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Angela Saini

lines on the record: 35
first: 2023-11-29
most recent: 2023-11-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Now what the past offers us is a lesson that we can build society any way we want. There is no natural Inhibitor there. There is no barrier in biology or in history that says that you can't live this way, you can't have a more equal society if you want one. We just have to be imaginative and bold in trying to create it.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patriarchy was not universal, that does have a history as a start date. But I think all of this, what it speaks to is we need to feel inspired before we can change things. We need to feel that There is some kind of underlying pattern to how we are supposed to live and we are looking for that pattern in history. And I think the lesson of history is that that pattern doesn't really exist. Where everywhere you look, people live in so many different ways. And they always have. They've always switched things around, even in Chettlehuk, the different layers of that settlement indicate different periods of history because people would build new, every generation would build new settlements on top of the old ones. And you can see sometimes there is social tension and then that dissipates and people go in a different direction. And that is how humans have always been. We've always had social conflict because every single one of us has a different idea of what an ideal society looks like. And what we have to remember, and I think this is the message of the book, is not that the past offers us guidance on how we can live.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can't help it. And this happens on all ends of the spectrum. I think you get patriarchal, modern patriarchal societies that look to the past to reinforce this idea that there is some kind of natural division of labor between men and women, that there is some natural way in which we should behave. So they look to ancient Athens or they look to ancient religious texts to reinforce this idea that patriarchy is natural. But you also get among feminists, there is a lot of feminist literature that looks to a matriarchal past as some kind of indicator that we can live a different way, that we don't have to live like this because once upon a time all humans were matriarchal. And again, we don't have good evidence for that necessarily. We do have good evidence to suggest that the way we thought about gender was far more varied in the past and that”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know that in Sparta, for instance, there were very different norms around what was appropriate for how men and women behave, the visibility of girls and women and what they did, how much property women owned. So within ancient Athens, we think of this place as reflecting nature because it was so long ago. In fact, even by the standards of its own time, it was a very warped and strange society. And it was aware of that strangeness even to itself because that's what we see in the subject of the literature.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If there is this group that you believe to be naturally subservient and inferior, why do you have to go to such lengths to vilify them in literature to be so scared of them? There are so many plays and dramas in which women threaten to overtake men or kill men. We have the legend of the Amazons, this idea that there is this superior race of women who will somehow overpower men if we're not careful. And I think what that fear speaks to is this understanding that what we have created here is a society that is to some degree weird and unnatural. You only had to step outside ancient Athens to see that the rules were different in other societies. In ancient Egypt at that same time, women worked in the professions. There were women pharaohs. They were very powerful Egyptian queens.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is we look to ancient Greece and I think particularly in the West because we draw this straight line between those civilizations, the Greeks and Romans and the present day. We feel ourselves to have inherited that civilization and so we model ourselves on it. Our architecture is a reflection of that. Even here I live in New York now. You go downtown. It's all neoclassical columns. It's just everywhere, this idea that there is this kind of unbroken line between antiquity and the present. What we forget is that as misogynistic as ancient Athens was, there was also constantly this unease, this instability, this perceived instability around society. You look at Greek literature. It is deeply misogynistic, deeply hateful for women, but we have to ask ourselves why.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patriarchal societies newly emerging you see a huge amount of negotiation and variation in gender norms in how people think about the roles of men and women and of course the interplay of other forms of oppression including class and wealth. So for example we have always had upper class women in all societies who have had a great deal of power and wealth and control over many men in their societies as well as women so we can't think about gender equality as something or gender inequality”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without a doubt, it is extremely patriarchal. The men are definitely in charge. And yet, you still have women doing incredible amounts of work. according to the outsider accounts that we have of Mongol society, you see women riding horses as well as the men governing, you know, managing large communities, large societies, the setting up of homes trade if their men are missing then they take over and take charge and physically very strong. I mean, we have these accounts of women, of outsiders, foreigners to this society saying the women are so powerful and so strong. And this may be apocryphal that they give birth standing up and then carry on as though nothing happened once a baby is born, which is remarkable. And it probably is apocryphal, but it just goes to show that even within”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, when I say the rise of the state precipitated this kind of gendered depression in which you start to see a division of labor between men and women and a balance of power between men and women, that doesn't happen all over the world in the same way immediately. It happens in certain parts of the world. These systems, these patriarchal systems are then exported by large states and empires, by the powerful to other parts of the world, and then they become adopted in the same way that happened in Kerala with the British in Kerala, you see that happening thousands of years ago by the big empires, the Romans, the Greeks, Mongols. But even within these patriarchal societies, you see a great deal of gender variation. So just to take the Mongol Empire, for instance, which is much later than in history, of course, this is around 12, 13th century. Here is a society that prizes sun.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As many children as the state wanted. So they've introduced all these interesting measures. They've called on Chinese officials to come up with new ideas to encourage young people to have more children, including recently telling college students they can have a week off hoping that they will fall in love and then get married and have children earlier. So these are still preoccupations of patriarchal states to this day.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on young women to have as many children as possible and precious starts to fall on young men to be available to fight, to be strong and stoic and brave and macho. So this is where we get our stereotypes now about femininity and masculinity linked to motherhood and fighting and being a warrior is from those two twin preoccupations in those earlier states. And that's still an issue now. You go anywhere in the world. As soon as birth rates start to fall, governments start to get nervous. You only have to look, for example, in Hungary they've introduced these remarkable incentives for women who have plenty of children, including they don't have to pay as much income tax as women who have fewer children. In China, they ended the one-child policy, but women still weren't having...”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we get people to stay here and produce a surplus for the elites to defend our states against incomers and expand our territory if necessary and conduct wars of conquest so we can grab more people and have more resources for the elites? And that creates two pressures. Number one, a pressure on people, on families to have more children. And number two, a pressure to be loyal to the state that a family must be loyal in order to stay and defend the state. And of course that creates gendered pressure then. What you see over time, and this happens not immediately, it happens very, very slowly, is you see that women slowly, instead of doing lots of different kinds of work, which they did before, and they start, their remit starts to narrow. So they start to be the pressure fall.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was so often we assume that it was agriculture, that the agricultural revolution was this big turning point because it requires upper body strength, because that was the advent of property, that as soon as you get property that men want to claim that property and then slowly drip bit by bit, you get patriarchy. But actually, we have agriculture, or we have animal and plant domestication for a very long time before we have any signs of any clear signs of gender depression. So we can't pin it to that. I think what we can pin it to more decisively is the rise of the state. So when you see those very early states in ancient Mesopotamia, along the fertile crescent, this is around 5,000 years ago or more, the big preoccupation of the elites in those big states was population, of course.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a big question. And I was hoping deep down that there would be some kind of single catastrophic moment that could explain everything. This is what Friedrich Engels wrote about in the middle of the 19th century, when he was writing about the family and the state, he theorized that there was this world, and you see this in feminist literature all the time, this world historical defeat of the female sex, that once we were all matriarchal and then we became patriarchal, how did that happen? And it was very difficult to answer that question in the 19th century because we didn't have as much information as we have now. We're actually well placed to answer it now, which is part of the reason I was so desperate to write this book is because we know so much more about history, how gender played out in history, and also we have all these cross-cultural examples from the present. And what we see is that it isn't what anthropologists have sometimes”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are biological elements to them, of course, and we resort to biology when we think about sex. Of course we do that all the time, but we can't assume that there is some consistent, perfect way in which we have always thought about sex, always, that humans have always imagined it this way. That just doesn't exist.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Society extremely patriarchal and conservative, just as much as the Vatican is, the idea is that gender resides in the mind. So if you believe yourself to be another gender, you should have surgery and then completely occupy that space that the other gender occupies, which means that if you're a transgender woman in Tehran, you're expected to live as a woman to wear a veil and to marry and to do all those things. We really do have to let go, relinquish this idea that we have always known what sex and gender is. There is really no truth to that. These are ideas that we have built and understood and they're really culturally specific and time specific.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, absolutely not. We cannot assume that the way we think about gender in whichever society you're in now was the way that people thought about it in the past. We do not have any sense in which that might be true. And in fact, we only have to look at present-day societies. Different cultures think about gender extremely differently. So one example I give in the patriarchs is just to take an example of two patriarchal societies and how differently they think about gender. You look at the Vatican and you look at the Islamic Republic on the question of transgender, where does gender reside in the body? For the Vatican, it resides in the body itself. So the way that God made you is the way that you are. You cannot switch gender. No amount of surgery will allow you to be another gender. In the Islamic Republic, which again is a patriarchal society.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Staring straight ahead as though she has tamed them, it is a figure of such authority, and it has really upturned the way that we imagine gender in prehistory. And I think it's a sign that we cannot assume that the past was as gendered as the present is. There is really no evidence of that.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“neutrality of this being an ungendered place. But genuinely we can't see any signs that whether you're a man or woman was of much significance to the life that you lived in Chattel Huyuk. And not just that, women were not invisible. So we see loads of female figurines, the most famous of which is a seated woman of Chattelhuk, which is about as high as my hand, this very small, beautiful object, this figurine depicting a woman who seems older she has these kind of deep indents in her skin, these glorious rolls of fat kind of switching spilling out around her. She's sitting bolt upright, her back completely straight and underneath her resting hands are what looked to be two big cats possibly leopards.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us that men and women lived very similar lives. They ate pretty much the same food. They were buried in very similar ways and that's very important especially here because we see that burials were incredibly important. There is thought to have been a cult of the ancestor because bodies were handled so carefully and really revered. So we don't see men and women buried very differently. They did pretty much the same work. We can measure that through wear and tear on different parts of the body And even the size difference between them, so the height difference between men and women was very slight. So men and women lived pretty much the same lives and this is what archaeologist Ian Hodder who was the leading archaeologist who worked there most recently said to me was that gender just didn't matter very much here and these are 21st century ideas we're talking about this idea of gender”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There would be a hole in the ceiling and a ladder, and you would kind of go in and out of your home through using the ladder up to the roof and then business would be conducted on the top of these houses. On the walls are these vivid red frescoes of hunting scenes and vultures picking apart dead bodies, bull horns embedded in the walls, people's bodies themselves buried in platforms underneath the floors where people lived, where people slept. So this is such a complex place. It's pre-writing as far as we're aware. So we can't know what people were thinking. It involves so much speculation on the part of anthropologists to know what was going on. But every single archaeological measure that we have, every way that we have of measuring gender inequality in a settlement like this, in a site like this, tells”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While inevitably, if you're looking at the origins of something, if you're looking at the origins of inequality, which essentially was what I was trying to do with this book, then you have to end up at the beginning. And the furthest back I was able to go was the Neolithic. So Chattelhuyuk, which I'm sure many people will have heard of, is a very famous settlement in southern Anatolia. This is on the border with Syria, in Turkey, not very far from where the recent devastating earthquakes happened. This is a site that's more than 9,000 years old. Thousands of people live there. And it's incredibly sophisticated. So this isn't some kind of simple hunter-gatherer settlement. This is, you know, the houses, just to look at it, I stood on the precipice of this cavernous kind of settlement archaeologists have been digging through it in layers. And what you see are these box-like houses without windows or doors.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How people think, how they imagine themselves, how they imagine the people around them, and compare themselves to other what they imagine to be more modern societies. And that is how this social change happens. And I think that's a good lesson. If we look at Kerala and look at how matriline was abolished there, we remember that this is how social change probably happened right throughout history.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are kind of primitive in some way, that to be civilized is to be patriarchal, and so they carry through this, it's not so much a policy as a kind of drip feed effect within the laws, in legal judgments that are passed, all kinds of things that happen that slowly chip away at matrilineal customs within Kerala to the point where by the 1970s, after the British have left, cultural norms have changed so much that by 1976 the Kerala legislature abolishes matrilinee altogether. So it is not a system in which people can live anymore because it's not legally sanctioned anymore by the state. So it's quite revealing, I think, it's a reminder that social change does not happen like a thunderbolt. Patriarchy is not introduced in some kind of vicious, violent way immediately. It happens bit by bit. It changes.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the freedom and power that women have in this society, and missionaries and British judges and British officials bit by bit try to shift Naira society within the patriarchal model. And they do that in the belief that what they are doing is civilizing this community. They think of matrilineal communities as something that is backward, that if you do not live in this father-led society, that you are”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the history of the Kingdom of Travencour of the Niger Society, including Manupillai's book Manupilla's Indian Historian, and he writes very vividly about how much agency, sexual agency, education that women have in Carolyn society as a result of this matrilineal community, very influential matrilineal community. Now the issue is that if you look historically at why is it that matrilineal societies fade, why do they disappear? Looking at Carolo is a good example because here we have a very recent history. In fact, within living memory of how this happened, in the 19th century, late 19th century, as the British were administering and governing this state, what you see is a real shock.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of authority and equality. It's always, it's sometimes even described as a matriarchal society. And that isn't absolutely true. It's not as though women run everything in Kerala. But certainly there is this long tradition of matriline that stems back to the kingdom of Travancore. So this is this very influential community of Nairs in which descent and inheritances pass from mother to daughter and families would live in these beautiful big extended households known as Turavads. So in these huge households in which the eldest female is the matriarch of the family, the royal family had very prominent women within it and there was no there was a lot of sexual freedom so there is some wonderful work that looks”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I have worked in India twice and where I worked was Delhi. So Delhi is in the north of the country and it is a notoriously unfavourable city for women, which are putting it lightly. So when I was there, especially the first time when I was living there alone, I was told you should not go out alone at night. If you do go out, then go with a male relative or a friend. It's just not safe. And there have been, you know, it does feel like a very difficult city to navigate as a woman on your own. You do feel kind of constantly watched. But what I was constantly told when I was growing up, and even when I was living in India, was it's not like this in the south, especially in Kerala. Kerala is lauded as this beautiful kind of, it's a very lush green, of course, of where it sits very near the equator. This lush green, beautiful state in which women have a great deal of”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It translates to the rule of the Father, that rule of the Father idea is certainly not universal, and anthropologists have documented at least one hundred sixty existing matrilineal societies even now. And like I said, the further you go back into history, the more social variation you see. But even now we have matrilineal societies dotted all across the Americas, indigenous societies mainly, right across Africa there's an entire what's known as a matrilineal belt of matrilineal communities and right across Asia there are so many and some of them are thought to be thousands of years old”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we kind of marginalize non-patriarchal society, so matrilinee essentially means that dissent and inheritance is recognized from mother to daughter rather than from father to son, as it is in patriarchy. And what you often get in matrilineal societies is matrilocality. So people tend to live in their mother's homes. So there are some matrilineal societies, for instance, in which everyone will live in their mother's home over generations, which means that fathers are not necessarily raising their own children, they will be more focused on their nieces and nephews, so the children of their sisters. So this kind of idea that there is”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amy Parrish's brilliant primatologist, and just when I got there a male had been injured by an older female, and he was cowering to one side because he was scared that it might happen again. So this is a kind of clearly matriarchal species and it's nothing to do with size. It's nothing to do with power, physical power. It's all to do with networks and alliances. So among female bonobos, the females form very strong bonds even with females who aren't kin and it becomes impossible then for the males to move up that hierarchy in the same way.”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chimpanzees are male dominated, there's no doubt, but generally what we're discussing there is alpha males or males higher up, dominating males lower down the hierarchy. And females actually have their own dominance hierarchies. If we look at bonobos, the other species just as close to us genetically, they are female-dominated. This is a very clearly matriarchal species. And although it took some time for primatologists to accept that fact, in fact, when I interviewed Franz DeWal about this and in his recent book, Different, he laid out just how difficult it has been for some scholars to accept that there is a female-dominated species among closely related primates. But I've seen this for myself. I went to San Diego Zoo when I was writing Inferior and I was there with...”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was with inferior really that it became so clear to me at least, I'm sure it was already clear to so many biologists and anthropologists, that there is no natural reason why we would only live in male-dominated or very rigidly patriarchal societies. Because for one thing, we live in so many different ways already. Patriarchy is not the rule universally. The further back you go into history, the less of a rule it is. But even if you look at other animal species, and this is where this overlaps with your own work, when we talk, for example, about male domination among other primates, generally primatologists are not talking about males dominating females. They're talking about males dominating other males. So if we look at the two closest species to us genetically, chimpanzees and bonobos,”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Europe were happening when people started asking these questions about capitalism and social inequality and the roots of it, then naturally they looked at gender inequality and asked, how is it that we landed on this?”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was but the question I was actually asking was quite specific, so I'm not trying to paint an entire history of patriarchy or all the reasons in the entire world why male domination exists or the forms in which it exists. I'm asking a very specific thing, which is how is it that when we can live in so many different ways as humans, so many of us have landed on these very rigidly male-dominated societies? How did that happen in the first place? And there is actually quite an interesting literature on that, not as much as you would expect given how vital that question is to the question of equality or, you know, how we live. It feels so fundamental. And there isn't that much out there, but it was a big topic of debate in the middle of the 19th century. So that is where I started when the big revolutions”
2023-11-29 · Intelligence Squared · The Patriarchs: Angela Saini on the Roots of Gendered Oppression · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT