THE CREATION OF PATRIARCHY.
Assignment- 1
Submitted by- Dolly Chauhan.
B.A(hons) Philosophy
Third year.
What is patriarchy?
Patriarchy is a historical creation formed by men and women in a process which took nearly 2500
years to its completion. In its earliest form patriarchy appeared as the archaic state. The basic unit of
its organization was the patriarchal family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rules
and values. The roles and behaviour deemed appropriate to the sexes were expressed in values,
customs, laws, and social roles. They also, and very importantly, were expressed in leading
metaphors, which became part of the cultural construct and explanatory system. The sexuality of
women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified
even prior to the creation of Western civilization. For example:- The development of agriculture in
the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal "exchange of women,” not only as a means of avoiding
incessant warfare by the cementing of marriage alliances but also because societies with more
women could produce more children. The enslavement of women, combining both racism and
sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression. Class differences were, at their very
beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations. Class is not a separate
construct from gender; rather, class is a gender oriented term. Moreover, By the second millennium
B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage or prostitution in
order to advance the economic interests of their families. The daughters of men of property could
command a bride price, paid by the family of the groom to the family of the bride, which frequently
enabled the bride's family to secure more financially advantageous marriages for their sons, thus
improving the family's economic position. If a husband or father could not pay his debt, his wife and
children could be used as pawns, becoming debt slaves to the creditor. Claude Levi-Straus who
introduced the concept of "the exchange of women," speaks of the reification of women. But
women is not reified and commodified, it is women's sexuality and reproductive capacity which is so
treated. The distinction is important. Women never became "things," nor were they so perceived.
Since their sexuality, an aspect of their body, was controlled by others, women were not only
actually disadvantaged but psychologically restrained in a very special way and their struggle, up to
this time, has lagged behind that of men.
A) The first gender-defined social role for women was to be those who were exchanged in
marriage transactions.
B) Second gender-defined role for women was that of the "standing" wife, which became
established and institutionalized for women of elite groups.
C) Third, the role of warrior led men to acquire power over men and women of conquered
tribes.
The historical record of every slave society offers evidence for this generalization. The sexual
exploitation of lower-class women by upper-class men can be shown. For women, sexual
exploitation is the very mark of class exploitation. At any given moment in history, each "class" is
constituted of two distinct classes, men and women. The class position of women became
consolidated and actualized through their sexual relationships. It always was expressed within
degrees of unfreedom on a spectrum ranging from the slave woman, whose sexual and reproductive
capacity was commodified as she herself was; to the slave-concubine, whose sexual performance
might elevate her own status or that of her children; then to the "free" wife, whose sexual and
reproductive services to one man of the upper classes entitled her to property and legal rights.
On the other hand, Class for men was and is based on their relationship to the means of production:
those who owned the means of production could dominate those who did not. The owners of the
means of production also acquired the commodity of female sexual services, both from women of
their own class and from women of the subordinate classes.
The gender definition of sexual "deviance" marks a woman as "not respectable," which in fact
consigns her to the lowest class status possible. Women who withhold heterosexual services (such
as single women, nuns, lesbians) are connected to the dominant man in their family of origin and
through him gain access to resources. Or, alternatively, they are declassed. In some historical
periods, convents and other enclaves for single women created sheltered space, in which such
women could function and retain their respectability. But the vast majority of single women are, by
definition, marginal and dependent on the protection of male kin.
Economic oppression and exploitation are based as much on the commodification of female sexuality
and the appropriation by men of women's labour power and her reproductive power as on the direct
economic acquisition of resources and persons.
From the second millennium B.C. forward control over the sexual behaviour of citizens has been a
major means of social control in every, state society the patriarchal family has been amazingly
resilient and varied in different times and places. Oriental patriarchy encompassed polygamy and
female enclosure in harems. Although, relative improvements in the status of women in a given
society, this frequently means only that we are seeing improvements in the degree in which their
situation affords them opportunities to exert some leverage within the system of patriarchy. Where
women have relatively more economic power, they are able to have somewhat more control over
their lives than in societies where they have no economic power, anthropologists and historians
have called this relative improvement women's "freedom . Such a designation is illusory and
unwarranted. Reforms and legal changes, while ameliorating the condition of women and an
essential part of the process of emancipating them, will not basically change patriarchy. The
system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured
by a variety of means: 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.
Why did women chose to stay with strong protectors/men?
under conditions of public powerlessness and economic dependency, to choose strong protectors
for themselves and their children was a rational choice. Women always shared the class privileges of
men of their class as long as they were under "the protection" o f a man. For women, other than
those of the lower classes, the "reciprocal agreement" went like this: in exchange for your sexual,
economic, political, and intellectual subordination to men you may share the power of men of your
class to exploit men and women of the lower class. In class society it is difficult for people who
themselves have some power, however limited and circumscribed, to see themselves also as
deprived and subordinated. Women have for millennia participated in the process of their own
subordination because they have been psychologically shaped so as to internalize the idea of their
own inferiority. The unawareness of their own history of struggle and achievement has been one of
the major means of keeping women subordinate. Women were often forced to flee from one
"protector" to the other, their "freedom" frequently defined only by their ability to manipulate
between these protectors.
Male hegemony over the symbol system
A) Men appropriated and then transformed the major symbols of female power the power of
why women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unitMen constructed
theologies based on the counterfactual metaphor of male procreativity and redefined
female existence in a narrow and sexually dependent way.
B) Moreover, metaphors for gender have expressed the male as norm and the female as
deviant; the male as whole and powerful, the female as unfinished, mutilated, and lacking in
autonomy.
They have explained the world in their own terms and defined the important questions so as to
make themselves the centre of discourse. g the term “man" subsume "woman" and arrogate to itself
the representation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of
their thought. By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever
they are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly.
For example:- as long as men believed the earth to be flat, they could not understand its reality, its
function, and its actual relationship to other bodies in the universe. If men believe their experiences,
their viewpoint, and their ideas represent all of human experience and all of human thought, they
are not only unable to define correctly in the abstract, but they are unable to describe reality
accurately. This idea that has been built, into all the mental constructs of Western civilization,
cannot be rectified simply by "adding women." It demands for rectification is a radical restructuring
of thought and analysis which once and for all accepts the fact that humanity consists in equal parts
of men and women and that the experiences, thoughts, and insights of both sexes must be
represented in every generalization that is made about human beings.
Why women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit?
-The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.
She described man as autonomous and transcendent, woman as immanent. But her analysis ignored
history. She explained "why women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit" in
defence of their own interests she stated women have no past, no history, no religion of their own.
Over all she (de Beauvoir) is right in her observation that woman has not "transcended," if by
transcendence one means the definition and interpretation of human knowledge. But she was wrong
in thinking that therefore woman has had no history. Two decades of Women's History scholarship
have disproven this fallacy by unearthing an unending list of sources and uncovering and interpreting
the hidden history of women. This process of creating a history of women is still ongoing and will
need to continue for a long time. We are only beginning to understand its implications. The myth
that women are marginal to the creation of history and civilization has profoundly affected the
psychology of women and men. It has given men a skewed and essentially erroneous view of their
place in human society and in the universe. Women's progress through history has been marked by
their struggle against this disabling distortion.
Educationally disadvantaged and depravation of women.
For more than 2500 years women have been educationally disadvantaged and deprived of the
conditions under which to develop abstract thought. Educational discrimination has disadvantaged
them in access to knowledge; "cultural prodding," which is institutionalized in the upper reaches of
the religious and academic establishments, has been unavailable to them. Universally, women of all
classes had less leisure time then men, and, due to their child-rearing and family service function,
what free time they had was generally not their own. The time of thinking men, their work and study
time, has since the inception of Greek philosophy been respected as private. Like Aristotle's slaves,
women "who with their bodies minister to the needs of life" women have for more than 2500 years
suffered the disadvantages of fragmented, constantly interrupted time. Finally, the kind of character
development which makes for a mind capable of seeing new connections and fashioning a new
order of abstractions has been exactly the opposite of that required of women, trained to accept
their subordinate and service-oriented position in society. Yet there have always existed a tiny
minority of privileged women, usually from the ruling elite, who had some access to the same kind
of education as did their brothers. From the ranks of such women have come the intellectuals, the
thinkers, the writers, the artists. It is such women, throughout history, who have been able to give us
a female perspective, an alternative to androcentric thought. They have done so at a tremendous
cost and with great difficulty Thinking women have had to choose between living a woman's life,
with its joys, dailiness, and immediacy, and living a man's life in order to think. The choice for
generations of educated women has been cruel and costly. But such women, for most of historical
time, have been forced to live on the margins of society; they were considered “deviant" .
Creative women, writers and artists, have similarly struggled against a distorting reality.
Lastly, women's lack of knowledge of our own history of struggle and achievement has been one of
the major means of keeping us subordinate. But even those of us already defining ourselves as
feminist thinkers and engaged in the process of critiquing traditional systems of ideas are still held
back by unacknowledged restraints embedded deeply within our psyches. Emergent woman faces a
challenge to her very definition of self.
CURRENT GENERATION’S TAKE ON THE ISSUE
For this generation of educated women, liberation has meant the breaking of this emotional hold
and the conscious reinforcement of our selves through the support of other women. Revolutionary
thought has always been based on upgrading the experience of the oppressed. The peasant had to
learn to trust in the significance of his life experience before he could dare to challenge the feudal
lords. The industrial worker had to become "class conscious," the Black "race-conscious" before
liberating thought could develop into revolutionary theory. The oppressed have acted and learned
simultaneously the process of becoming the newly conscious person or group is in itself liberating.
So with women.
To evolve and shift from the preconceived notion it is important to come forward in two steps:-
A) Be woman-centred.
B) leave patriarchal thought behind.
Be women centred:- Ignoring all evidence of women's marginality, because, even where women
appear to be marginal. The basic assumption should be that it is inconceivable for anything ever to
have taken place in the world in which women were not involved. When using methods and
concepts from traditional systems of thought, it means using them from the vantage point of the
centrality of women. Women cannot be put into the empty spaces of patriarchal thought and
systems— in moving to the centre, they transform the system.
Leave patriarchal thought behind:- Being sceptical toward every known system of thought, being
critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions.
getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our
anonymous foremothers.
developing intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther
than our grasp, the courage to risk failure.
Being critical toward our own thought, which is, after all, thought trained in the patriarchal
tradition
The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems
to have nearly run its it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage
to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. While it is still
unknown that what kind of foundation will we have in the future we are in the process of becoming.
As long as both men and women regard the subordination of half the human race to the other as
"natural," it is impossible to envision a society in which differences do not connote either dominance
or subordination. A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from
patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a
world that is truly human.
