Earning the Bronze Medal since the Bronze Age: History of Patriarchy

Politics has a history of being male-dominated. Women had to fight to even have a say in politics and only recently have women begin to fill the leadership positions in politics. I find it reasonable to say that such leadership positions require higher degrees of education. Looking at the history of our countries leaders, logically it made sense that women would not take part in politics (especially before the 19th ammendment) because women were expected to stay home and raise children. Today, although there are many more women who hold powerful positions, politics still seems to be male-dominated and my gut reaction is again to claim that the socially accepted view has not completely evolved yet and so the thought of women in power is still somewhat radical. However, I wasn’t quite sure how we got to this point where a woman’s role was to be at home.

As I was thinking about monarchy, I noticed that men also tend to dominate as well. Perhaps the reason for so many Kings can be attributed to the biblical belief that lineage was passed on through the male, especially since, depending on the interpretation, God made Adam first. Yet this is all speculation so I searched for reasons that could account for the gender gap in politics and other leadership positions and I stumbled across the author Gerda Lerner, Ph.D., who wrote, The Creation of Patriarchy. Dr. Lerner notes in an interview that women are almost absent in history. Women have accomplished many things which sadly are lost amongst the “great male achievements”. Such lack of history allows men to believe that they “are much more important in the world than they actually are.” Dr. Lerner explains that if men are responsible for the great in this world, then it is only natural that boys will be held to higher expectations. Dr. Lerner says that humans created the leadership disparity because it was appropriate for the time (the Bronze Age). Women and children were “the first slaves in every civilization.” This fact is a result of the Bronze Age, where plow agriculture allowed more production of food and thus prisoners of war could be kept alive and turned into slaves. Before, keeping slaves wasn’t possible because there wasn’t enough food for them. With the invention of chains, prisoners could be locked up and the victor wouldn’t, “ take the risk that that man at night would brain them all.” However, capturing men didn’t come until later. Captured women could be sucked into the victor’s group through marriage thus allowing tribes to grow.

The Bronze Age brought much war and so women found it beneficial to “ally themselves to a man who promised to give them that protection.” Dr. Lerner notes that anthropologists disagree with her work and claim other methods that lead us to patriarchy. It seems, however, that the other theories all support that patriarchy was only reinforced over hundreds of years and consequently, women became more and more oppressed. Now women must climb out of this grave that our ancestors have dug and I believe progress has been made. I just hope things really start to speed up so that it won’t take hundreds of years to reverse such disparity.