence undermining the myth of the supposed naturalness of male domination, or in the form of organized women’s movements, or in the work of revolutionary socialists trying to reimagine and to expand our definition of what counts as the family.

It can also appear in smaller ways: in women refusing to take their husbands’ name upon marriage or in giving children matrilineal surnames. It can come in the form of people of all genders refusing to get married and have children at all. And it can also come when one exasperated mother fills up a bucket with water to convince her Disney-obsessed toddler that princesses are indeed strong.