Jessica Wynn

And she goes further saying that this myth didn't originate in feminism.

The myth was originally created by men, Bakofen, Engels, and their intellectual heirs, who thought of matriarchy as something humanity had correctly outgrown.

Savage.

So the feminist version is a later reinterpretation, not the original idea.

And women are submissive.

You're not far off probably because of course who wrote it?

The answer is largely men.

from patriarchal societies, and they're working with their own assumptions about what power looks like.

And those assumptions were not neutral.

So what assumptions are we talking about?

Okay, so this is documented.

It's not speculative.

So when European colonial administrators, the ones you're imagining, arrived in West Africa among the Akan in what's now Ghana, they encountered societies where women held

real political authority.

There were female chiefs, female councils, female religious leaders.

But when it came time to negotiate and sign treaties and establish colonial governance, they just couldn't process it.

Europeans dealt almost exclusively with men because that's what authority looked like to them.

The women's political roles were simply not legible to them, so they gave no respect to female power.

Yeah, I mean, the women's authority wasn't always invisible, but it was often treated as irrelevant.

And over time, that selective recognition reshaped the actual power structure itself.