In part one I listed; patriarchy, male privilege, discrimination, sexual harassment and violence against women, and the sexual objectification of women. I said we’d look at them one by one. So here we go:
Patriarchy – well now, the OED (or The Dictionary) says:
· A form of social organization in which the father or oldest male is the head of the family, and descent and relationship are reckoned through the male line; government or rule by a man or men.
OK, cool, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what I want. Next:
· The predominance of men in positions of power and influence in society, with cultural values and norms favouring men. Frequently with pejorative connotation.
Yep, that’s the one. When a feminist says ”patriarchy”, they mean the second one. Especially “Frequently with pejorative connotation”, but without the “Frequently“. The concept of patriarchy is absolutely central to most feminist frameworks. It is used to explain the stratification of power and privilege by gender that can be observed in society. Feminism expands the definition of patriarchal society given in the first definition, to describe a pervasive and systemic bias against women. As radical feminists examined society in the late 60s, they observed women in positions of power. But they also saw the way society perceived women in power as an exception to a collectively held view of women's rôle in society. Rather than saying that individual men oppressed women, most feminists saw that oppression of women came from the underlying bias of a patriarchal society.
“Other groups that were subordinated in history — peasants, slaves, colonials, any kind of group, ethnic minorities — all of those groups knew very quickly that they were subordinated, and they developed theories about their liberation, about their rights as human beings, about what kind of struggle to conduct in order to emancipate themselves. But women did not, and so that was the question that I really wanted to explore. And in order to understand it I had to understand really whether patriarchy was, as most of us have been taught, a natural, almost God-given condition, or whether it was a human invention coming out of a specific historic period. Well, in Creation of Patriarchy I think I show that it was indeed a human invention; it was created by human beings, it was created by men and women, at a certain given point in the historical development of the human race. It was probably appropriate as a solution for the problems of that time, which was the Bronze Age, but it's no longer appropriate, all right? And the reason we find it so hard, and we have found it so hard, to understand it and to combat it, is that it was institutionalized before Western civilization really, as we know it, was, so to speak, invented, and the process of creating patriarchy was really well completed by the time that the idea systems of Western civilization were formed."
[Gerda Lerner, in an interview in "Thinking Allowed with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove"].
To be continued rather more…