June Purvis: What are the historical origins of patriarchy?
That’s exactly the question that set my book in motion. We know from anthropological evidence that human societies haven’t always been male-dominated in the way that we are today - and that’s a finding that is now quite widely accepted. These ideas and ideologies [of the roles and status of different genders in society] vary culturally and through time. The question I was constantly asked by readers of my previous books was: if we haven’t always been this way, then how did we get here? How did patriarchy become so widespread? And I didn’t really have a good answer, because there’s so little
