Nora McDonald

“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“But nothing encapsulated the subordinate status of wives more obviously than the fact that their domestic labour was unpaid. ‘They are excluded from the realm of exchange and consequently have no value,’ wrote Delphy. Even outside the home, women were more likely than men to work as volunteers. This couldn’t be explained by the nature of the work they were doing. It wasn’t that cleaning, cooking, caring, or doing agricultural work were always unpaid. People could be hired to do these jobs, and these workers would expect to receive wages. It wasn’t the case, either, that wives were getting nothing in return. It’s just that what they were getting in return was so little. The wife’s job was to work, honour, and obey, Delphy concluded. What she got in return was upkeep. This situation was so obviously exploitative that ‘when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife’. Delphy’s argument was that, rather than her work being worthless in monetary terms, it was a wife’s relationship to production that gave her labour so little value. It was because she was a wife doing it, in the same way that if a slave were doing it, they wouldn’t be paid either. In the family, and by extension in wider society, the product of her labour was seen to belong to her husband.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“Once codes were created and meaning given to categories, they had to be policed for fear of transgression. And that’s exactly what’s seen over time in the historical data. Laws around marriage, divorce, and adultery in Mesopotamia become harsher for women as time passes. Their freedoms and privileges are slowly eaten away. At the same time, over centuries, working women gradually disappear from the historical record. If there’s attention on what women are doing, it is increasingly on their loyalty as wives, mothers, and citizens.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

“The earliest states, entities that these days feel reassuringly solid but once had to be built from scratch, were faced with a basic problem. They needed to convince people to stay within their geographical boundaries, to not wander off because they did not like the conditions, says American anthropologist James Scott, who has devoted his career to understanding how the first states emerged and the factors that helped them grow. Without a population, states have no power. And this made people the most valuable commodity of all.”
― Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule