text: It has been this way in this European-based culture, a religious patriarchy, for well over a thousand years.   It is not this way in all cultures at all.   There were many matriarchal, matrilineal societies among indigenous people around the world where women owned the houses and the fields and had as much social power as the men.   I grew up in a family that was dominated by a matriarchal  history, and I could tell by the time I was ten years old that this society is misogynistic and treats women very badly.  It wasn't that long ago that women couldn't vote in this country, and that their husbands could beat them legally, dispose of them in mental institutions and elsewhere because they were now 35 or something. etc.  When I was a child there were three professions/jobs that women could enter - nursing, teaching, and secretarial.  Oops, also waitress.   
  
  Deeply ingrained ways of seeing reality - about 3,000 years worth of patriarchy - haven't gone away.