Reading Rambo

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner is a 1986 study into the possible origins of our current societal structure. I'm reviewing it in sections, because each chapter has a lot of ideas worth discussing. Part I can be found here , and part II can be found here . If you will remember, this book focuses on ancient civilizations and the earliest records we have of patriarchal formations. Most of these chapters talk about the Code of Hammurabi, and Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew law. In these we can see the gradual subjugation of women as it became codified and then part of our collective consciousness. This post is solely focusing on chapter 5, as it got way too long while I was writing it. Chapter 5: The Wife and the Concubine [A] man's class status is determined by his economic relations and a woman's by her sexual relations...It is a principle which had remained valid for thousands of years. A civilization's laws don't show us how its citizens actuall...

Continuing on with Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy , her 1986 attempt to discover how we arrived at the current patriarchal system that OPPRESSES OUR VERY SOULS and does things like make the default character on Grand Theft Auto a dude with no lady option unless you log into your online account, which is bullshit. It also does a lot of other things, most of which are very important. The Grand Theft Auto one was maybe not the most important. But it came up this weekend. So there we are. Lerner's book is really hard and I am here to read it for you and give you nice quotey bits that make you feel like you've learned something. Chapter 2 is "A Working Hypothesis." This begins with: The basic assumption with which we must start any theorizing about the past is that men and women built civilization jointly. She basically says that yes, man probably hunted, and woman was "the inventor of clay and woven vessels, by means of which the...