Angela Saini
Angela Saini
Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the fourth, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, was published in 2023 and was a finalist for that year's George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Saini has worked as a reporter and presenter for the BBC and has written for a number of publications, including The Guardian, New Scientist, and Wired U
"If you were a geek growing up, youll recognize how lonely it can be. If you were the female geek, youll know its far lonelier. By the time I reached my final years of school, I was the only girl in my chemistry class of eight students. I was the only girl in my mathematics class of about a dozen. And when I decided to study engineering at university, I found myself the only woman in a class of nine."
"It was in 1680 that the English political theorist Sir Robert Filmer defended the by arguing in his that the state was like a family, meaning kings were effectively the fathers and their subjects, the children. The royal head of state was the ultimate earthly patriarch, ordained by God, whose authority went back to the patriarchs of biblical times. In Filmers vision of the universe—an obviously self-serving one for an aristocrat—patriarchy was natural. It began small, in peoples families, with the father having dominion over his household, and ended large, marbled through institutions of politics, law, and religion."
"De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had "dethroned" women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point."
"The power hierarchy had white people of European descent sitting at the top. They believed themselves to be the natural winners, the inevitable heirs of great ancient civilizations. There are still many today who look at the world and imagine that the imbalances and inequalities we see are natural, that white Europeans have some innate superiority that allowed them to conquer and take the lead, and that they will have it forever. They imagine that only Europe could have been the birthplace of modern science, or that only the Europeans could have conquered the Americas."
