Angela Saini: Patriarchs

How did societies develop across the globe, and how did gender become so enmeshed in them?

Award-winning science journalist Angela Saini's new book The Patriarchs goes in search of the true roots of gendered oppression, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.

We could not be more thrilled to welcome Saini back to Edinburgh following appearances at our Book Fringe for Inferior in 2017 and a Radical Book Fair event for Superior in 2019! Now she's back with an ever bolder, more radical, feminist offering.

Travelling to the world’s earliest known human settlements, analysing the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and tracing cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, Saini overturns simplistic universal theories to show that what patriarchy is and how far it goes back really depends on where you live.

'By thinking about gendered inequality as rooted in something unalterable within us, we fail to see it for what it is: something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted.'

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist and author based in New York. She presents radio and television programmes, and her writing has appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, The Sunday Times and Wired. She was a spring 2022 Logan Nonfiction Program Fellow and a 2022 fellow of the Humboldt Residency Programme in Berlin.

Her previous works include; 'Superior: The Return of Race Science' which was published in 2019 to widespread critical acclaim and 'Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong' which has been translated into fourteen languages. Both are on university reading lists across the world. Angela's two-part television series for the BBC about the history and science of eugenics aired in 2019.

As the founder and chair of the 'Challenging Pseudoscience' group at the Royal Institution, Angela researches and campaigns around issues of misinformation and disinformation. Listen to her 2019 BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Misinformation Virus, here.