An arrangement that has to be enforced against resistance is a human settlement, not a law of nature

The argument

A second case for invention rests on enforcement. Arrangements that follow from nature do not need to be compelled: no society has had to legislate that people breathe or that infants are born helpless. Male dominance, by contrast, has been written into law, scripture and custom in extraordinary detail, through rules about who may own, inherit, testify, divorce, be educated, enter a trade or appear in public. Proponents of this position argue that the sheer volume of that apparatus is evidence against inevitability. A settlement that must be enforced against resistance is one people could refuse, and the enforcement exists because some of them did. The record of that resistance is the second strand. On this account there have always been women who held property, led households, taught, ruled or fought, and the usual response was not to discover that they could not, but to prohibit them from doing so again. Restrictions tightened and loosened; they were argued over, defended on changing grounds, and in many places eventually repealed. That is the behaviour of a contested institution rather than of a biological constant. Taken together, proponents conclude, patriarchy resembles other durable human arrangements such as bondage, hereditary rule and caste, which also appeared across many societies, were defended as natural and permanent by those they favoured, and turned out to be neither. Calling male dominance invented is not a claim that it was arbitrary or easy to overturn; it is the claim that it was built, maintained deliberately, and therefore answerable to the same questions of justification as anything else people have built.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders of inevitability answer that enforcement is exactly what a natural tendency looks like once societies grow large and formal. Laws codify arrangements people already have, they argue, and the direction of codification is the point: it ran one way almost everywhere. On their account the long record of prohibition shows that male dominance was being protected rather than created, and the fact that it had to be defended tells us only that some women pressed against it, not that the tendency itself was contingent.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Many arrangements that follow from strong natural tendencies are codified and enforced all the same, from the care of children to the handling of the dead, so the inference from enforcement to contingency does not hold. [Rejecting P2] The apparatus of prohibition is evidence that male dominance was being defended, which is what one expects of an existing advantage, rather than evidence that the defending created it. [Rejecting P3] Contestation and repeal show that the conditions sustaining the arrangement changed, not that the arrangement was avoidable under the conditions in which it first arose. [Rejecting C] The conclusion overreaches: human choice clearly maintained and shaped patriarchy, but maintaining an advantage is consistent with its origin having been all but unavoidable.