I’ve been talking with other feminists lately about the patriarchy and how, in order to dismantle it, we have to know what it is: its structure, purpose and intent.
Part of this means acknowledging that the gains women are making have made under patriarchy’s current form, neoliberal capitalism, are not a threat to neoliberalism itself. This is why we are allowed to have them. The needs and desires of women that threaten the system will always be suppressed. Without radical system change, there is no women’s liberation.
It also follows that were we to change to another form of patriarchy, say fascist or authoritarian states, we would likewise not be allowed liberation. I point this out to show that while there are important and significant differences between neoliberal capitalism and fascism, both deny women the right to our own being, politics and culture.
What is the patriarchy?
The patriarchy is a 5,000 year old hierarchical, domination system many contemporary countries use to organise society, and like all human systems it has structures that are informed by belief. So what are these structures and beliefs?
Left wing feminist and philosopher Jane Clare Jones is a good starting point.
Lets do patriarchy 101 shall we?
Patriarchy is a system of *male dominance.*
In this system male people hold most of the power and wealth. In this system, very importantly, we also privilege the needs and interests of male people over those of female people.
The feminist analysis of this situation is that society is structured to serve the interests of males. A significant part of these interests involves female people being positioned as a *resource* for males. This includes being a reproductive and sexual resource, as well as the exploitation of female people’s domestic and emotional labour.
That women have certain reproductive capacities, and that men want to have reproductive and sexual access to women is FUNDAMENTAL to why this system evolved, and why men *still have an interest* in maintaining it.
That is, male dominance over women is entirely non-accidentally related to the fact that men want access to WOMEN’S BODIES.
And on oppression of women as a sex class,
Structural oppression is a class based relation between a dominant class and a subjugated class through which the dominant class extracts labour, or access to bodies, or both, from the subjugated class. That is, structural oppression is a class based relation of material extraction, through which the dominant class profits from the oppression of the subjugated class.
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There are three main axes of structural oppression – socio-economic class, sex and race.
If that seems too academically dense, put it this way: capitalism (the patriarchy) needs labour to build wealth for the power holders in society. Who provides the people that do that labour? Women. Without women there are no wage slaves to do the work of building capital. We make sure that the species continues, both by childbearing and child rearing.
We generally don’t get paid or particularly well supported for that, and there are serious barriers for women who have children to fully take part in society. The system uses women but keeps us in the proper place within the system: it needs women to have babies and it needs to control that for the wellbeing of the capitalistic system. It can’t pay women for our labour, because then we’d have more power to change the system to something that works for women and children, and that wouldn’t be the neoliberal, capitalist, anti-nature, death cult state we have now. It would mean the end of capitalism.
It’s worth pointing out that men on the trad left who deny that sex is an axis of oppression, are doing the work of the patriarchy. Also worth pointing out that the neoliberal left appears to have largely abandoned socioeconomics and sex as class oppressions.
Patriarchy as a system of domination, egalitarianism as a system of partnership
Another useful analysis of patriarchal structure and belief comes from systems scientist and futurist Riane Eisler, who conceptualised the patriarchy as a dominator system but also presented an alternative: arranging society based on a partnership model.
From the Wikipedia article on Eisler’s 1987 groundbreaking book The Chalice and the Blade,
Briefly her thesis is despite old narratives about an inherently flawed humanity, more and more evidence shows humanity is not doomed to perpetuate patterns of violence and oppression. Female values offer a partnership alternative with deep roots in the pre-Patriarchy paradigm of cultural evolution. No utopia is predicted; rather, a way of structuring society in more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable ways is envisioned.
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The author compares two underlying types of social organization in which the cultural construction of gender roles and relations is key. Eisler places human societies on what she calls the partnership-domination continuum. At one end of the continuum are societies oriented to the partnership model. At the other are societies oriented to the dominator or domination model. These categories transcend conventional categories such as ancient vs. modern, Eastern vs. Western, religious vs. secular, rightist vs. leftist, and so on.
The domination model ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and religion vs. religion, with difference equated with superiority or inferiority. It comprises an authoritarian structure in both family and state or tribe, rigid male dominance, and a high degree of abuse and violence. The partnership model consists of a democratic and egalitarian structure in both the family and state or tribe, with hierarchies of actualization where power is empowering rather than disempowering (as in hierarchies of domination). There is also gender partnership and a low degree of abuse and violence, as it is not needed to maintain rigid top-down rankings.
The point here isn’t women/good, men/bad. It’s specifically that the patriarchy is a system that heirarchises power and gives preferential treatment to men and demotes women. In fact it basically treats everyone and all of life badly, but within that some people do better than others. Key here is that men as a class have a vested interest in maintaining the system and women have a vested interest in dismantling it. That’s a choice.
Also important is that Eisler’s model isn’t a reversing of the patriarchy and putting women in charge and men in a subordinate position to women. Women-centric egalitarian cultures centre women, because women will share power, upholding the community and the value of the whole tribe (including men) rather than the individualistic ethic that most of us in the West have been socialised into and that has given rise to the neoliberal capitalistic current form of patriarchy.
Referencing the long development of human culture before the rise of patriarchy in eastern Europe/the Middle East 5,000 years ago, Eisler uses a multidisciplinary approach across anthropology, sociology, law, art, literature, psychology, science, religion and political science.
But Eisler makes it clear that pre-history wasn’t utopia, and the point now is not to return to some imagined state, but to use what we know to create new systems going forward.
Of note here is that rather than presenting a rigid binary of dominator vs egalitarian cultures, Eisler puts them on a continuum. This in itself is an example of partnership model thinking. Hard dualistic thinking is a feature of patriarchy. Flexible, both/and thinking is what opens the way to egalitarianism. Embrace the contradictions and nuance.
Indigenous perspectives: not all societies are patriarchal
Following on from this, is looking at the work of Native American scholar, the late Paula Gunn Allen. In the introduction to The Sacred Hoop – Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Allen outlines seven main themes in Native culture. These include multiple references to what she calls gynocracy (which I interpret not as rule by women, but the centering of women in societal organisation).
Traditional tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic than not, and they are never patriarchal. These features make understanding tribal cultures essential to all responsible activists who seek life-affirming social change that can result in a real decrease in human and planetary destruction and in a real increase in quality of life for all inhabitants of planet earth.
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Some distinguishing features of a woman-centered social system include free and easy sexuality and wide latitude in personal style. This latitude means that a diversity of people, including gay males and lesbians, are not denied and are in fact likely to be accorded honor. Also likely to be prominent in such systems are nurturing, pacifist, and passive males (as defined by western minds) and self-defining, assertive, decisive women. In many tribes, the nurturing male constitutes the ideal adult model for boys while the decisive, self-directing female is the ideal model to which girls aspire.
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In tribal gynocratic systems a multitude of personality and character types can function positively within the social order because the systems are focused on social responsibility rather than on privilege and on the realities of the human constitution rather than on denial-based social fictions to which human beings are compelled to conform by powerful individuals within the society.
Tribal gynocracies prominently feature even distribution of goods among all members of the society on the grounds that First Mother enjoined cooperation and sharing on all her children.
One of the major distinguishing characteristics of gynocratic cultures is the absence of punitiveness as a means of social control.
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Among gynocratic or gynocentric tribal peoples the welfare of the young is paramount, the complementary nature of all life forms is stressed, and the centrality of powerful women to social well-being is unquestioned.
Again, I feel compelled to point out that this isn’t native/good, white/bad. We’re talking systems here. And please, let’s resist the temptation to dismiss what Paula Gunn Allen is presenting by casting it in (anti) Noble Savage memes just because it challenges our own dominator socialisation.
It’s likely that all peoples have ancestors from egalitarian cultures if we go back far enough.
Speaking about the ways in which Indian women held and hold power in traditional societies,
The colonizers saw (and rightly) that as long as women held unquestioned power of such magnitude, attempts at total conquest of the continents were bound to fail. In the centuries since the first attempts at colonization in the early 1500s, the invaders have exerted every effort to remove Indian women from every position of authority, to obliterate all records pertaining to gynocratic social systems, and to ensure that no American and few American Indians would remember that gynocracy was the primary social order of Indian America prior to 1800. But colonial attempts at cultural gynocide notwithstanding, there were and are gynocracies—that is, woman-centered tribal societies in which matrilocality, matrifocality, matrilinearity, maternal control of household goods and resources, and female deities of the magnitude of the Christian God were and are present and active features of traditional tribal life.
Feminism looking beyond the patriarchy
Why don’t we know about women-centric, egalitarian societies? Because under the patriarchy, men got to write history and those men have a vested interest in their own sex, race and socio-economic class remaining in control.
One of the prime tasks of feminism is to teach women that the patriarchy is not inevitable. In Eisler’s model of post-patriarchy, the beliefs and stories of the system matter. For feminism, shifting the narrative from ‘this is how it’s always been’ to ‘we already know how to do women-centred culture’ is central in women reclaiming our power and liberation.
Feminist historian and founder of the Suppressed Histories Archive, Max Dashu, has this short video on historical and contemporary examples of Mother-Right Equalitarian Societies from across the globe.
Front page image from the Suppressed Histories Archive via Cradle of Civilisation. Max Dashu,
Women’s circle dance in bronze age rock art from Zerovschan, Tajikistan, with numinous quadrant in center. They appear to be wearing skirts, but the dot between the legs is a very common female sign, or the dot in vulva which may also figure here.
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