ABSTRACT
Patriarchy is ‘a situation in which men have primary control of the most prestigious social, political-economic and cultural institutions in their society’ (for matriarchy, read ‘women’; Barfield 1997: 312, 350). Nineteenth-century scholars regarded patriarchy as a relatively recent development, in which primitive matriarchy was overthrown by ‘father-right’, supposedly when private property, monogamous marriage, and class societies first surfaced, resulting in ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’ (Engels 1884 [1972]: 120, cf 117–19; Leacock 1972: 29–46).
