[roughly]

There's a self-fulfilling cycle that happens here in both history and anthropology where the assumption when looking at old cultures has been that they were a patriarchy, because that's all we've ever seen, because every time we look at an old culture we're assuming it's a patriarchy, so when we see things that look like a matriarchy we assume we're mistaken because everything else we've seen has been a patriarchy, so this must be one, too.

For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy, the assumption has been that these were gods being portrayed, and not rulers, because rulers are men and these were women, so they couldn't have been rulers.

You see similar where we'll find grave sites where the skeleton seems female, but they're buried with the trappings and in the fashion of a ruler, and a shocking amount of effort is spent trying to reconcile that contradiction.

(This is not to argue that Rome was actually a matriarchy or anything silly like that, rather that the blindness of history to the role of women reaches almost comical levels in other places, so it's not surprising to find a blank spot in Roman history in pop culture, at least.)

[coldtea]

>For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy

Who assumes that? For over 40 years I've been reading conjectures about Minoan Crete being a matriarchy or substantially less patriarchical from all kinds of sources, it's quite a common theory. Even Wikipedia: "While historians and archaeologists have long been skeptical of an outright matriarchy, the predominance of female figures in authoritative roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was matriarchal, and among the most well-supported examples known."

[roughly]

Yes, and the reason it's taken more than 40 years to go from conjecture to broadly if grudgingly acknowledged theory is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries. Looking at the evidence on its own without the notion that a matriarchy would be outlandish and weird, there'd be no doubt what you were looking at, but instead we spent a long time talking about how strange it was they kept painting fancy women on the walls and we couldn't figure out who their kings were.

[coldtea]

>is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries

Given 100% of present societies and all examples from recorded history can you blame them for this baseline? That's literally what a baseline is supposed to be!

[roughly]

> all examples from recorded history

This is literally the thing we're talking about. Remember the Minoans?

[PoignardAzur]

I think GP meant "all examples where we have records telling us how their society worked and we're not guessing from pictures".

[bigstrat2003]

> Given 100% of present societies

100% of present societies are not patriarchies. Not even close to 100%.

[coldtea]

You mean states, or some tribes here and there?

Like, you're adding say USA (350M), China (1.4B), France (80M), etc with say, some Amazonian tribe of 5K people (which you don't count as part of the 99.999% patriarchical Brazil)?

I guess in that way it's enough that 200 tribal villages (more than the UN nations iirc) to be matriarchical for the world to be "predominantly matriarchical" or at least 50%-50%.

[xyzzy123]

Agree op is wrong as worded. Sort of depends how you count though. If you count like an anthropologist, tons of non patriarchal examples.

But they don't seem to have scaled in the same way for one reason or another.

If you count by membership the number of people who live in patriarchal societies vs not, I think you would come up with an answer very very close to 100% patriarchal.

[roughly]

There's a little bit of an interesting facet of this, which is that it depends on how you're defining patriarchal societies - if you're looking at what is explicitly encoded into the legal systems, it's hard to argue that, as of today, the US or really most of modern world qualifies, and similarly if you're looking at who holds power, while the gender skew is still towards males, a disinterested observer from the future would not observe a society in which power is either exclusively or as a rule held by men. I'm not sure the legal structures around gender in China or India (if we're talking about percentages of the global population), though, although at least for India one could argue Indira Gandhi might have been the most powerful person in India since the empire.

Culturally is a different question, obviously.

[swaginator]

Semi-related, I was doing some reading about different cottage industries from antiquity and the feudal era and was wondering if a feudal-era simulator existed that included cottage industries as part of its core mechanics. I ended up finding that Manor Lords game later on which features this exact mechanic!

It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.

Last thing, there is a anecdote by Richard Feynman I think where he is in a room with his friend's wife who is crocheting. He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?". It's interesting how much knowledge humans were about to collect about the world before the scientific method.

There is a book "1000 Years of Women's work" that is on my reading list now but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

[roughly]

> It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.

There is a very rich strain of feminist literature on this very point!

> He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?".

This is fantastic.

I'll have to take a look at "1000 Years of Women's work." Another one to add to the reading list, just for sheer pique, is "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" by Lucy Cooke - https://bookshop.org/p/books/bitch-on-the-female-of-the-spec...

[te0006]

This seems to be the Feynman episode in question: https://thinkingwiththings.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/richard-...

If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.

[swaginator]

That's a similar but different anecdote. The one I am thinking of he specifically is talking to someone's wife while she is crocheting. It may not have been Feynman though, I CTRL+F'ed "Surely You're Joking" and wasn't able to find it or I would have cited my sources in the parent comment.