Patriarchy varies too much across societies to be a fact of nature

The argument

Those who hold that patriarchy was invented begin from variation. If male dominance followed directly from human nature, it would look much the same wherever people live. What the historical and ethnographic record instead shows, on this account, is enormous variety: societies that trace descent through mothers and societies that trace it through fathers, societies where women hold land and societies where they cannot, societies with women in religious and political authority and societies that bar them from both. Where an arrangement differs that widely from place to place, proponents argue, it is a social institution rather than a biological outcome. The second move is to identify the institutions that do the work. On this view patriarchy is bound up with heritable property, with the household as a unit of production, and with rules of marriage and descent that pass wealth through men. Once property must be handed down a line, control over whose children count as heirs becomes valuable, and controlling that means controlling women's labour and sexuality. None of those arrangements is given by anatomy; each was built, codified in law and religion, and enforced by people who benefited from it. The conclusion matters because it bears on what can be changed. If patriarchy is an invention then, like other inventions, it has a history, it has interests behind it, and it can be dismantled by altering the institutions that sustain it: inheritance rules, legal personhood, access to paid work, control over reproduction. Proponents of this position argue that treating male dominance as inevitable mistakes a contingent settlement for a law of nature, and in doing so shields it from the scrutiny any other institution would receive.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold that patriarchy was inevitable reply that variation in form is not variation in substance. Descent and property rules differ, they argue, but societies in which women held the dominant public authority are vanishingly rare, and that near-universality is what needs explaining. On their account the institutions named here are not the cause of male dominance but the shapes it took once it had already arisen from asymmetries in reproduction and force. Cataloguing the variety of those shapes, they argue, leaves the underlying regularity untouched.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This sets a standard nothing social could meet: institutions that arise from a tendency common to the species still take locally varied forms, so uniformity of form was never the right test. [Rejecting P2] The variation described is variation in descent and property rules, not in who held public authority, and on the latter the record is strikingly uniform, which is the fact the argument needs to explain away. [Rejecting P3] That these arrangements were codified shows only that they were formalised once writing and law existed; codification follows an existing practice rather than creating it. [Rejecting C] Even granting that patriarchy was built, a settlement that gets built nearly everywhere out of conditions common to the species is better described as inevitable than as invented.