Aas a writer my focus has been on one of the greatest mysteries in all of history: what is the origin of patriarchy in human society? I should have known that the journey to answer that question would forever change the way I thought about myself.
What I did know was that it would mean going back in time. The historical time scales involved here are not centuries, but millennia. That’s how I ended up in southern Anatolia, Turkey, the site of one of the oldest known human settlements in the world. Çatalhöyük is beautifully preservedits box-like houses a window into how people lived in this region thousands of years before Stonehenge was built or the first pyramids went up in Egypt.
A museum nearby holds the most precious artifact found at the site, a figurine not much bigger than my hand, yet so poignant that when it was unearthed in the 1960s, it sent ripples through the archaeological world. The Seated woman from Çatalhöyük is approximately 9,000 years old, depicting what appears to be an older woman. She sits like a queen, her back straight, pressed rolls of skin spilling out like clay waterfalls around her, with two large cats – possibly leopards – staring forward from beneath her resting hands.
When she was discovered, archaeologists immediately branded her a goddess, a possible symbol of the female divine. Since then, experts have wondered if she was in fact a real person, possibly a respected figure in her community or a family matriarch. We can’t be sure, and it’s unlikely we ever will be, since she comes from a time that predates writing. But analysis of human remains can tell us something about the society to which this object belonged. Çatalhöyük was a settlement in which people seem to have lived the same kind of lives regardless of gender.
The data we have so far tells us that men and women in Çatalhöyük ate similar things, spent about the same amount of time indoors and outdoors, did the same kinds of work as each other, and were buried in roughly the same ways. Even the height difference between the sexes was slight – a reminder that biological gender differences can be deeply influenced by our social circumstances. If there were social hierarchies in this Neolithic settlement, they do not seem to have cut along gender lines.
But, as the figurine suggests, they may have cut along lines of age.
Age is a curiously neglected axis of power, even though it is clear that most powerful people, both now and throughout history, have been older. Within families, elders generally held the highest status. In Chinese cultures, filial piety still requires it. Even in the most rigidly patriarchal families, mothers and mothers-in-law can have a tight grip on younger members.
In the world’s many matrilineal societies, in which inheritance passes from mother to daughter rather than from father to son, it is the eldest woman in a household who holds the authority. In India today, older women no longer encumbered by young children are storming into local village politics, known as panchayat. Just this year, an 89-year-old woman was elected the oldest serving panchayat president in the state of Tamil Nadu. But she was not the oldest on record. In 2015, a 93-year-old woman was elected in Maharashtra.
Perhaps we ignore age because it is a democratic way to gain power – after all, it happens to all of us who survive. As I slowly move into mid-life, I can feel it for myself, that gradual build-up of respect and status that seems to come almost automatically. When a shop assistant called me ma’am for the first time a year or two ago, I was amazed; now i love it. I know it’s not the same for all women, but at least I feel freer to speak up, more confident that I won’t be fired, more able to demand what I want. Perhaps the most liberating feeling of all is finding myself less and less subject to the male gaze. It’s my thoughts that people care more these days. They want to know what I think.
I have spent over a decade researching and writing about gender. At that time I understood it to be much less static than we imagine. What gender means to a person does not even stay the same over the course of their lives. For young children, gender does not matter at all. If it has meaning, it is what we force through the stereotypes we inject into it. Gender comes into play later, in adolescence and early adulthood. But then in old age, as fertility declines and our bodies change, it changes meaning again.
The older you get, the harder it becomes to maintain the stereotypical appearance of femininity (or masculinity). I now need lipstick, where I found I didn’t need it before. It takes deliberate effort to keep my hair soft, shiny, the same color as it was, and to keep my skin from sagging. I can feel my youth slipping away, and with it the qualities that make me recognizably feminine. For the first time, I wonder how easy it would be to tell older men from older women if people didn’t put in all this work.
It can feel destabilizing. But seen differently, it is also liberating. Wouldn’t we all appreciate not having to carry the weight of what society expects of us? So, despite the message I get from the firms trying to sell me anti-aging creams that I risk losing what makes me most valuable – my youthful femininity – I find myself unexpectedly excited about this next phase of my life. to enter. The older I get, the less relevant my gender feels. I finally have the license to just be myself, like I did as a kid.
In these moments I experience what I like to imagine the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük might have thousands of years ago, perhaps knowing that her body was less consistent than the authority she had due to her age. I look enviously at the very brilliant older women I know, the ones who couldn’t care less what people think, who head university departments, edit newspapers, sit on councils. I can’t wait to join them. Why should any of us fear rolls of skin and cavernous wrinkles when we can have something far better than youth – when we can have strength?
