Why are there more patriarchies in human history than matriarchies?

1.34K views

Why are there more patriarchies in human history than matriarchies?

In: 0

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

This isn’t something that has a widely accepted answer. Most of the societies that we have a lot of historical records about have been patriarchal to varying degrees. There are quite a few examples of societies that appear to be more egalitarian or even matriarchal, for example the Mosuo, but they’re in the minority. A lot of people believe that pre-agricultural societies generally had egalitarian gender roles, but there is only very limited evidence about how these societies functioned, so it’s hard to be certain. But if that’s true it suggests that the rise of agriculture may have had something to do with it.

Obviously cultural practices tend to spread from one place to another, so in most cases you can’t really say that different cultures developed a patriarchy independently of each other. For example it seems that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were probably patriarchal, and some aspects of their culture happened to end up spreading far and wide (3.2 billion people speak languages that are ultimately descended from theirs, including English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, etc.). So it may just be a historical accident that patriarchal cultures ended up being more influential.

You are viewing 1 out of 10 answers, click here to view all answers.