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Theories Of Patriarchy
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This is an A grade essay Assess the claim that gender inequalities in
understood with reference to the concept of patriarchy. You should
illustrate your answer with reference to a range of feminist
perspectives. Introduction Western female thought through the
centuries has identified the relationship between patriarchy and
gender as crucial to the womens subordinate position. For two
hundred years, patriarchy precluded women from having a legal or
political identity and the legislation and attitudes supporting this
provided the model for slavery. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries suffrage campaigners succeeded in securing some legal and
political rights for women in the UK. By the middle of the 20th
century, the emphasis had shifted from suffrage to social and
economic equality in the public and private sphere and the womens
movement that sprung up during the 1960s began to argue that
women were oppressed by patriarchal structures. Equal status for
women of all races, classes, sexualities and abilities - in the 21st
century these feminist claims for equality are generally accepted as
reasonable principles in western society; yet the contradiction
between this principle of equality and the demonstrable inequalities
between the sexes that still exist exposes the continuing dominance
of male privilege and values throughout society (patriarchy). This
essay seeks to move beyond the irrepressible evidence for gender
inequality and the division of labour. Rather, it poses the question of
gender inequality as it manifests itself as an effect of patriarchy
drawing from a theoretical body of work which has been developed
so recently that it would have been impossible to write this essay
thirty years ago. Feminist Theory and Patriarchy Although
patriarchy is arguably the oldest example of a forced or exploitative
division of social activities and clearly existed before it was ever
examined by sociologists, the features of patriarchy had been
accepted as natural (biological) in substance. It was not until
feminists in the 1960s began to explore the features and institutions
of patriarchy, that the power of the concept to explain womens
subordinate position in society was proven (Seidman, 1994) . The
feminist engagement with theories of patriarchy criticised pre-
existing theoretical positions and their ideological use, tracing
theoretical progenitors of popular views about gender, gender roles
etc (Cooper, 1995; Raymond, 1980). Developing theories to explain
how gender inequalities have their roots in ideologies of gender
difference and a hierarchical gender order, feminist theoretical
concepts of patriarchy are able to explain and challenge gender
inequality and the gendered division of labour in the private and
social spheres (Seidman, 1994). They have done this by challenging
concepts of gender, the family and the unequal division of labour
underpinned by a theory of patriarchy that has come to reveal how it
operates to subordinate women and privilege men, often at womens
expense. Patriarchy, Structure and Gender Inequality Walby (1990)
reveals how patriarchy operates to achieve and maintain the gender
inequalities essential for the subordination of women. Crucially for
this essay, she shows how it can operate differently in the private
and public domain but toward the same end. She identifies
patriarchy as having diverse forms of and relationships between its
structures in the public and private spheres, and yet still operates in
a related fashion. Walbys explanation sees the household and
household production as being a key site of womens subordination
but acknowledges that the domestic area is not the only one that
women participate in. She shows how the concept of patriarchy is
useful in explaining the relationship between womens subordination
in the private and public arenas by showing that they work equally to
achieve this subordination as well as supporting, reflecting and
maintaining patriarchy itself. Firstly, Walby points out that the
structures of patriarchy differ in their form. The household has a
different structure to other institutional forms, e.g., the workplace.
This is an important point because if feminist theories of patriarchy
are to stand they must show that patriarchy operates to the same
end in both the private and public sphere, even if it uses different
strategies, otherwise it could not be the main reason for the
continuing inequality of women in both the private and public sphere.
Walby shows that within the private structure and the public
structures, patriarchy does use different strategies to maintain
gender inequality and these strategies both achieve the
subordination of women. The household strategy is considered to be
exclusionary and the public structures strategy as segregationist. The
exclusionary strategy in the private arena is based on household
production. Application of this strategy in the domestic sphere
depends on individual patriarchs controlling women in the private
world of the home. The male patriarch in the household is both the
oppressor and recipient of womens subordination. This strategy is
direct women are oppressed on a personal and individual basis by
the individual patriarchs who share their lives. The segregationist
strategy used in the public patriarchy actively excludes women from
the public arena using various structures to subordinate them.
Application depends on controlling access to public arenas (Golombok
and Fivush, 1995). This strategy does not benefit the institution
directly, but it does ensure that individual patriarchs are privileged at
the expense of women, and it maintains gender differences. The way
in which individual patriarchs and public institutions use there power
further reveals how related the structures of patriarchy are. Public
institutions do not have the power to oppress individual women or
exclude them directly from public structures; this work is carried out
in the home. Power in institutions is used collectively rather than
individually, and the segregationist strategy pursued in the public
arena maintains the exclusionary strategy used in private that in turn
supports the segregationist strategy used in public. Yet, the
institution can only pursue its segregationist strategy because the
individual patriarch subordinates the individual women daily. Walbys
description of patriarchal structure looks powerful where there are
fewer variables e.g., when women and men seem to share the
privilege of being exploited equally as a labour force working equal
hours for equal pay in equal conditions (Haug, 1998). Haug (1998)
cites research from East Germany which allows her to calculate that
women do 4 hours and 41 minutes of domestic labour against mens
2 hours 38 minutes. Men split their extra two hours between leisure
time and paid employment. She asks if it is a realistic possibility that
patriarchy could be so completely and comprehensively asserted in
as little as two hours a day. Haug does not answer this question
(perhaps it is rhetorical) but I think that Walbys (1990) theory of
patriarchy is so powerful because it can reveal the answer to
questions like this. Walbys theory stands because she shows that the
power of patriarchy is asserted in both the private and public sphere
simultaneously supporting, reflecting and maintaining itself,
regardless of the economic and social framework that prevails. In
Haugs case, patriarchy is not being asserted in two hours per day,
rather it is an expression of patriarchy, i.e., a symbol of male
privilege, which could only be expressed if the general strategies of
patriarchal structure were intact and functioning. This description of
the relationship between patriarchy and structure demonstrates how
inequalities in the workplace and in inequality in the home are two
sides of the same coin and individual males are involved in the direct
and indirect subordination of women simultaneously. The concepts
that allowed Walby (1990) to define patriarchy as she has are
discussed below, with reference to the work of second and third wave
feminist thinkers. Gender and Gender Inequalities in the Domestic
and Occupational Divisions of Labour Feminist concepts of gender
and gender inequality allow us to refer more or less directly to a
theoretical framework for understanding how they have come to
form a basis that helps structure the whole of society according to
the concept of patriarchy (Seidman, 1994). The gender differences,
which lead to gender inequality in the division of labour, and
presented as natural by patriarchy and unequal gender order has
been normalised and legitimated by science, medicine and popular
culture (Raymond, 1980). Feminists hold that this normalisation
conceals the social and political formation of an unequal male order,
arguing that gender difference is socially produced in order to sustain
male dominance (Seidman, 1994). Frable (1997) points out that
there is no basis for a biological account of gender difference since
gender identity can only refer to the psychological sense of being
male or female. Gender is now understood as a social category
(Frable, 1997) and so liberal feminism was correct to deny that
nature requires rigidly separate and unequal social roles based on
gender (Ruehl, 1983). The patriarchal concepts of gender criticised
by feminists are used to ascribe the roles that result in gender
inequality in the division of labour (Sarup, 1993). This view is
supported by Garnsey (1991) when she describes the division of
labour as the differentiation of work tasks organised in structured
patterns of activity. These activities are imposed and remunerated in
a specific and unequal manner. When the evidence allows us to place
the words according to gender into the last two sentences, and they
new sentences mean something, then the concepts of patriarchy
argued by feminists begin to take on an explanatory power.
Occupational Labour and the Economy Liberal feminist provided
concepts of gender that account for pay differentials and might even
account for why women can receive less money than men for doing
the same job (Golombok and Fivush, 1995). They can be used to
explain why the political and social change which has allowed
substantially greater numbers of women to enter the labour force
has also concentrated them in the poorest employment (Golombok
and Fivush, 1995). This is especially so if Garnseys (1991)
description of the differentiated and imposed tasks of the division of
labour is used to structure the argument. However, they do not
explain the reasons behind womens oppression and in order to do
this Marxist feminists to began to argue that gender inequality has
been shaped by capitalist development, highlighting explanations
which connect gender inequality with economic needs (e.g., Mitchell
J, 1966 used Marxist theory in Women: The Longest Revolution).
However, while most feminists see the close links between the
organisation of production and the division of labour many thought
that there was a limited future for feminism under theories which
reduced the specifics of womens lives to the extent that the
subjective and interpersonal flavour was not captured (e.g., Firestone
S, 1970; The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution). The
socialist or Marxist feminist proposition positions class as the most
basic form of human conflict but this position was challenged by
radical feminists according to whom, equality does not mean being
like men (Sarup, 1993). Radical feminists successfully argued for the
substitution of gender conflict as the source of all other conflict and
fighting for equality in the occupational field became subordinate to
challenging the social and cultural order (Sarup, 1993). Asserting
that a female identity and subjectivity could only be defined without
reference to the patriarchal framework, many radical feminists
looked for ways to identify and develop a female culture and way of
being which was free from the influences of patriarchy. For example,
Irigaray (1985) proposed that this be done through the promotion of
entre-femmes, a kind of social form specific to women. A cultural
terrain distinct from womens usual site - the family. Household
Labour Feminist writers have taken the family as a central feature of
their explanation of patriarchy but they do not always agree about its
role in shaping women to serve patriarchal ends in domesticity and
work (Sarup, 1993). Liberal feminism recognized the gendered,
social roles of wife and mother but advocated choice for women with
respect to marriage, family, career etc., proposing to achieve this
through a process of education and reform (Seidman, 1994). In
radical feminism, the family is viewed as a major institution whose
role is to foster gender inequality through the socialisation of children
and subordinate women by forcing them to conform to feminine
stereotypes (e.g, Greer G, 1970, The Female Eunuch). Postmodern
feminism based on Foucaults work explicitly criticises the emphasis
on the family as the unit in charge (Sarup, 1993). In order to carry
out its functions, the family relies on differential relationships
(Broderick, 1993). Coole et al (1990) point out that the functional
needs served by the nuclear element of the nuclear family are
neither exclusive nor universal which indicates that differentiation it
is not essential to the performance of the vital functions of the
family. This means that the social roles of wife and mother as
conceived by liberal feminism are a gendered and manufactured
choice. The differential relationships that identify the roles of wife
and mother are part of the nuclear family model promoted by
patriarchal ideologies for more than one hundred and fifty years
(Coole et al, 1990; p43). This suggests that the one or some of the
roles ascribed to the family by other feminists may be more
accurate. Despite the differences, feminisms main assertion, that
gender identities and roles are socially formed, makes the theoretical
proposition that a social and political explanation (patriarchy) can be
given for male dominance and patterns of gender inequality possible
(Seidman, 1994). Conclusion The strength of feminist perspectives
on patriarchy is that most of them have been developed from the
standpoint of womens lives (Seidman, 1994) and yet this is also a
criticism what womens lives does the standpoint reflect? If
feminist perspectives of patriarchy are to be useful they must not
only make sense structurally, they must also make sense of all
womens lives. Lesbian, Black, Third World and post-colonial critics
have demonstrated some of the limitations of western feminist
agendas that prefer patriarchal accounts of equality to racialised and
cultural accounts (Burman, 1998). For example, the promotion of
reproductive choices by western feminists in the 1970s focussed on
contraceptive and abortion rights. However, many women at that
time were being discriminated against because of their colour,
sexuality or physical abilities and were fighting to keep their children,
born and unborn (Burman, 1998). Whilst these criticisms of western
feminist raise questions about how and why the priorities of the
issues and campaigns these women cho (o)se to think and act on
were agreed, they do not suggest an alternative account of inequality
in which the public and private oppression of women is explained
(Seidman, 1994). Critics are however right to point out that the
feminist account of patriarchy developed by western liberal feminists
needs to be expanded to ensure that the experiences of more women
can be included but they must also acknowledge that the priorities
and concerns of liberal feminists have resulted in some of the most
far reaching and important education and legal reforms of this
century taking place in the last the last twenty years. These reforms
particularly reflect the western feminist concern with differential
relationships. In the area of social policy and the law, reformers have
begun to focus on protecting the individual rights of vulnerable
household members women, children, and the elderly (MacLean &
Kurczewzki 1994) at the expense of patriarchal privilege. Crucially,
whilst the law has become aware of the potential for the exploitation
of family members and in acting underlines the importance of public
attitudes and legislation in maintaining gender inequalities and
differential relationships; the reform approach cannot be seen as an
open acknowledgement that socialisation patterns and family
arrangements are male dominated (MacLean & Kurczewzki 1994).
Following the vote of the General Synod in 1992, the ordination of
women in the Church of England has challenged hundreds of years of
patriarchal authority and tradition in the church. The implicit
relationship between individual men and institutions can be viewed
explicitly in the complex provision made to protect those who are
individually opposed using the churchs own structures. Regardless of
the refusal of key patriarchal institutions to acknowledge the extent
to which man have been and are systematically and deliberately
privileged by their structures and actions, these dominant forms of
power can help produce social change, even if they are only
attempting to keep in touch with contemporary society (Cooper,
1995). The process of power is therefore open to change and
feminist theorists have shown using their account of patriarchy that
the by products of power (e.g., inequality) can be mediated by the
institution which represents it and moderated to be less damaging to
individuals (Cooper, 1989).

Bibliography

Burman E (ed.) (1998). Deconstructing Feminist Psychology. Sage:

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Family Life, in Eekelaar J and MacLean M (eds.) (1994), A Reader On
Family Law, Oxford University Press: England, pp 31:62 (idem. The
Family Way, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1990, chap. 2)
Cooper D (1995). Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the
State. Open University Press: Buckingham. Frable DES (1997).
Gender, Racial, Ethnic, Sexual, and Class Identities. Annual Review of
Psychology (48): 139 -162. Garnsey, E (1981). The Rediscovery of
the Divisions of Labour. Theory and Society (10): 337. Graham E,
Hinds H, Hobby E and Wilcox H (Eds) (1996). Her Own Life:
Autobiographical writings by seventeenth century women (3rd
Edition). Routledge: London. Golombok S and Fivush R (1995).
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(1998). Questions Concerning Methods in Feminist Research in
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115 139. MacLean M and Kurczewski J (eds.) (1994). Families,
Politics, and the Law, Clarendon Press: Oxford. Raymond JG (1980).
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Words: 2756

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 Contents of
Introduction to
Patriarchy and
Patriarchy and Marxism, Gender Roles
Introduction to Patriarchy Engles, The Origin of the 1 Sex and Gender
and Gender Roles
Family 2 Sex difference,
cultural and
integrated
perspectives on the
relationship
DOWNLOAD Equations are omitted for technical
between sex and
FREE reasons - download the original pdf
gender
3 Patriarchy and
Patriarchy literally means rule by the
Marxism, Engles,
father but is taken to refer to the male
The Origin of the
dominance in society. Kate Millett
Family
argues as follows. Firstly, society is
4 Radical feminism
governed by "power-structured
and the Marxist
relationships, arrangements whereby
interpretation of
one group of persons is controlled by
patriarchy
another". Secondly, patriarchy is a
5 Changes in the
structure whereby "male shall
Patterns of
dominate female". There are questions
Women's Economic
raised by this. (1) Do we in fact live in
Dependency
a patriarchy? (2) Is there a biological
6 Women's low
basis to patriarchy? (3) Are patriarchy
incomes
and capitalism separate structures or
7 Women and
do they depend on each other? (4) If
Lifetime earnings
patriarchy is a separate structure from
profiles
capitalism, is it a more or less
8 Women in the
fundamental structure than
contemporary
capitalism? A Marxist would reply to
labour market
these questions as follows: (1) Yes, we
9 Sue Sharpe: Just
do live in a patriarchy. (2) There is no
Like a Girl
biological basis to patriarchy. Women
10 Changing Forms
are not the weaker sex. Gender roles
of Patriarchy, public
are socially constructed. (3) Patriarchy
and private
depends on capitalism. (4) Capitalism
patriarchy
is the fundamental structure.
11 Gender Role and
Patriarchy serves capitalism. Note,
Choice, the
that if there is a biological basis to
National
gender roles, then patriarchy must be
Longitudinal Survey
a separate structure to capitalism,
since it is rooted in biological
differences. Hence, for consistency, a
Marxist should argue that gender roles
are socially constructed and not
constructed out of biological
differences. The Marxist view is
expressed by Engles. He put forward a
Marxist interpretation of the family in
his The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, published in
1884. In this work he describes the
evolution of the family. He maintains
that at some early stage of human
evolution the means of production
were owned communally and there
was a period of primitive communism.
Sexual relations were promiscuous.
According to Engles, following the
period of primitive communism
marriage evolved through several
stages that include polygyny and
finally took the form of the
monogamous nuclear family. The
monogamous nuclear family emerged
as a result of the development of
private property. He writes, "It is based