In 1932, 75-year-old socialist Clara Zetkin stood in Germany’s Reichstag and, despite being so unsteady that she had to be carried into the building on a stretcher, managed to give a rousing speech lasting more than 40 minutes. “The fight of the labouring masses,” she declared, is “the fight for their full liberation.” She wasn’t a fan of feminism (dismissing it as bourgeois), but it was Zetkin’s dream that women everywhere, especially the most deprived and marginalised, might one day be free of all forms of oppression. The Nazis took power in Germany shortly after. Zetkin fled to Russia and died there.
On the day I went to see Zetkin’s former home north of Berlin in Brandenburg, now a museum, there were no other visitors. Despite her iconic status in her own time, she has been largely lost to history. Her bravery is remembered usually as a footnote to the fact that she helped found what we now know as International Women’s Day.
We can only guess at what Zetkin might have made of how pitifully watered-down International Women’s Day has become. For all its revolutionary beginnings, today it’s more about empowerment brunches in corporate meeting rooms, or women on minimum wage serving pink cupcakes to women in expensive suits outraged at why the Barbie movie didn’t win more awards. It’s mainstream. So mainstream that the Conservative party, while it calculates how to fly vulnerable refugees, many of them women, to Rwanda, wishes women everywhere a happy International Women’s Day. Even the Labour party has sacrificed bold idealism for a don’t-rock-the-boat centre ground in which nothing really changes except for the tone.
As the cupcake icing melts in our mouths, we forget that women like Zetkin once believed that wholesale change was possible. It’s a strange state we find ourselves in when we consider that most of human history has in fact been about social experimentation. As far back as we have records, people have been trying out different modes of living, testing out democracy and farming, knocking down powerful leaders when they became despotic, branching off to form new communities, sometimes across continents and oceans. Sometimes these attempts have failed; other times, they’ve stuck. But they all prove how remarkably versatile we are as a species, capable of inventing countless forms of social organisation.
As I learned on my travels while researching the origins of patriarchy, anthropologists have documented at least 160 matrilineal societies still in existence today, in which people trace their lineage through the women in their family rather than the men. There is an entire “matrilineal belt” that stretches across Africa, and others dotted across Asia and North and South America.
In her book The Kingdom of Women, the former corporate lawyer Choo WaiHong has described women in the matrilineal Mosuo community of south-west China as having “a self-assurance that comes from deep within” – the result of living in what she calls a “feminist utopia”. Grandfathers change nappies. Grandmothers have six-packs. Tiplut Nongbri, a retired academic who grew up in a matrilineal society in the Khasi Hills of India, told me that Khasi women divorce and remarry more often than women in the rest of the country, and have more freedom and agency. Kristen Ghodsee, author of Everyday Utopia, has catalogued countless alternative societies around the world, including matriarchal ecovillages in Colombia.
Some of these communities have traditionally worshipped goddesses. Some subvert patriarchal notions of gender and sexuality, transcending the binary. Some don’t have monogamous marriage, or even marriage at all in the way it is commonly understood elsewhere. In many, individuals live out their days in their ancestral mothers’ homes, raising children communally.
They exist on the very same planet as the rest of us. Yet, suggest alternatives such as these to anyone in today’s big states and you would probably be laughed out the door. We have become so terrified of change that many of us can’t even imagine living like others whose world we share. A myth has taken root that patriarchy is how things were originally, everywhere in the world. Last year, the feminist icon Taylor Swift told Time magazine as much. “What has existed since the dawn of time?” she said. “A patriarchal society.”
Nothing could be less true. Not only are patriarchies a relatively recent human invention – appearing in an incipient form between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, taking millennia to develop into what we recognise them as in the modern age – they’re not universal even today.
Of course, the mainstreaming of feminism is a welcome shift in many ways. Women are acquiring or already have the same legal status and rights as men in many countries. It’s harder for modern patriarchal states such as Iran and Afghanistan to maintain their legitimacy. But at the same time, more radical possibilities seem to have fallen off the table, such as the idea that household work might be paid, or carried out by trained teams of well-equipped workers employed by the state, as the activist Angela Davis once suggested. Few seriously question the nuclear family, or raise the prospect of abolishing marriage as an institution. We seem decades away from redesigning infrastructures and institutions to safely make space for everyone, including non-binary and transgender people. If the Labour party cares about gender equality, when it comes into power it could transform women’s lives at a stroke by radically reducing income inequality between the rich and the poor. Instead, the party remains in thrall to society’s wealthiest.
Clara Zetkin’s vision for a post-patriarchal future was never about women having the same as men and everything else staying the same. It was about resetting society, inventing one without need, in which nobody suffered unnecessarily. She stood up to the Nazis in defence of that hope. We would do well to honour her, not with cupcakes, but with imagination.
Angela Saini is a science writer, teaches at MIT and is the author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule