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For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality, our imagined past and contested present, look if we didn't assume that men have always ruled over women? If we saw inequality as something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted? In this bold and radical book, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what we call patriarchy. She travels to the world's earliest known settlements, analyzes the latest research in science and archaeology, and traces cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, finding that there was enormous variation in gender and power in many societies for thousands of years, but colonialism and empire changed those ways of life, spreading patriarchal customs and undermining how people organized their families and work. In the 19th and 20th centuries, historians, anthropologists, and feminists began to actively question what patriarchy meant as part of the attempt to understand the origins of inequality. In our own time, despite the pushback against sexism, abuse, and discrimination, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. But The Patriarchs is a profoundly hopeful book, one that reveals a multiplicity to human arrangements that undercuts old narratives and exposes male supremacy as no more, and no less, than an ever-shifting element in systems of control.