“It’s important to remember the lengths that those at the top will go to in order to refashion and reassert their control over people” - Angela Saini
Interview with critically acclaimed author and journalist, Angela Saini
Angela Saini is a journalist and author based in New York. She teaches science writing at MIT and her work appears regularly in National Geographic, Science and Foreign Policy. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and her latest, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford. At HistFest 2024, she chaired Plague Nurses and Lady Doctors with Kavitha Rao and Dr Lara Thorpe.
You’ve written four hugely successful and critically acclaimed books, Geek Nation, Inferior, Superior and your latest, The Patriarchs. They’re all big in scope and powerful in their arguments. What is it that draws you to a story?
Most of the time, it’s curiosity. Although my last three books have all been about exploring aspects of human difference, they’re all driven by the same simple belief that there must be tangible explanations for social inequality. The Patriarchs in particular is asking a very basic question: how did men in many human societies come to have so much power compared to women?
Can you tell us about The Patriarchs?
Anthropologists have known for a long time that male domination among humans is neither universal nor timeless, so this book is an attempt to trace a history of how men came to rule in the parts of the world where they do. The last book looking specifically at this was the late Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy around four decades ago, but we have amassed so much more knowledge since then in archaeology, gender scholarship, the classics and science to help shine a light on this question. I use examples from different parts of the world to show that patriarchy was never inevitable anywhere, but has been rather a slow grift, gradually seeping into cultures and laws in the interests of narrow elites.
Was there anything that surprised you when you were conducting your research?
The word ‘patriarchy’ means ‘rule of the father’, implying that it is male domination within the family that set the basis for patriarchal power. But the historical evidence instead suggests that patriarchy actually began at the top, in some of the world’s earliest states, as a system imposed by the elites on everyday families. For me, that opened up a world of possibilities for how we imagine power - and how we might more effectively challenge it.
In The Patriarchs you draw from many academic disciplines. How has science challenged accepted history?
We have remarkable evidence now from ancient DNA studies, allowing geneticists together with archaeologists to trace human movement patterns and the relationships between individual people over enormous periods of time. This is evidence that needs careful analysis and is prone to overstatement, but also capable of offering beautiful insights into gender relations in history. For example, whether ancient societies were matrilocal or patrilocal.
Is patriarchy unique to humans?
In most ways, yes. Kin relationships in other species, especially primates, are usually arranged through mothers. The father being the head of a family unit is very rare. Male domination is common, but this most often means that an alpha male is dominating other males as well as females. Even one of the two closest species to us genetically, the bonobo, is matriarchal. There is far more social variation in other species than we have traditionally assumed, and scientists are uncovering more data about this all the time.
Are their historical examples of matriarchies?
Not as far as most Western anthropologists are concerned, but there are arguments to be made that matrilineal and matrilocal societies (of which there are still many all over the world) are not truly patriarchal either. We have strong evidence of communities in the distant past in which gender didn’t really appear to matter. We need to stop imagining that a society can only exist with one gender in charge.
Have things changed for women as much as we might like to think they have?
Things have always been changing for as long as we have evidence. Patriarchy is thousands of years old in some parts of the world, but for others, it was imposed only in the last couple of centuries. So, progress (or the lack of it) depends on where you are. It’s important to remember the lengths that those at the top will go to in order to refashion and reassert their control over people. Patriarchies are being continually remade, for instance today in Afghanistan and Iran. They frame this as a return to tradition, but that’s a smokescreen. They are selectively picking from the past to create new patriarchies for the 21st century.
What’s next for you?
I am working on a new book, to be published in 2026, about human classification and what the boxes we are given to tick on forms really mean. It’s deliberately provocative, but I ask how states might look if they stopped categorising people and instead recognised each person as an individual.
The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule is published by Fourth Estate and is out now.