“Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.” For 97% of human history we didn’t live this way. It only arrived with agriculture for the purposes of ensuring that women were sexually controlled (so that fatherhood could be determined). Patriarchy did allow population to grow exponentially, but it wasn’t instituted for some altruistic reason — to help women. And even if they were, the end result was not altruistic. Remember stoning the adulteress?

And if what was done since then isn’t relevant, why bring up something from 10,000 years ago? How is it remotely germane to establish that thousands of years ago there was no bad intent? It has no bearing on current issues whatsoever. For every year since that time men continued to enact and uphold laws that specifically marginalized, disenfranchised and harmed women — on an on-going basis, and it’s still going on. Even if there were no bad intent 10K years ago, what’s way more important is what has been going on every single year since that time — malicious, intentional acts meant to keep women in their place. Pretending that isn’t so isn’t going to erase it. It’s not going to make for the “why can’t we all get along” society that you want. I want that too, but first we have to deal with the realities that are still to this day standing in the way of that. Golf, anyone…………

Edit: Women who tried to vote weren’t just told, “No, sorry, you can’t. That’s the law.” They were spat on, beaten and jailed. There was on-going violent perpetuation of patriarchal ideals. Well, that’s what they’d always known, they didn’t know any better, you might say. But for 97% of human history that wasn’t what they’d known, and society evolves and changes all the time. In this case it took 10K years to change and it’s still not all the way there — because of on-going active deliberate acts to keep it in place. That’s what actually matters. When that ceases, then we can stop talking about it.