The Independent: The Ascent of Woman, TV review: The story of how a feminist hero came to legitimise misogyny

In this scholarly yet pacy BBC documentary, Dr Amanda Foreman started her search for answers a long, long way back

In this scholarly yet pacy BBC documentary, Dr Amanda Foreman started her search for answers a long, long way back

By Simon Usborne

In the current debate about the new feminism, and daily assaults on equality, I do not recall anyone stepping back very far from the contemporary world of pay gaps and thigh gaps to ask the most basic question: why is this a thing? Where do the roots of sexism lead, and how long are they? In the first episode of The Ascent of Woman, a scholarly yet pacy four-part documentary, Dr Amanda Foreman started her search for answers a long, long way back. As far as archaeologists can tell, Catalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old city in modern-day Turkey, was an equal society, and God was a seated woman attended by leopards.

Then things got bad. With agricultural surplus came currency and power, the harvesting of which chiefly became the concern of men and their bloodlines. After the Anatolian leopard woman, a figurine of whom Foreman observed, her binder of game-changing women were exceptions to the patriarchal rule.

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