This is not the kind of question historians typically explore - /r/AskAnthropology is better equipped to answer it. I am sure they have answered it a few times, I'd recommend you search through earlier posts before asking.

Early social scientists were fixed on the question of the "division of labor", how people became specialized into roles. You can see this from George Duzemil's proposed "trifunctional division" of Indo-European society (farmers, warriors, and priests) or Emile Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society or Adam Smith's extensive discussions in the Wealth of Nations. The division of labor both reflected their understanding of what separated primitive societies from complex societies, and also reflected their current times, as urbanization and industrialization were completely remaking the contemporary division of labor (that's what Durkheim's book is explicitly about, for instance).

Historically, it's pretty clear that the most elemental division of labor we see is a sexual division of labor, which is to say, men and women play different roles. David Graeber points out in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology that some small scale societies that otherwise seem radically egalitarian have a sexual division of labor and notable inequality between the sexes. To quote an older post I made:

The TL;DR is something like The opposite of patriarchal (male rule) isn't matriarchal (female rule) but egalitarianism. Many small scale societies are much more egalitarian, but here probably "more egalitarian" is more appropriate than "egalitarian". The sexual division of labor grew and became firmer with agriculture, settled societies, and the divisions of labor that exists in other societies (ranging from the classical priests-warriors-farmers that the Indo-Europeans had, to the specialized trades that come with permanent cities like merchants, smiths, scribes, etc.). All this means that "civilizations" were probably more patriarchal than earlier forms of social organization. Basically, if you want the "anti-patriarchy", you'd be better to look for an "egalitarian small scale culture" (probably one with minimal division of labor) rather than a "matriarchal civilization".

Here is an older AskAnthropology posts that might also interest you: Is it true that most anthropologists believe that matriarchal societies have never existed?

But it seems like the simplest answer is that complex societies require a division of labor (even before agriculture in many cases, but definitely after), and that one of the most elemental divisions of labor is the sexual division of labor. Only in the 20th century, with the advent of extensive time saving devices for work at home (washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners, industrialized food preparation, etc), do we see the sexual division of labor eroding strongly and widely (though it's still the way most people default in relationships, studies have shown).