Since I am always ranting and raving about patriarchy, I have been taking a closer look at the key bibliography on the topic. The discussion of patriarchy appears to be disseminated among many heterogeneous texts and has not generated one single essential volume, though I grant that Austrian-American historian Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) comes close. Also, the monograph by British sociologist Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (1990). I haven’t read yet Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900 (1998) by the historian of sociology Pavla Miller, nor her new volume, simply called Patriarchy (2017). Whatever I say here is, then, woefully underresearched.
My own enlightenment about how patriarchy has pulled the trick of making itself absolutely dominant yet invisible, camouflaged as ‘human nature’, came from Anne Baring and Jules Cashford’s The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1993). I have no idea why this book is so little mentioned; perhaps Penguin’s decision to place it in its Arkana collection has made many readers avoid it supposing this is a book on esoteric feminism. It is not, beyond leaning a bit too heavily on the theory supposing that Homo Sapiens first organized society along matriarchal lines and the cult of an Earth Goddess. This has not been proven, although the remains of Turkish proto-urban Neolithic (and Chalcolithic) settlement of Çatal Höyük suggest that non-patriarchal arrangements did happen. Baring and Cashford explain that by the end of Neolithic times nomadic bands, probably from Central Asia, colonized the Middle East, imposing a regime based on male dominance then new to most of the world. Lerner narrates how this regime started History by making private patriarchy the foundation of the state, that is to say, of public patriarchy. Proof of this is the Hammurabi Code (1754 BC), though at this point it must be clear to you that the history of patriarchy is much older than 3000 years.
We are going now through an intense examination of patriarchy, a word which has taken quite a while to finally appear in the media and public opinion as the root of all trouble. Patriarchy used to mean ‘the rule of the father’ but we are all aware now that it actually means ‘male supremacism’. This poses the problem I am trying personally to solve (ehem!), which is how we distinguish between the men who support masculinism (another name for ‘male supremacism’) and those who don’t. Supposing that all men are patriarchal is like supposing that all whites are racist, but, then, if this is what you do suppose, my arguments won’t work with you.
I can’t say with precision when the Second Wave feminist debate on patriarchy begins (possibly with The Second Sex) but I can say that a turning point was the publication in 1973 of Steven Goldberg’s The Inevitability of Patriarchy (known since its second expanded edition as Why Men Rule (1993), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitability_of_Patriarchy). Goldberg, simplifying very much, started (or reinforced) biological essentialism and evolutionary biology by claiming that men rule because testosterone inclines them in that direction.
This is why, he claimed, all over the world we have the same social structure supported by patriarchy (the power-based hierarchy), male attainment (the ‘achievements’ that give men a place in patriarchy) and male dominance (self-explanatory). He himself claims in his website (http://www.goldberg-patriarchy.com/logic.html), in the long section counterarguing accusations of sexism, that his research descriptive, not prescriptive, for “No scientific explanation of how the world works can tell us how we should politically or morally act”. In short, he offers a diagnosis on which society then can act, even in anti-patriarchal ways. Supposing we accept this diagnosis (I certainly don’t) the only solution for patriarchy is, as he more or less concludes, a genetic intervention to curb down testosterone and produce a post-humanity with the right hormone balance. The word you’re looking for is preposterous. At least I’m glad a man, not a woman, is suggesting this.
The obvious solution is education, based on the fundamental tenet that “Patriarchy is not a historical constant” (Walby, 173) and on the hope that, therefore, patriarchy can be ended. This is why understanding how it began is so important: because this historicity justifies the idea that, pace Goldberg, patriarchy is not inevitable. If it were, I, a woman, wouldn’t be here expressing my opinion against it, to begin with.
Lerner believes that in a span of about 1000 years “patriarchal dominance moved from private practice into public law” by making “the control of female sexuality, previously left to individual husbands or to family heads, (…) a matter of state regulation” (121); this made it necessary to set up public law. I have little doubt that this neatly ties up with private property: the alpha male (with high testosterone?) who first announced “this is mine”, whatever ‘this’ was, needed to make sure that his property would pass on to a male heir, hence the obsession with regulating virginity and all female sexuality. Also, as novelist Lorenzo Mediano wonderfully explains in his novel El secreto de la Diosa (2003), patriarchy may have started when Neolithic men finally realized how sex connects with reproduction–the time lapse between intercourse and birth may have been used by women to convince them that they created life alone and to maintain the cult of the Goddess.
Lerner makes the case that, in essence, the links between the patriarchal family and the paternalistic state have survived thousands of years of changes. An essential aspect of this process was the rise of monotheistic, patriarchal religion and, as we all know, its use to convince women of their secondary status. This is, Lerner, says, “the historic moment of the death of the Mother-Goddess and her replacement by God-the-Father and the metaphorical Mother under patriarchy” (198), precisely what Baring and Cashford narrate. As it is obvious if you know any woman with deep monotheistic religious convictions (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), “The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women” (217). Sorry if I’m being offensive, but if you’re a woman, and much more so if you’re a mother, ask yourself why you need to believe in a male God as the world’s creator.
Lerner lists other ways in which patriarchy ensures our cooperation: “gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women’s sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women” (217). This was published in 1986 but thirty years later still makes sense. If you think about it, 200 years of feminism (starting with Mary Wollstonecraft) can hardly dent thousands of years of patriarchy.
Walby typically defines patriarchy “as a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” (20), denying the biological determinism defended by Goldberg but also the “notion that every individual man is in a dominant position and every woman in a subordinate one” (20). This is, precisely, why I cannot agree that patriarchy is constituted to subordinate women only: when pro-feminist men started giving their view of the matter in the late 1980s they stressed that actually patriarchy is also destroying the lives of many men (think of conscription in war times, for instance).
Most interestingly, Walby presents patriarchy as a flexible model “composed of six structures: the patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relations in paid work, patriarchal relations in the state, male violence, patriarchal relations in sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions” (20). This explains why at some points “some of the structures are more important than others. The elimination of any does not lead to the demise of the system as a whole” (177). Think of the Cold War: the Eastern communist block and the Western capitalist block were equally patriarchal though each foregrounded a different set of beliefs. How do I know that both were patriarchal when, actually, the Soviet Union presented itself as the utopian state in which women could finally enjoy total equality? Easily: there was never a Politburo (or Soviet Government) headed by a woman or with a significant female representation.
In patriarchies, like ours, in which hegemonic masculinity is at high risk of collapsing, the system makes room for women at the lower levels and occasionally at the upper ones but the glass ceiling of masculinism prevents radical change. I may be a university teacher, something my own mother could never dream of, but the university itself is still deeply patriarchal.
British historian Jill Stephenson’s Women in Nazi Germany (2001) is also very useful to understand something that has always puzzles me: how come that so many women work outside the home in patriarchies which insist that their nature is domestic. The plainly misogynistic, masculinist Nazi regime tried to exclude women from the public sphere and deployed a vast propaganda machine to convince ‘Aryan’ women to fill the Third Reich with perfect ‘Aryan’ babies. At the same time, the complex state machinery and the economy needed women to participate, particularly in the 1939-45 war period, when the ‘Aryan’ men were sent to occupy Europe. In the face of these incompatible demands, many ‘Aryan’ women reacted by dragging their feet, having not too many children and even shirking factory work. The actual truth, Stephenson writes, is that Nazi patriarchy didn’t exclude women from all kinds of work but only from the very high positions of power. Women were “a resource to be tapped when necessary and dispensed with when there were sufficient men” (72). Funnily, this excluded the Wehrmacht.
Stephenson categorically denies that gender lines operate in a clearly-defined way even in the most blatant patriarchies, like Nazi Germany: “Even if the only people wielding political power were men, the vast majority of men were politically impotent” (5). That most Nazis were men, does not mean that being a man in their regime granted you a privilege, as Communists men first learned, and then Jewish men, Roma and Sinti men, gay men. Actually racist/patriarchal criteria were applied above gender/patriarchal criteria: Jewish women and children were massacred, as ‘Aryan’ women were pressured to produce children (or sterilized if deemed ‘worthless’: ‘asocial’ or ‘hereditarily unhealthy’). The correct picture of patriarchy is rather, one of a minority of Nazi men gathered around alpha male Hitler, oppressing the rest of society, with the collaboration of a minority of subordinated women.
The hardest passage to read in Stephenson’s volume is this one: “There were women who collaborated in the worst crimes of the Nazis (…). Women were, clearly, neither better nor worse than men. The difference was that men had more opportunity to commit crimes against humanity, given their greater role in the public sphere, including serving in the Wehrmacht. It was when women were given the opportunity that their potential for evil could be judged” (128, my italics). Nazism, then, which only accepted women in Hitler’s coterie as pliant wives or as pets (Eva Braun), placed, however, some of their female adepts in positions where they could exercise unlimited power over defenceless persons. I’ll speculate that the horrors that ensued may have even surprised some of the Nazi men. It is still very hard for me to believe that gender equality might lead in the future to a female-dominated, genocidal regime but Stephenson’s work presents patriarchy not so much a social structure based on gender but on power. Power, in its turn, is not enjoyed by all men, but by a minority, backed by a minority of women also seeking the enjoyment of power. I refuse to call these Nazi women victims of patriarchy (just in case this came to your mind).
I’m still shuddering, thinking of Stephenson’s phrase: ‘given the opportunity’. Perhaps Goldberg’s thesis should be rephrased: what we face is the inevitability of gender-neutral oligarchy. Given the opportunity.
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