The Patriarchs, by award-winning science journalist, Angela Saini, goes in search of the true roots of gendered oppression, uncovering a complex history of how male domination became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.  In Afghanistan, women are now banned from attending university, in Turkey, where a woman’s universal right to vote was secured in 1934, before France, Switzerland  and Italy – has left the Istanbul Convention, aimed at providing better protection against gender-based violence. In the US, women and girls in certain states are now denied reproductive rights. The book begins with a 1968 Hollywood film The Planet of the Apes: that males are nearly always at the center of any action and that the one strong female character, Cornelia, get less screen time across the decades of movie remakes.

 Cornelia is chimpanzee and this discussion leads to the beahviour of another of out nearest genetic relatives in the animal kingdom: bonobos.

Bonobos community are more egalitarian and it is mothers who confer status to and protect their young. Yet the film which shows a future world where apes have taken charge, chose to emulate a patriarchal society instead of the more equitable bonobo one.

“By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is: something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted”.

Saini provides examples of matriarchal societies, such as Minangkabau in West Sumatra,

Saini travels to the world’s earliest known human settlement, analysing the latest research findings in science and archaeology and tracing cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, she overturns simplistic universal theories to show that what patriarchy is and how far it goes back really depends on where you are.

Efforts to push back against sexism and exploitation in our time, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have oft4en ended in failure and backlash. Saini  explains why we need to look beyond the old narratives to understand why sexism and exploitation persists in the present.

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini, Fourth Estate £15, 320 pages.