This chapter examines the historical and political role of women in early human societies, challenging prevailing narratives that associate civilization with progress and gender equity. Drawing on archaeological, historical, and anthropological evidence, it argues that women held relatively high societal status and exercised political power in pre-neolithic, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. The chapter further contends that the onset of hierarchical rule—typically imposed by violent, patriarchal male elites—correlated with the systematic disenfranchisement of women. Through a reassessment of Old European cultures, the Minoan civilization of Crete, Neolithic Anatolia, and steppe societies like the Scythians, the chapter reconstructs a past in which women not only participated in public and political life but, at times, governed and defended egalitarian traditions. The historical presence of women warriors, such as the Amazons, and the political leadership of women in precolonial African societies—including the Yoruba and Tswana—are presented as empirical evidence of gender parity in earlier, more democratic forms of social organization. The chapter concludes by arguing that women’s status serves as a barometer for the health of democratic institutions and that modern liberal democracies, like their classical Greek predecessors, remain structurally patriarchal and exclusionary. Women’s domestication into the private sphere, particularly under colonial and religious imperialisms, marked the suppression of egalitarian democracy and the rise of state-centered hierarchies.