Markets & Society E13

Friedrich Engels famously described civilization as a “world-historical” catastrophe for women, since it subjugated them within a patriarchal system, burying their agency inside male-dominated households and excluding them from the historical structures of the last ten millennia. In this episode, we consider the foundations of patriarchy, and ask how human beings may have crafted their societies before the emergence of post-Neolithic patriarchal structures. Drawing on the pioneering work of Sara Hrdy and Gerda Lerner, we try to unpack the dynamics of sex and gender across the Palaeolithic/Neolithic divide to ask how and why the subordination of female reproductive agency became an integral feature of the rise of civilization.