Pankaj Mishra’s position on patriarchy is puzzling

I was glad to see Pankaj Mishra turning his gaze on masculinity (Man trouble, Review, 17 March), since his work on the roots of current crises in Age of Anger is so insightful. But I was puzzled by his statement: “A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.”

With such a statement he seems to be unaware of how this hierarchy was imposed way before the 19th century. Feminist historians have mapped how the patriarchy has been codified in law from at least the 18th century BCE in Mesopotamia and is evident in every recorded culture, even if the existence of a few goddesses, queens or prophetesses may distract us. As Mary Beard reminds us in Women and Power, we find as early as Homer that “speech will be the business of men”. And while patriarchal values were so clearly imposed in the 19th century, this was also the time when resistance became more visible and organised – the resistance that feminists celebrate and continue.

It is essential that male writers who want to unpack the burdens of masculinity recognise how heavy and how complex these burdens are and how they have weighed on women and men not for 200 years but for millennia. Otherwise they run the risk of underplaying not only the scale of the problem, but also the work already carried out by feminists to map the patriarchy and resist it.
Natasha Walter
London

• At my local Asda, I mixed with mothers fresh from the school run with babies and toddlers in tow while pushing heavy trolleys. Just how keen are fathers to exchange roles, I wondered (MPs say fathers should get 12 weeks’ ‘use it or lose it’ leave, 20 March)?
Barbara Symonds
Birmingham

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