Myth: patriarchy restricts women

Patriarchy restricted women. The myth begins when that fact is translated into “patriarchy liberated men.”

The standard feminist account is good at counting restrictions imposed on women and authority held by men. It is much worse at counting the other side of the same arrangement: obligations imposed on men, the price of male status, and the rules built around male strength.

If duties count as restrictions too, the balance looks very different. Men were expected to provide, protect, serve, answer for dependants, keep their word, preserve status, submit to hierarchy, and control the use of force. Authority over resources came with an obligation to obtain and maintain them. Household authority came with responsibility for the household. Citizenship increasingly came bundled with military duty.

Patriarchy did not make the stronger sex unrestricted. It tried to make male power predictable.

Male status had to be earned

Psychologists use the term precarious manhood for a recurring pattern: manhood is treated as harder to earn and easier to lose than womanhood. Vandello and Bosson’s review connects that status to demands that men demonstrate masculinity through behavior, risk, work, endurance, and reactions to status threat.¹

That theory is not a description of every society. It does establish the mechanism that matters here: male status is often conditional on performance.

“Male breadwinner” is not a description of all human history

The provider role is one of the clearest modern examples. An OECD review of masculine norms describes the expectation that a “real man” should be a breadwinner and financial provider as one of the most persistent norms attached to masculinity across societies.² But projecting the modern breadwinner deep into prehistory as a universal family arrangement is a mistake. Horrell and Humphries specifically trace the expansion of the male-breadwinner family in nineteenth-century Britain out of an older family economy in which husbands, wives, and children all contributed to production.³

Hunter-gatherer data break the idea of an eternal male breadwinner who alone feeds a dependent woman. In Kaplan and colleagues’ comparative table of nine foraging populations, women’s share of adult food energy ranged from 15.9% among the Aché to 57% among the G/wi; one full !Kung estimate put women at 54.5%.¹⁴ For this argument, the upper end matters: there were societies in which women produced half or most of the food energy. That alone is enough to rule out “men always fed women” as a universal explanation of male status.

There is no need to reverse the myth and declare women the universal providers: in other societies male production was much higher. It does mean that male social function cannot be inferred from calorie accounting alone.

A more durable distinction concerns the risk profile of production. Codding, Bliege Bird, and Bird compared Aché, Martu, and Meriam foragers and found that when high energetic returns came with high acquisition risk, women contributed more to lower-variance resources with smaller reliable harvests while men concentrated more on larger, more variable harvests. When high-energy resources could be acquired reliably, male and female strategies converged.¹⁵

Kraft and colleagues’ global database covering 14 hunter-gatherer and 22 horticulturalist populations likewise shows wide variation in male and female time costs, energetic costs, and food production.¹⁶ Human division of labor does not reduce to one prehistoric template in which “he brings food and she consumes it.”

Provider, insurance, or producer of a public good?

Even among the same people — the Hadza — researchers reach different answers about why men hunt. Using data from 2005–2009, Wood and Marlowe concluded that men channeled foods they produced toward wives, children, and kin, and that large-game sharing significantly advantaged producers’ households.¹⁷ This is a strong version of the man as household provider.

Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones reported a different pattern. In their data, large game was shared so widely that little of it reached the hunter’s own household, while hunting success and time spent hunting did not determine how much meat his family received.¹⁸ In a 2025 review, the same authors again argued that Hadza evidence contradicts key elements of the classic hunting hypothesis that ties big-game hunting primarily to provisioning wives and children.¹⁹

That long-running dispute is more useful than the simple picture. If anthropologists have spent decades arguing over whether a successful hunter primarily provisioned his own family or produced a widely shared public good, the popular formula “men ruled because women ate from their hand” is plainly too simple.

A third model treats men as insurance. Marlowe found a critical period among the Hadza: women with nursing infants had lower foraging returns, while their husbands had higher returns and brought home more food. The extra contribution did not come from large game but mainly from less widely shared foods such as honey.²⁰ The man is not necessarily the permanent source of most calories. He becomes particularly important when the woman’s own production temporarily falls.

Sometimes food can flow from woman to man while protection flows the other way

Alger, Dridi, Stieglitz, and Wilson go further in a model of early hominins. This is not an archaeologically established fact but a conceptual and mathematical evolutionary model. In it, females efficiently extract calorie-rich underground plant foods, males protect them against food theft, and under pair-bonding some food flows from females to males in exchange for guarding.²¹

The authors suggest that female provisioning of males could have emerged before habitual hunting. The relevant point here is the principle: male contribution can sit outside the food column. A woman can produce calories while a man produces security. Count only food, and his contribution disappears from the ledger.

Even hunting was not absolutely male

Archaeology also resists a perfectly clean picture. Haas and colleagues described a roughly 9,000-year-old adult female burial at Wilamaya Patjxa with a big-game hunting toolkit and, in a broader sample, produced a model consistent with nontrivial female participation in big-game hunting in the early Americas.²² Caution matters: the authors themselves note variation in the quality of sex estimation, dating, and artifact association, with WMP6 standing out as the strongest securely identified adult female hunter burial in their sample.

A widely discussed 2023 study by Anderson and colleagues reported evidence of women hunting in 50 of 63 foraging societies examined.²³ A group of hunter-gatherer specialists challenged that estimate in 2024, identifying sampling and coding problems and stressing that sex-based division of labor remains real in all known contemporary forager societies and that men hunt more often.²⁴ So “79%” should not be treated as a reliable prevalence estimate. The narrower conclusion survives the dispute: female hunting is real, and the rule “men hunt, women never do” is also a modern caricature.

The household was not fed only by husband and wife

The nuclear family is itself a poor unit for describing a foraging economy. In a review of Hadza evidence, Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones note that women of childbearing age spent about 4.5 hours a day foraging, while postreproductive women averaged more than seven hours, much of that additional time in energetically demanding tuber digging.²⁵ Children also begin contributing food well before adulthood.

That makes the question “who fed the family?” partly misleading. Producers could include a man, a woman, a grandmother, and children, while part of the harvest was redistributed through the camp. The modern wage model projects backward a picture in which the man earns while the woman and children consume. Ethnography does not provide that universal.

The modern male-breadwinner norm is better understood as a later translation of an older and more complex division of labor into the language of monetary income. A woman could produce half or most of the daily calories while a man simultaneously specialized in higher-variance production, external risk, protection, and tasks tied to the security of the wider group.

If a woman can produce most of the calories while a distinct male role still persists, that role cannot be reduced to calories. Tubers and meat can be counted in one column. Risky hunting, group defense, readiness for physical conflict, and public-good production are harder to price in the same unit.

A feminist description of the later breadwinner family usually reads it as female economic dependence. That is only half the transaction. For the man, the same system creates an obligation to produce the household income. Failure at work is therefore not merely financial failure; it can become failure at being a man.

The same exchange appears at the level of the state. Historians of mass mobilization describe the nineteenth-century citizen-soldier model as explicitly tying male citizenship to male military duty.⁴ Rights and obligations were bundled together much more often than a modern list of “male privileges” suggests.

See also the rights-without-duties myth.

Honor codes restrained the person most capable of doing physical damage

Men are stronger on average, and the strength gap expands sharply through adolescence. A meta-analysis of grip strength from birth to age sixteen finds a large, stable sex difference by late adolescence.⁵

That creates a basic coordination problem: if most direct physical force is concentrated in men, societies have a strong reason to regulate male force especially heavily.

This does not mean all morality was invented by men, or that honor cultures always reduced violence. Honor could itself demand violence: an insult might require an answer. But honor also converted conflict from arbitrary attack into a procedure with recognized causes, intermediaries, limits, and stopping conditions.

The history of dueling makes this visible. Margery Masterson describes the duel as highly ritualized violence that regulated relations within elite male society. During the nineteenth century, external honor increasingly gave way to ideals of internal “character” and physical self-restraint.⁶

The form of restraint changed, but the underlying demand remained: a man had to prove not only that he could use force, but that he could control it.

The surviving folk rules are easy to recognize: do not hit a man when he is down, do not attack from behind, keep your word, accept defeat, do not hide behind the weak, stop when the contest is over, answer for your people. These are not permissions to be violent. They are restraints placed around the sex most capable of causing immediate physical harm.

That argument is developed further in the “violence is a male trait” myth.

Less direct force does not mean less competition

When direct confrontation is costly, an obvious alternative is to compete without confronting directly. Modern behavioral research documents exactly those strategies.

Tracy Vaillancourt’s review describes indirect aggression — reputational attacks, rumors, criticism of appearance, and social exclusion — as an important form of female intrasexual competition.⁷ Across four studies, Benenson and colleagues found that females were more willing than males to exclude a temporary ally, reported more experiences of exclusion, and detected exclusion cues faster.⁸

That does not establish that women are “naturally deceitful.” It establishes a more useful point: the absence of a punch is not the absence of a power struggle. Reputation, coalition, exclusion, and information can substitute for direct force.

A study of punishment in everyday life shows the broader mechanism. People use direct confrontation more when they have greater power, while gossip becomes more likely when retaliation is costly and the punisher has less power.⁹

That pattern is compatible with an evolutionary hypothesis: because direct physical confrontation was historically more costly for the physically weaker sex, indirect strategies may have offered women a cheaper route to influence. It is a plausible account of origins, not proof of an innate female moral defect.

The archetype predates feminism

The distinction between force and cunning is far older than modern psychology.

Homer’s Odyssey is saturated with mêtis: flexible, indirect, sometimes deceptive intelligence. Odysseus survives not by being the strongest actor in every scene, but by disguising himself, concealing his identity, telling stories, waiting, and deceiving. Penelope uses the same kind of intelligence in the weaving ruse that delays the suitors. Modern scholarship explicitly places Odysseus’ mêtis beside Penelope’s and treats improvisation and deception as tools shared by both spouses.¹⁰

One modern literary reading goes further and describes Odysseus’ successful return as dependent on his willingness to use a “feminine model” of mêtis embodied by Athena, Circe, Calypso, and Penelope.¹¹

Literature does not prove biology. It does show how old the archetype is: open force and indirect strategy were understood as different routes to power long before modern gender theory existed.

Women enforce rules without a male boss

The central weakness in the slogan “patriarchy restricts women” is that it notices vertical authority and often misses horizontal authority.

Men can constrain through law, office, physical force, or formal hierarchy. But groups can sanction without a ruler. Female groups do not stop generating norms when men leave the room.

Female intrasexual competition includes well-documented reputational attacks and social exclusion.⁷⁸ Research on same-sex workplace competition also finds that competition with another woman is more damaging to female coworker relationships than comparable male competition, and discusses a female peer culture more oriented toward maintaining the appearance of harmony and equality.¹²

The result can be a system in which nobody formally issues an order, yet a woman can lose reputation, access, allies, and status. The absence of a male prohibition is not the absence of female power. It is a different mechanism of power.

There have always been societies in which law, religion, and male authority directly controlled women from above. That does not erase the larger point: a vast amount of everyday norm enforcement is horizontal and carried out by members of the group themselves.

Even bell hooks breaks the “men restrict women” model

A particularly useful witness here is not a men’s-rights writer but one of the best-known radical feminist authors. In Understanding Patriarchy, bell hooks explicitly says that a patriarchal thinker need not be male: women can be just as committed to patriarchal thinking, and both sexes learn those norms in the family. She goes further, arguing that mothers often transmit those attitudes and that a female-headed household does not stop reproducing patriarchal gender roles merely because no man is present.¹³

This is not statistical evidence about who is more likely to enforce traditional norms. Its value is different: it is a primary feminist source conceding that the simple model “men make the rules, women obey them” is inadequate. A woman can transmit a rule to a daughter, demand it from a son, punish deviation, and idealize a male role even when there is no male head of household.

In the same essay hooks rejects the picture of men as always and only powerful and women as always and only victims. She argues that placing all responsibility for sustaining the system on men can conceal women’s own participation in it and their own desire to dominate.¹³

At the same time hooks describes the cost of the male script. In her autobiographical example, her brother was taught to be strong, provide, think and plan, suppress parts of his emotional life, and channel aggression into socially permitted settings including protection of home and nation. She later explicitly treats rigid sex roles as damaging to men.¹³

Finally, hooks adopts the idea of psychological patriarchy: not merely rule by fathers or men, but a pattern of dominance, submission, collusion, and manipulation in which both sexes participate. For her political argument, that expands the concept. For our purposes, it exposes a problem of definition.

If “patriarchy” still exists when the rule is enforced by a mother, reproduced inside a female household, and imposed on a man, the word no longer tells us who actually has power over whom. That has to be measured separately.

What exactly is being “liberated” from patriarchy?

Feminist criticism correctly identifies costs borne by women under older systems: restrictions on education, property, sexuality, public office, and personal independence. There is no need to deny them.

The accounting becomes ideological when the male side disappears.

Male authority is called patriarchy. Male provision is called responsibility. Male protection is called decency. Male military obligation is called the needs of the state. Male self-restraint is called the minimum standard of behavior. Male willingness to absorb risk is called masculinity.

So male authority is treated as a patriarchal privilege while a large share of patriarchal male duties survive as ordinary expectations. Men are still expected to be safe, composed, economically useful, decisive, protective, and accountable — only those expectations are no longer counted as gender constraints.

At the same time, informal female power can pass under softer labels: social norms, boundaries, reputation, community standards, peer support. Renaming a sanction does not stop it from being power.

Patriarchy is not a free man standing beside a constrained woman

Patriarchy did constrain women. It was not, however, a club in which men received freedom and women received rules.

Its central bargain was harsher: more strength and authority meant more duty and more demands for self-control. Male status came on condition that men performed the role.

Count female restrictions while refusing to count male obligations and the conclusion is built into the arithmetic.

Patriarchy’s central problem was how to make the stronger sex governable: make men provide, protect, obey rules, and answer for the consequences of their strength. Women were constrained by norms. Men were constrained by norms, duties, and responsibility for power.

Sources

1. Joseph A. Vandello, Jennifer K. Bosson, Hard won and easily lost: A review and synthesis of theory and research on precarious manhood, Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 2013.
2. OECD, Man Enough? Measuring Masculine Norms to Promote Women’s Empowerment — Masculinities and women’s empowerment in the economic and political spheres, 2021.
3. Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries, The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain, International Review of Social History, 1997.
4. Ute Frevert, Citizenship, Mass Mobilization, and Masculinity in a Transatlantic Perspective, 1770s–1870s, in The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600, 2020.
5. James L. Nuzzo, Sex Differences in Grip Strength From Birth to Age 16: A Meta-Analysis, European Journal of Sport Science, 2025.
6. Margery Masterson, Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman, Journal of British Studies, 2017.
7. Tracy Vaillancourt, Do human females use indirect aggression as an intrasexual competition strategy?, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2013.
8. Joyce F. Benenson et al., Social Exclusion: More Important to Human Females Than Males, PLOS ONE, 2013.
9. Catherine Molho et al., Direct and indirect punishment of norm violations in daily life, Nature Communications, 2020.
10. Tom Phillips, Nobody’s Home: Metis, Improvisation and the Instability of Return in Homer’s Odyssey, Ramus, 2015.
11. Grace LaFrentz, Weaving a Way to Nostos: Odysseus and Feminine Mêtis in the Odyssey, Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal, 2021. This is a literary interpretation, not empirical evidence about sex differences in behavior.
12. Sun Young Lee, Selin Kesebir, Madan M. Pillutla, Gender differences in response to competition with same-gender coworkers, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2016.
13. bell hooks, Understanding Patriarchy, 2004. hooks argues that patriarchal thinking is reproduced by both sexes, often transmitted by mothers, and that treating men as always powerful and women as always victims hides women’s participation in sustaining the system; she also discusses the costs of rigid gender roles for men.
14. Hillard Kaplan, Kim Hill, Jane Lancaster, A. Magdalena Hurtado, A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity, Evolutionary Anthropology, 2000. Table 2 compares male and female food-energy production across nine foraging societies.
15. Brian F. Codding, Rebecca Bliege Bird, Douglas W. Bird, Provisioning offspring and others: risk–energy trade-offs and gender differences in hunter–gatherer foraging strategies, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2011.
16. Thomas S. Kraft et al., The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies, Science, 2021.
17. Brian M. Wood, Frank W. Marlowe, Household and Kin Provisioning by Hadza Men, Human Nature, 2013.
18. Kristen Hawkes, James F. O’Connell, Nicholas G. Blurton Jones, Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men’s Work, Current Anthropology, 2001.
19. James F. O’Connell, Kristen Hawkes, Nicholas Blurton Jones, Targeting the Hunting Hypothesis: Review of Evidence From the Hadza, Evolutionary Anthropology, 2025.
20. Frank W. Marlowe, A critical period for provisioning by Hadza men: Implications for pair bonding, Evolution and Human Behavior, 2003.
21. Ingela Alger, Slimane Dridi, Jonathan Stieglitz, Michael L. Wilson, The evolution of early hominin food production and sharing, PNAS, 2023. This is a conceptual and mathematical model, not direct archaeological observation.
22. Randall Haas et al., Female hunters of the early Americas, Science Advances, 2020.
23. Abigail Anderson et al., The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts, PLOS ONE, 2023; see also the authors’ 2024 correction.
24. Vivek V. Venkataraman et al., Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real: a comment on Anderson et al. (2023), Evolution and Human Behavior, 2024.
25. Kristen Hawkes, James O’Connell, Nicholas Blurton Jones, Hunter-gatherer studies and human evolution: A very selective review, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2018.