What happened to sisterhood?

01

Before the story of male leadership: what actually came first

We are often told that male dominance is natural, that men were always the leaders, the hunters, the decision-makers, and that women have always been secondary. This is not history. It is a story told backward from a conclusion.

The oldest human figurines ever found are female. The Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria and dated to approximately 25,000 BCE, is one of hundreds of similar objects found across Europe and western Asia, all depicting women with emphasized reproductive features. Archaeologist Nicholas Conard documented a comparable female figurine from Hohle Fels Cave in Germany dating to at least 35,000 BCE, making it one of the oldest known pieces of figurative art in the world.[1] Across the Paleolithic period, over millennia, across thousands of kilometers, early humans chose to represent the female body as the primary sacred image. The fact that the oldest human art is overwhelmingly feminine is not incidental. It reflects what early humans considered worthy of reverence.

In the Neolithic period, the evidence becomes more specific. The city of Çatalhöyük in what is now Turkey, occupied between approximately 7500 and 5700 BCE, is one of the best-documented early urban sites ever excavated. James Mellaart's excavations beginning in 1958 and Ian Hodder's subsequent decades of research found no evidence of hierarchical gender differentiation in burials: men and women were interred with comparable care, under the same floors, with equivalent goods.[2] The shrines throughout the city were decorated with female figurines and imagery associated with birth and regeneration. This was a society in which the generative power of women was central to the sacred life of the community.

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas spent her career documenting what she called the civilization of the goddess: a network of Neolithic European cultures from roughly 7000 to 3500 BCE in which female deities were central to religious practice, art, and social organization.[3] Her interpretations are debated by some scholars, but the underlying material record (the figurines, the shrines, the burial evidence) is not in dispute. What is clear is this: the claim that men have always led and women have always followed is not an archaeological finding. It is an assumption projected onto the past. And assumptions can be named.

The reason this matters is simple. If male dominance were biologically inevitable, it would not have required centuries of active enforcement. The history that follows is the history of that enforcement. And enforcement implies resistance, which means there was something to resist.

02

How sisterhood was dismantled, century by century

The erasure of women's collective power did not happen all at once. It moved through different tools across different countries at different moments. What follows is a chronological account, not exhaustive, but specific enough to show the pattern.

Antiquity: Greece and Rome (500 BCE to 400 CE)

In classical Athens, women were excluded from virtually all forms of public life. They could not participate in democratic assemblies, hold public office, initiate legal proceedings, or own property independently. Respectable women were expected to remain confined to the domestic sphere. Aristotle gave this exclusion its philosophical justification: in his Politics, written around 350 BCE, he argued that the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, and that this hierarchy was as natural and necessary as the rule of the soul over the body.[4] This was not a private opinion. Aristotle's philosophy became the intellectual foundation of European thought for more than a thousand years.

Rome gave women slightly more legal room. Some could own property, and upper-class women had social influence through their relationships with powerful men. But the legal institution of tutela mulierum, the guardianship of women, kept adult women under the formal authority of a male guardian for most significant legal and financial transactions throughout the Republic and much of the Empire. The physician Galen, writing in the 2nd century CE, described the female body as an inverted and incomplete version of the male.[5] His medical writings dominated European medicine for over 1,400 years. The woman was structurally defined, in both law and medicine, as an imperfect man.

The medieval Church and the control of women's bodies (500 to 1400 CE)

As Christianity spread across Europe and the Church became the dominant institutional power, its theology formalized a specific account of female inferiority. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century theologian whose work remains foundational to Catholic doctrine, drew directly on Aristotle to argue that woman is a mas occasionatus, a defective male, produced when the generative power of the father's seed is weakened by circumstance.[6] Woman was associated with Eve's transgression, with bodily weakness, with susceptibility to sin. The theological argument was not incidental to the institutional reality: it provided the justification for excluding women from clerical roles, from universities, and from formal religious authority.

At the same time, women were the primary healers in European communities. They knew plants and herbs, they managed birth, they held the medical knowledge of their villages. Church councils from the 10th century onward increasingly worked to restrict healing practice to men with formal ecclesiastical training, framing women's embodied knowledge as superstition, folk magic, or improper meddling. The ground was being prepared methodically for what came next.

The witch hunts: burning the knowledge network (1400 to 1700 CE)

Between the 14th and 18th centuries, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed across Europe on charges of witchcraft. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of those executed were women.[7] The persecution was not uniform: it was concentrated in the Holy Roman Empire (modern-day Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), along with France, Scotland, and the Swiss Confederation, with significant outbreaks in England, Scandinavia, and Poland. It crossed Catholic and Protestant jurisdictions alike.

In 1486, two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, published the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches. This manual provided the theological, legal, and procedural framework for the persecutions. It described women as inherently susceptible to demonic influence by reason of weaker intellect and carnal appetite. It outlined how to identify, interrogate, and prosecute accused witches. It went through fourteen editions before 1520 and was cited in courts across the continent.[8] The text was not a religious aberration. It was an institutional tool, distributed and applied systematically.

The women most frequently targeted were not random. Historians Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English documented that the accused were disproportionately midwives, herbalists, healers, women living alone, widows who had not remarried, and women who gathered in groups.[9] What was being destroyed was not witchcraft. It was a knowledge infrastructure: the network of women who knew how to manage birth, fever, and the body, who passed that knowledge between each other across generations. Historian Silvia Federici, in her landmark work Caliban and the Witch, placed the persecutions in direct relation to the enclosures happening across England and Europe at the same time: the legal seizure of shared land that had been held in common.[10] The commons were the physical spaces where women gathered, organized, and transmitted knowledge. When the land was enclosed, the gathering places disappeared. The witch trials eliminated the women who still held the knowledge. The two processes worked together.

Language and symbolic erasure: France and Europe (17th century)

As the violence of the trials subsided, the erasure continued through language. In France, this is unusually well documented. Before the 17th century, French grammar operated by what grammarians called the proximity rule: an adjective agreed in gender with the nearest noun. Word order could keep a sentence feminine. Then, in 1647, grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas began promoting the superiority of the masculine gender. In 1651, Scipion Dupleix stated the logic explicitly, writing that the masculine was superior by nature. By the late 17th century, the Académie française had codified the rule: le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin, meaning the masculine wins over the feminine.[11] Historian Éliane Viennot spent years tracing exactly how this political decision was dressed as a grammatical one and what was lost in the process.[12]

The same period saw the systematic disappearance of feminine professional titles. La philosophe. La médecin. La poète. La autrice. These words had existed, been used, and were progressively dropped from official written French, leaving only masculine forms as defaults. The Académie française resisted formally reintroducing feminine professional titles well into the 2000s. France was not alone: German, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic all moved toward masculine defaults during the early modern period, requiring women's presence in language to be explicitly marked rather than assumed. Language does not merely describe a world. It constrains what can be imagined. When the word for a woman in a role of authority disappears from the language, it becomes harder to picture her there. That is not a side effect. It is the function.

Institutional exclusion: universities and medicine (18th to 20th century)

Medical schools across Europe formally excluded women until the late 19th century. In the United Kingdom, women were not permitted to train as doctors until 1876, and only after organized legal battles stretching across decades. In France, Madeleine Brès became the first woman to obtain a medical doctorate in 1875, in the face of significant institutional resistance. In Germany, women were barred from most universities until the early 1900s.[13] The timing is precise: women were formally excluded from medicine exactly as medicine displaced and delegitimized the healing traditions women had held. Their knowledge was redeclared as superstition. The institutions that replaced it were closed to them by law. These two facts are not coincidental. Together, they constitute a transfer of authority.

What this sequence reveals is not a series of isolated events separated by centuries. It is a campaign with consistent internal logic: wherever women organized, shared knowledge, held communal resources, or exercised public authority, that capacity was identified and dismantled. The tools shifted: theology, law, language, grammar, institutional policy. The outcome did not.

03

How the machinery still runs today

The historical tools described above did not disappear. They were updated.

In 1999, psychologists Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn published a study that has since become one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. They gave men and women the exact same math test. When the groups were told the test had historically shown gender differences, women underperformed significantly compared to men. When both groups were told the test showed no gender differences, women and men performed identically.[14] The test did not change. The expectation did. This is what researchers call stereotype threat: knowing that a negative stereotype exists about your group is enough to impair your performance in the domain it concerns. A meta-analysis covering over 100 studies confirmed the effect is consistent and significant.[15] The same logic applies in reverse: when a test is framed as measuring a skill women are expected to be good at, the performance gap disappears or inverts. The competence was always there. What changes is the frame.

The bias also operates in how women's work and potential are evaluated by others. In 2012, researchers at Yale University sent identical CVs to academic faculty at universities across the United States. The only difference was the name: some read "John," some read "Jennifer." Faculty across disciplines, including female faculty, rated John as significantly more competent, more hirable, and worth a higher starting salary than Jennifer, given identical qualifications.[16] This study has been replicated in law, science, and corporate hiring. The result holds.

When women display leadership behavior, they are penalized for it in ways men are not. Psychologists call this the prescriptive gender stereotype violation: women are expected to be warm and communal, and when they act with authority or decisiveness, they are evaluated more harshly on both likeability and competence simultaneously.[17] A woman who is aggressive is penalized. A woman who is too soft is not taken seriously. The corridor of acceptable behavior is narrow in a way that has no male equivalent.

Salary negotiation produces the same asymmetry. Research by Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai found that women who initiate salary negotiations are penalized more than men who do the same, by both male and female evaluators.[18] The advice to simply "negotiate your worth" ignores the documented cost women pay for doing exactly that. When a woman follows the same playbook as a man, she does not get the same result. The playbook was not written for her.

Motherhood produces the sharpest measurable gap. Sociologists Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik sent identical CVs to employers, varying only whether the candidate had children. Mothers were called back at half the rate of childless women with the same profile. Fathers were called back at a higher rate than childless men.[19] The same event, the same qualification, opposite outcomes. Parenthood adds to a man's perceived value and subtracts from a woman's. This is not culture in the abstract. It is a measurable economic mechanism, operating in real hiring decisions in the present day.

These are not remnants of a more ignorant past. They are active, peer-reviewed, reproducible findings. The tools are different from the Malleus Maleficarum. The function is the same: to limit what women can access, build, and claim.

04

What is shifting

The machinery still runs. And something is also moving.

In Rwanda, women hold 61 percent of parliamentary seats, the highest proportion of any national legislature in the world.[20] This did not happen spontaneously: it was built, deliberately, through constitutional quotas introduced after the 1994 genocide, combined with decades of grassroots organizing by Rwandan women who had rebuilt their communities from the ground up. The result is a legislature where women have driven legislation on land rights, domestic violence, and maternal health that measurably changed outcomes for the population.

Iceland has ranked first on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report for fourteen consecutive years.[21] It achieved this through a combination of universal childcare, pay transparency laws, and parental leave structures that apply equally to fathers, changing the economic logic of hiring a woman of childbearing age. The gender pay gap there is the smallest documented in the world. These are policy choices, not cultural destiny.

In 2018, the European Union began requiring large companies to publish gender-disaggregated pay data. Countries that implemented mandatory pay transparency earlier, including the UK and Denmark, documented measurable reductions in the gender pay gap in the years following implementation.[22] What gets named gets changed. The naming required pressure from women who organized to make it happen.

Across disciplines, the record of women's intellectual and political contribution, suppressed for centuries, is being actively reconstructed. Historians are naming the women written out of scientific discoveries, political movements, and literary traditions. Legal scholars are documenting the legislative history of rights granted and then taken back. Linguists are recovering the feminine professional titles that were removed from French, German, and Spanish, and reintroducing them. The erasure is being reversed in deliberate, documented increments.

None of this is fast enough. None of it is complete. But the direction is documented. Women who understand the history of what was taken are harder to convince that the taking was natural. That clarity is not a small thing. It is how structural change begins.