Note on patriarchy

Patriarchy

Patriarchy is the name feminists give to an order, social, economic and cultural at once, in which men are valued above women and hold power over them. Its most visible work is a division of labour. Home and family are treated as women's concern and the public world of paid work as men's, even though most women in fact also earn outside the home; they are left with the whole of the housework as well, a "double burden", as feminists call it, while having little or no voice in public decisions. The order is defended as natural: men and women are said to differ by nature, and the difference is said to justify their unequal places. Feminists answer by separating sex, a biological fact, from gender, the roles a society assigns, and by showing that most of the inequality is made by society, not by nature.

Feminist accounts. Carol Hanisch's second-wave slogan, the personal is political, treated the private lives of women as an image of the power structures of a patriarchal society; with the writings of Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, feminism moved beyond women's political rights to the personal, psychological and sexual sides of their oppression. Sexual politics in this sense means the domination of men over women or the attempt to change it. Radical feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s stressed the material basis of patriarchy, and they held that oppression need not be institutional: it can be personal. Being male does not by itself make a man an oppressor, in their view; he becomes one when he claims superiority over women on the ground that he was born a man. Marxist feminists see it as bound up with the family and with capitalism, since Engels, in the passage the unit quotes, calls the confinement of women to reproduction within the family the "final defeat" of the female sex. Socialist feminists treat patriarchy and capitalism as two systems that reinforce each other, and so women get lower wages and face sexual harassment. Postmodern feminists warn that women's subordination has many sources and no single cause.

Forms. It acts through the division of labour, which leaves housework to women even when they also work outside the home; through lower wages and sexual harassment at work; and through sexuality, child care and household work, which is why radical feminists called for housework and the care of children to be shared equally and for abortion to be made legal. Indian feminism has its own early roots: a women's body founded in Madras in 1917, the Indian Women's Association, pressed for the right to divorce, a larger franchise for women and fairer laws of inheritance.

Ending it. Feminists hold that the public/private distinction and all gender inequality can and should be removed: through equal legal rights and education, access to employment and political office, shared domestic work and change in culture.