I’ve been doing genealogical research recently and it makes me sad that my female lineage is so much more difficult to pin down than my male lineage. I was able to do my mitochondrial DNA and that just gave me the haplogroup my female ancestors belonged to, with few matches.

I come from a very patriarchal culture, but it’s the women’s stories that particularly interest me. My great-grandmother, for example, was a badass that avenged her husband and raised five children on her own, who ran and expanded a farm, and who survived WWII. And I recently learned that our grandmother’s body forms the egg that we grow from, as your mother’s body was born with all the eggs she would have over her lifetime already. There’s something mystical about the female lineage, and it’s all obscured in favor of patrilineal inheritance and men’s status obsession.