The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.10

Patriarchy, the Hardest Case

This episode treats the subordination of women as history's hardest case of inequality: it appears in nearly every society you can name yet had a beginning that can be dated. It tests explanations including economist Ester Boserup's argument that plow farming favored male strength and shifted field work and status toward men, later confirmed with regional data. It presents historian Gerda Lerner's argument that patriarchy began in a specific place and era, the ancient Near East, through a Middle Assyrian law requiring certain women to veil in public. It concludes no single cause accounts for patriarchy, only weak mechanisms reinforcing each other, changing faster in the last 150 years than in the previous four thousand.