12,000 BCE–present: (Rethinking Gender in World History — Patriarchy Having Characterized Culture and Authority for Several Thousand Years Across the Middle …

12,000 BCE–present: (Rethinking Gender in World History — Patriarchy Having Characterized Culture and Authority for Several Thousand Years Across the Middle Belt of Eurasia from East Asia to Iberia, the Discipline of Written History Originating in That Belt and Simply Presuming Male Primacy as Universal, the Presumption Profoundly Affecting Anthropology Which Assumed That Even in Matrilineal Societies the Mother’s Brother Rather Than Women Themselves Held Authority, Counterevidence from the Matrilineal Iroquois and Cherokee and from Bantu Peoples Across Africa’s Southern Savanna Belt Being Downplayed or Denied): It is past time for historians, globally, to rethink gender in our recounting of the human past. Patriarchy has characterized culture and authority for several thousand years right across the whole middle belt of Eurasia, from farther East Asia to Iberia — with varying levels of subordination of women, from mild to intense, in different regions and at different eras. The discipline of written history originated in that belt of the world, and so Western history writing for a long time simply presumed men, from time immemorial, as everywhere the primary actors and shapers and women as everywhere subordinate. The presumption that males always had authority over women profoundly affected the emerging discipline of anthropology in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well. It became a common anthropological interpretation that, in matrilineal societies, the father of course did not rule the extended family, but instead it was the mother’s brother who did so. Where the counterevidence was strong that adult women held independent authority over a broad sphere of social and cultural relations in their societies and commonly had to be consulted even in matters of war and politics — such as among the matrilineal Iroquois and Cherokee of North America and among Bantu peoples all across Africa’s southern savanna belt — anthropologists came to downplay or deny significance to that evidence. Chris Knight has written a telling account of how the historical and social milieus of the founding-era scholars of anthropology shaped and drove their retreat from the early findings about the power and agency of women in matrilineal societies. This is not merely a methodological critique. It is an indictment of a discipline that looked at matrilineal societies where women held real power and could not see what was in front of it, because the scholars’ own patriarchal assumptions rendered female authority invisible even when it was being exercised before their eyes.