s1gr1d 's review for:

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini

5.0

challenging informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

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An amazing book packed with information, I highlighted countless paragraphs! The book traces the diverse history of how humans organized themselves socially, revealing how different circumstances led to different forms of patriarchy. There’s no single "patriarchy" but rather varied local and cultural systems of oppression. For instance, the book shows how states began categorizing the complex realities of human existence into rigid "men" and "women" categories, each serving specific state needs. Men for warfare, women for reproduction. It also exposes how marriage functioned essentially as slavery: women give their identities (cutting their hair, taking new names, leaving families), performed unpaid labor (childcare and housework), and submitted to their "masters" (women couldn’t work without husbands' permission, and marital rape was legal for the longest time).