Event: FEMINIST GIANT & The Strand Present: Angela Saini
FEMINIST GIANT is teaming up with The Strand Book Store in New York City to launch a feminist book club! The goal is to have monthly events—a combination of in-person and online—that will feature exciting and global feminist books.
Our last event for poets Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Noor Hindi was a full house! And I’m sure there will be lots of interest for award-winning journalist Angela Saini’s new book The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, which will be our next Book Club feature.
Angela will join me at an in-person discussion on March 17, hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
This event is FREE to attend.
Can’t make the event?
Purchase a signed copy of The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality here.
About The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality
A groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it
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, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present. She travels to the world’s earliest known human settlements, analyzes the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and traces cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, finding that:
Matrilineal societies are more common than we appreciate, existing under a variety of different social and environmental circumstances, and in some cases for thousands of years.
From around seven thousand years ago, there are signs that a small number of powerful men were having more children than other men.
In societies where women left their own families to live with their husbands, marriage customs came to be informed by the widespread practice of captive taking and slavery, later influencing laws that alienated women from systems of support and denied them equal rights.
There was enormous variation in gender and power dynamics in many societies for thousands of years, but colonialism and empire dramatically changed ways of life across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, spreading rigidly patriarchal customs and undermining how people organized their families and work.
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 diversity to human arrangements that undercuts the old grand narratives and exposes male supremacy as no more than an ever-shifting element in systems of control.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT. Â
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