Patriarchy(CONTINUED!) Why Many People Think Patriar.docx

Patriarchy
(CONTINUED!)
Why Many People Think Patriarchy is
Inevitable
•God/gods/similar powers made us this way
•Biology/physiology predestined patriarchy
•Women are the “weaker” sex
•Men’s and women’s reproductive capacities shape
their participation in social life
But…Is patriarchy universal?
Nope!
◦Anthropologists have documented cultures in which
gender was not a major organizing system in society
in
Alternatives to patriarchy
oSocial inequalities based on some
trait other than gender (most often
age/seniority, family lineage), or no
inequality
oWomen and men alternate tasks
(including care giving) and share
religious and leadership

responsibilities)
Example: Vanuatu
Melanesian island culture of the Vanatinai is
organized around the principle of personal autonomy
◦No ideology of male superiority
◦No economic exclusion of women
The past wasn’t always more
patriarchal than the present
Many countries were home to more
gender egalitarian cultures in the past
than they are today:
oCleopatra’s Egypt
oThe Amazons (Scythian women)
oNorthern and Western African tribes
pre‐colonial contact
oNative Americans/First Nation
Canadians pre‐conquest
Patriarchy’s many manifestations
Patriarchy can take many different forms and
can operate through many different institutions
Is the expression of patriarchy universal?
• Nope! Patriarchy operates in many different

ways
4/4/2020
1
CORE CONCEPTS IN
GSST
PATRIARCHY
Patriarchy
•A system in which men hold power and are the
central figures in the family, community,
government, and larger society.
•…”A system of social structures and practices in
which men dominate, oppress and exploit
women” (Walby 1990).
4/4/2020
2
Important related concepts
oPower: the capacity to influence the behavior of
other people and/or the course of events
oIn patriarchy, power=power over
oResources: A source of support or aid that can be

drawn on as needed
Important related concepts
See Johnson #2, page 23, in our text
4/4/2020
3
Features of patriarchal societies (Johnson, The
Gender Knot)
◦Male dominance: positions of authority are generally
reserved for men
◦Male centeredness: focus is primarily on men and what
they do
◦Obsession with control (esp. male control): controlling
women and anyone who might threaten male privilege
◦Male identification: core ideas about what is considered
good/desirable/preferable is associated with how we think
about men and masculinity
4/4/2020
4
Susan B. Anthony #17
Male dominance: Judge and complainants men; all

positions of formal power are held by men; as Anthony
notes, all men are her political sovereign
Male centeredness: The law is, in Anthony’s words, “all
made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men,
in favor of men…” (126).
Obsession with control: The law (among other
institutions) is used to silence women, such as by denying
a woman a right to vote
Male identification: Concept of citizenship assumes a
man citizen; women are excluded from citizenship
We ALL participate in patriarchy
oThe terms of women’s participation in patriarchy
differ from men’s, but women also participate
oPerforming our assigned roles
oInternalized sexism
4/4/2020
5
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4
Patriarchy Is…
male eyes.” – Lori Heise, USA
decision making power, and
opportunities.” – Srilatha Batliwala, India
imperialism.” – Azola
Goqwana, South Africa
femininities.” – JoJo Guan,
Philippines
whom, what you must wear and
look like, what you must and must not eat.” – Maggie
Mapondera, Zimbabwe
woman ask a young man for
permission.” – Thoko Phiri, Malawi

patriarchy’s footsoldiers and
gatekeepers.” – Hope Chigudu, Zimbabwe
– Shereen
Essof, South Africa
F
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4/4/2020
6
Features of patriarchal societies
◦Androcentrism: the privileging of masculine or male‐
associated traits over feminine or female‐associated
traits
◦Misogyny: hatred of women that maintains
patriarchy

◦Sexism: prejudicial and stereotypical attitudes
against women and discriminatory acts against them
based on those attitudes
The System & Us
•We are of patriarchy and it is of us
•Patriarchy is not static—it can change and we
can change it
4/4/2020
7
Walby’s Six Structures of Patriarchy
1.Paid work
2.Household production
3.Culture
4.Sexuality
5.Violence
6.The state Wa
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Why is Patriarchy Important to GSST?
a key organizing concept
provides an important and
accurate way of theorizing about
the underlying cause of gender
inequality
serves as a target for social
change
4/4/2020
8
“If Men
Could
Menstruate,”
(Steinem
#62)
This content is protected and may not be shared, uploaded, or
distributed without the express
permission of the author. © 2020 Katja M. Guenther, University
of California, Riverside
[email protected]
GSST 1
Week Two
Lesson One
Patriarchy

You’ve probably noticed by now that our major concept this
week is patriarchy.
In the Johnson reading and the YouTube lecture, you are
introduced to what patriarchy
is and how it operates as a social system. Historically, the term
“patriarchy” referred to
social systems in which the father or the oldest man in a kinship
group held power over
the family or tribe. In Greek, patriarchy literally means “rule of
the father;” only in the
mid-twentieth century did the word take on the broader meaning
of an institutionalized
pattern of men’s dominance in society. Many patriarchal
societies are also patrilineal,
which means that inheritance follows men’s ancestry and that
usually only men can
inherit (this continues to be true in many parts of the world;
while in the US it is no
longer legally true, in cultural practice, men tend continue to
hold power in many
families and many of our marriage rituals—such as women give
up their own names
and taking that of their husband, or a father “giving away” a
daughter by walking her to
a marriage ceremony—are a relic of when women were men’s
property).
The origins of patriarchy have been subject to historical
scholarship, and there
are multiple (and generally contradictory) explanations of when
and how patriarchy
developed. Some archeologists have found evidence that male
hierarchies emerged
when eastern Europeans (Ukrainians) invaded southern and

central Europe as early as
7000 BC. Some historians trace the roots to several millennia
later (4000 BC) when the
concept of fatherhood took root. Another theory on the
development of patriarchy,
advanced by feminist historian Gerda Lerner, is that patriarchy
developed between 3000
and 600 BC in the Middle East when tribes began trading
women as a way to build
bonds of loyalty across groups of people. This practice had
social benefits for increasing
a sense of social solidarity across groups of people and reducing
the likelihood of
warfare, but it also established the idea that women could be
traded away without their
consent, and that men had rights to self-determination that
women do not have—the
seed of patriarchal ideologies that are still with us today. Karl
Marx and his collaborator
Friedrich Engels assert that patriarchy developed in tandem
with the rise of private
property (particularly as an outcome of the domestication of
animals): Marx and Engels
argued that once people had private property such as a herd of
animals, they needed a
way to pass that property on across generations, but could not
do so unless men
controlled women’s reproduction; otherwise, how would you
know whose kid was
whose? So women were forced into monogamy. In The Origins
of Patriarchy (1884),
Engels described the development of patriarchy in terms many
Second Wave and
contemporary feminists would echo: A wife was to be ruled by
her husband, “reduced
to servitude,” and “the slave of his lust and a mere instrument

for the production of
children.” The creation of patriarchy, Engels concluded,
constituted “the world historical
defeat of the female sex.”
[email protected]
No “initiating event” has been identified for patriarchy; that is,
historians have
not found conclusive evidence that something specific happened
(like an environmental
or demographic change) to push humans in this direction.
The Second Wave Feminist Movement brought new attention to
the idea of
patriarchy, moving it from a technical term used by scholars to
a more widely used term
with which many Americans became familiar. Fighting
patriarchy became an organizing
goal of the Second Wave, which found evidence of patriarchy in
virtually all major social
institutions: family, religion, economy, politics, education,
sports, arts and culture.
Through consciousness raising (see last week’s lessons), the
Second Wave helped
women identify patterns of patriarchy in their own lives.
Consciousness raising also
worked to help women identify and stop their own internalized
sexism, a type of
internalized oppression through which girls and women
internalize (or take on, accept,

or believe) sexist ideologies and start enacting sexism and
misogyny on themselves and
other women and girls. Read about some examples of her own
internalized sexism that
one young woman notices here:
https://feministcampus.org/ways-we-have-internalized-
misogyny/
One of the goals of feminism has been to support people in
unlearning
patriarchy. That is, starting with the Second Wave feminist
movement, feminism has
worked to help all people rethink their own systems of
knowledge and belief to identify,
problematize, and ideally ultimately purge patriarchal
ideologies. This is no easy feat,
and undoing patriarchy can be a lifelong project. Read this blog
post at Everyday
Feminism to get some ideas about how to start unlearning
patriarchy.
https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/10/unlearning-patriarchal-
lies/
In this recent column in UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, a
fellow UC student
discusses her experience trying to unlearn patriarchy:
https://www.dailycal.org/2019/03/29/unlearning-the-patriarchy/
As the course progresses and we delve more into different
expressions of gender
inequality, try to keep patriarchy in mind. Think about what the
rules and expectations
are for girls and boys, women and men, and how they differ and
what the
consequences of those differences are.
As you contemplate patriarchy, also note how patriarchy is
linked to
homophobia: same-sex desire is problematic precisely because

it violates patriarchal
expectations of sexual relations in which a man dominates a
woman and in which men’s
pleasure/desire is most important. Further, there is no room in
patriarchy for people
who don’t fit clearly into one of the two gender categories on
which patriarchy relies,
man or woman—a topic we will talk about more in Weeks
Three, Four, and beyond. In
fact, some scholars of gender inequality have now replaced
using the term patriarchy
with either the term heteropatriarchy or even
cisheteropatriarchy, in large part to
emphasize how powerholders are cisgender, heterosexual men
who, as a group,
dominate cisgender women and sexual minorities (including
gays and lesbians, trans,
intersexual, and non-binary persons) as a group.
[email protected]
Self-Assessment (not to be submitted, just for your own
reflection; best completed
after reading Johnson #2 and completing the first of the videos
for Week Two)
1. Write your own definition of patriarchy, using your own
words.
2. What has patriarchy meant in your own life? Identify 2-3

ways in which
patriarchy has shaped your opportunities, the expectations
others have for you
or that you have for yourself, and/or your beliefs.
3. Commit to trying to unlearn one patriarchal practice you
engage in for a month.
This could be something like changing something you say (such
as committing to
no longer use the term “you guys”), turning off any TV show
that centers on
violence against women and girls (when I tried doing this, I
learned I had to give
up the entire genre of detective/crime shows!), or letting go of a
patriarchal
belief you have about yourself or others (such as fatphobia).
Stick to it and
report back on Piazza how you are doing with your challenge.
1
[email protected]

Week Two
Lesson Two
The Truth about Truth (& Anthony)
Becoming grounded in the field of Gender & Sexuality Studies
benefits greatly from
learning a bit about the history of women and sexual minorities
in the United States.
While most students are aware that women in the US did not
have the right to vote
until 1920, fewer students are familiar with many of the other
limitations placed on
women, with how women (and allies) have organized to resist
these limitations, and
what the changing experiences of sexual minorities have been
across US history. As we
move through the quarter together, we will be reading some
historical documents that
help illuminate the lived experiences of women and sexual
minorities, as well as their
efforts at resistance. In many cases, these documents serve the
dual function of
showing concepts we are talking about in class in action in real
life.
Last week, we talked about the First Wave of feminist activism
in the United States,
which originated in the early 1800s and which focused on
women’s right to vote. It is
highly likely that you have heard the name Sojourner Truth
before, and you may have
read her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech. Maybe you
noticed that the speech we

read for class this week doesn’t include the phrase, “Ain’t I a
woman?” That’s because
Truth’s speech at the 1851 Ohio Women’s Rights Convention
was not recorded. The
most accurate record of her speech is believed to be that
documented by her good
friend Reverend Marius Robinson, who was present when she
gave the speech and who
took notes on it; he published his transcript of her speech just a
month after she gave
it. More than a decade later, white feminist and abolitionist
Frances Grange published
“Ain’t I A Woman,” changing the words significantly and
writing the speech as if it had
been spoken by a woman with the stereotypical accent of a
southern Black slave. In
fact, Sojourner Truth was Afro-Dutch; her first language was
Dutch, and she was born
and raised in New York state. She didn’t start learning English
until she was at least 11
years old, and spoke English with a heavy Dutch accent, not a
southern one (she never
lived in the American South).
Please read, look at the images, and listen to the videos about
the life of Sojourner
Truth available through the National Women’s History Museum
https://www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/sojourner-truth
As you are watching/reading/listening, pay attention to what is
new to you about
Sojourner Truth:
up by someone
else?

I A Woman?”
speech resonated so
much with American feminists across generations?
2
[email protected]
(Last year, during the GSST 1S lecture, a student commented
that Truth also removed
her shirt during her 1851 speech, which I found to be a
surprising claim; I subsequently
researched this and learned it was a myth propagated by trans
activist Laverne Cox
(and maybe others). For a woman to remove her clothing in
public—let alone at a
suffragist meeting—during this era would have been widely
documented and discussed;
there is no historical evidence to even hint that this ever
happened. Why do you think it
would matter if it did or did not happen?).
Susan B. Anthony is probably another familiar name to you.
Born in
Massachusetts in 1820, and spending most of her life as a
resident of New York,
Anthony was a white woman who opposed slavery and
advocated for women’s rights.

She became involved in the abolition movement as a teenager,
was a member of the
Underground Railroad network that helped Black slaves escape
the American South to
Canada, and became one of the most visible leaders of the
suffrage movement. She
was a rousing speaker, and she supported herself entirely by
giving paid lectures on
issues like abolition, temperance,1 and suffrage. Anthony
became best friends with
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another white woman leader of the
suffrage movement;
Stanton, who lived with her husband and their seven children,
dedicated a bedroom in
her home to Anthony, and biographers of both women note that
they spent more time
with each other than with any other human being in their
lifetimes. (There is sometimes
also innuendo that Anthony and Stanton were lovers—I am not
aware of concrete
evidence to support this, although there is compelling historical
evidence that Anthony
was a lesbian who had sexual/romantic relationships with at
least two other women in
the suffrage movement. Most who have studied her life see
Anthony as “married” to her
work rather to relationships. See Lillian Faderman’s book To
Believe in Women: What
Lesbians Did for America for a compelling account of the many
contributions of lesbian
women to social progress in 19th and early 20th century
America). While Anthony was
excited to be alive when slavery ended, she died fourteen years
before American
women were granted the right to vote.
Stanton was a controversial figure. She was unusually

outspoken as a woman for
her era, she never married or had children (as women were
expected to do), and she
appeared regularly in public, advocating for the rights of Blacks
and women. She
1 The temperance movement sought to restrict/ban the
production and sale of alcohol in the US in
the mid-18th and early-19th centuries. Temperance was seen as
a women’s issue both because at that
time women were understood to be the moral guardians of their
husbands and children and because
women were so often victimized by men who drank. If they
were married to a man with a drinking
problem, women could not seek protection from physical abuse,
stop men from gambling away the
family’s funds, nor seek divorce with any ease. If they did
manage to get their husband to initiate
divorce, they were almost guaranteed to lose custody of their
children and to lose their income.
Alcoholism was also a leading contributor to men abandoning
their wives and/or having extra-marital
affairs that resulted in the birth of out-of-wedlock children.
Drinking alcohol was thus seen as a serious
social issue and one that had unique effects for women. Thanks
in large part to the organizing of women
temperance activists, the production and sale of alcohol was
banned in the US in the period known as the
Prohibition from 1920 until 1933.
3

[email protected]
routinely received death threats, and often traveled with two
armed guards. In 1850,
Anthony was arrested for casting a false ballot as she voted in
the November election,
seventy years before women won the right to vote. Reading #17
documents her speech
to the judge.
In 2019, leaders in New York announced that they would be
unveiling a statue of
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in New York
City’s Central Park. The
statue would be only the 6th statute in New York City to feature
women, whereas over
150 public statues in New York City feature men; there are 23
statues featuring men in
Central Park, and this will be the first statue in the park to
feature women. There was
an immediate outcry that the statue failed to represent the
diversity of the suffrage
movement, and the statue was redesigned to include Sojourner
Truth (Truth was a
frequent visitor to Stanton’s home, as was Anthony, but it’s
unknown if Truth and
Anthony ever knew each other). You can see a picture of the
planned statue (which I
believe will be in bronze) here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2019/oct/21/new-york-central-park-first-sculpture-
honoring-women

Self-Assessment (not to be submitted, just for your own
reflection; best completed
after completing the reading)
1. Why in her argument with Judge Hunt does Susan B. Anthony
state that she
cannot get a trial by a jury of her peers (see top of second
column, page 126)?
2. What do Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony seem to have
in common? What
about their life experiences and beliefs seem to have been
different?
3. How is the lack of statues of women in New York City and in
Central Park
evidence of patriarchy? What elements of patriarchal structure
that Johnson
discusses are evident in this underrepresentation?
4. What arguments would you make in favor of including
Sojourner Truth in the
final statue design?

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