Understanding Patriarchy
(Intro to Feminism)
Social Systems—The global system of Patriarchy refers to male domination—both in public and private spheres. Feminists mainly use the term ‘patriarchy’ to describe the power-relationship that exists, in every country on earth, between men and women, and to characterize a system whereby women are kept subordinate in a great variety of ways. Thus, patriarchy is more than just a buzzword—it’s a concept, and like many concepts it is a tool to help us understand women’s realities. Patriarchy describes the institutionalized system of male dominance, usefully defined as a set of social relations between men and women which have a material base, and which, through hierarchy’s rankings, create independence of and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.
To live in a patriarchal culture, as we all do, is to learn what’s expected of men and women to learn the rules that regulate punishment and reward based on how individuals appear and behave. Laws, expectation, ideas which make up the symbolic sea we swim in and the air we breathe. Systems locate us in relation to people in other positions—father, mother, battered woman, boss, president, citizen, clergy, employed, unemployed, homeless. Our identity is created through these social ideas and the expectations instilled within us from birth. Cultural ideas— such as the belief that mothers are naturally better than fathers at child care and housework.
Misogyny means contempt for women. So when men interrupt women, ignore them, or use their authority to harass them, then the reality of patriarchy actually can be seen in concrete daily ways. Women and men both feel misogyny because the systems tell us it’s true, and show us constant images of it. The path of least resistance is not to argue with systems. Do you ever wonder how it is that what we think of as “normal and natural” life relates to male privilege, female oppression, and the control-obsessed, hierarchical world in which everyone’s lives are embedded? How we think affects the kinds of questions we ask. The rules of our culture define not just what to think, but what we can think about. We mostly don’t think about social systems. Although we exist inside them, they are invisible, as water is to fish.
Patriarchal ideology exaggerates biological differences between men and women, making certain that men always have the dominant, or masculine, roles and women always have the subordinate or feminine ones. Patriarchal systems accept that men have—or should have— one set of qualities and characteristics, and women another. The ‘masculine’ qualities—strength, bravery, fearlessness, dominance, competitiveness— and ‘feminine’ qualities—caring, nurturing, love, timidity, obedience. These are not just divided, but then one set is systematically raised above the other. Male values are exalted, while female values are denigrated, world-wide.
This ideology is so powerful that men are usually able to secure the apparent consent of the very women they oppress. They do this through institutions such as education, religion, health care, employment & economics, and the family, each of which justifies and reinforces women’s subordination to men. The patriarchal system is characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition. So, patriarchy is a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.
To preserve male supremacy, patriarchy created ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics, as well as private-public realms gendered by deliberate socialization processes. Socialization is considered to take place primarily during childhood, when boys and girls learn the appropriate behavior for their sex. All agents of socialization process are cultural institutions,—such as the family, religion, the legal system, the economic system and political system, the educational institutions, and the media— these are the pillars of a patriarchal system and structure. The use of the term “social structure” is important here, since it clearly implies rejection both of biological determinism, and the notion that every individual man is in a dominant position and every women in a subordinate one. In this system women’s labor-power, women’s reproduction, women’s sexuality, women’s mobility and property and other economic resources—are under patriarchal control”.
Above all, patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence. From the expression of emotion to economics to Nature, gaining and exercising control is a continuing goal. Because of this bent, the concept of power—(what one is able to Do)—takes on a narrow definition in terms of power-over—the ability to control others, events, resources, or one’s self, rather than alternatives such as the ability to share and cooperate, to give freely of oneself, or to feel and act in harmony with nature.
The main use of any culture is to provide symbols and ideas out of which to construct a sense of what is real. This is what social systems do. We all participate in social systems, and as we do, we are shaped by socialization. In all systems today, human experience=male experience. But, every one of us is involved and implicated in this system, despite the rewards or punishments heaped upon us by it. The key is that we get to choose HOW we participate. Masculinity and femininity are discussions that are socially constructed in a field of power. Every generation re-creates patriarchy and passes it forward to the next. Until it doesn’t.
History— According to modern psychology, women’s biology determines their psychology and, therefore, their abilities and roles. Sigmund Freud— that misogynist male genius for example, stated that for women, anatomy is destiny. In his view, which is the ancient Greek view posited by their most famous ancient philosophers, the normal human was male. But these theories of male supremacy have been challenged and it has been proved that there is no historical or scientific evidence for such explanations. There are indeed biological differences between men and women but these distinctions do not have to become the basis of a sexual hierarchy in which men are dominant. The analysis of many of these theories enables us to recognize that patriarchy is man-made—historical processes have created it.
One thing that the historical process is producing in the modern world is feminist scholars. According to scholar Maria Mies, women were the first producers of life, of social production, of the first tools of production and if they were also the first to initiate social relations, why were they unable to prevent the establishment of an hierarchical and exploitative relationship between the sexes? She answers this by saying that male supremacy, far from being a consequence of men’s superior economic contribution, was a result of physical strength, and also of the development and control of destructive tools through which they controlled women, nature and other men.
In the words of feminist scholar and creator of the first Women’s History graduate program— Gerda Lerner—“Patriarchy was not one event but a process developing over a period of almost 2500 years, from approximately 3100 BC to 600 BC, and a number of factors and forces that were responsible for the establishment of male supremacy as we see it today— Lerner begins by emphasizing the importance of womens’ history in women’s struggle against patriarchy and for equality. According to her, patriarchy, in fact, preceded the formation of both private property and class society.
Women’s subordination by patriarchy, which pre-supposes the natural superiority of male over female, shamelessly upholds women’s dependence on, and subordination to, men in all spheres of life. Consequently, all the power and authority within the family, the society and the state remain entirely in the hands of men. So, due to patriarchy, women were deprived of their legal rights and opportunities. Patriarchal values restrict women’s mobility, reject their freedom over themselves, as well as refusing them property ownership and inheritance. Subordination means having less power or authority than somebody else in a group or an organization.
In her book, The Creation of Patriarchy, Lerner said, “The use of the phrase subordination of women instead of the word “oppression” has distinct advantages. Subordination does not have the connotation of evil intent on the part of the dominant; it allows for the possibility of collusion between him and the subordinate. It includes the possibility of voluntary acceptance of subordinate status in exchange of protection and privilege, a condition which characterizes so much of the historical experience of women.
Patriarchy is a system whereby women are kept subordinate in a number of ways. The subordination that we experience at a daily level—regardless of the class we might belong to— takes various forms. Discrimination, disregard, insult, control, exploitation, oppression, and violence, within the family, in the work-place, on the streets, and in the general society. Some world-wide discriminations against women are—son preference, discrimination against girls in food distribution, the burden of household work on women and young girls, lack of educational opportunities for girls, lack of freedom and mobility for girls, wife battering, male control over women and girls, sexual harassment at workplace, lack of inheritance or property rights for women, male control over women’s bodies and sexuality, no control over fertility or laws controlling her reproductive rights. Thus, patriarchy is called the sum of the kind of male domination we see around women all the time.
This control over and exploitation of areas of women’s lives mean that men benefit materially from patriarchy—they derive concrete economic gains from the subordination of women. In what British feminist sociologist, Sylvia Walby calls ‘the patriarchal mode of production’, women’s labor is expropriated by their husbands and others who live in the home. She says housewives are the producing class, while husbands are the expropriating class. In fact, women’s endless and repetitive labor is not considered work at all, is unpaid in all societies, and housewives are seen to be dependent on their husbands. That’s what creates what Marists call a material basis for patriarchy.
Most property and other productive resources are controlled by men and they pass from one man to another, usually from father to son. Even where women have the legal right to inherit such assets, a whole array of customary practices, emotional pressures, social sanctions and sometimes, plain violence, prevent them from acquitting actual control over them. In other cases, personal laws curtail their rights, rather than enhance them. In all cases, they are disadvantaged. So the material base of patriarchy, then, does not rest solely on child bearing in the family, but on all the social structures that enable men to control women’s labor.
Private patriarchy is based upon household production as the main site of women’s oppression. Public patriarchy is based principally in public sites, such as norms of employment and laws of the state. In private patriarchy, the expropriation of women’s labor takes place primarily by individual patriarchs within the household, while in the public form it is a more collective appropriation. In private patriarchy, the principle strategy of domination is exclusionary, in the public it is segregationist and subordinating. Above all, Walby argues, “The state has a systematic bias towards patriarchal interests in its policies and actions” In this system, different kinds of violence may be used to control and subjugate women, such violence by men, which is even be considered legitimate in many cases, and women are always routinely experiencing male violence.
Male violence is systematically condoned and legitimated by the state’s refusal to intervene against it, except in exceptional instance. Due to such violence—rape and other forms of sexual abuse, female infanticide, dowry murders, wife-beating, physical coercion, and the continued sense of insecurity that is instilled in women as a result, keeps them bound to the home, economically exploited and socially suppressed. In this patriarchal system, men and women behave, think, and aspire differently because they have been taught to think of masculinity and femininity in ways which condition difference.
Both house-work and wage-labor are important sites of women’s exploitation by men. Within the field of paid work, occupational segregation is used by organized men to keep access to the best paid jobs for themselves at the expense of women. Within the household, women do more labor than men, even if they also have paid employment. These two forms of expropriation also act to reinforce each other, since women’s disadvantaged position in paid work makes them vulnerable in making marriage arrangements, and their position in the family disadvantages them in paid work.
Our participation in systems both shapes our lives and gives us the opportunity to be part of either changing or perpetuating them. At every level, from the global capitalist economy to sexual relationships to parenting, we can make systems happen differently, because, we make systems happen. All people—all women and all men, and all who don’t identify as either— are involved in this oppressive system, and none of us can control whether we participate in it. We can only control How. There is no such thing as giving up one’s privilege to be outside the system. One is always inside a system, however noble and egalitarian one’s intentions. So, choose. How will you act?
back to list