patriarchal - Women

Patriarchy is an androcentric social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. Historically, the principle of patriarchy has been central to the social, legal, political, and economic organization of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese cultures, and has had a deep influence on modern civilization.

Most forms of feminism characterize patriarchy as an unjust social system that is oppressive to women. In feminist theory the concept of patriarchy often includes all the social mechanisms that reproduce and exert male dominance over women.

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Definition and usage

Patriarchy is a multidimensional condition of power/ status . Whyte's 1978 comprehensive study examined 52 indicators of patriarchy, to which corresponded 10 relatively independent dimensions. The ten dimensions are:

lack of property control by women

lack of power of women in kinship contexts

low value placed on the lives of women

low value placed on the labor of women

lack of domestic authority of women

absence of ritualized female solidarity

absence of control over women's marital and sexual lives

absence of ritualized fear of women

lack of male-female joint participation in warfare, work, and community decision making

lack of women's indirect influence on decision making

Within feminist theory, patriarchy refers to the structure of modern cultural and political systems, which are ruled by men. Such systems are said to be detrimental to the rights of women. However, it has been noted that patriarchal systems of government do not benefit all men of all classes.

While the term patriarchy generally refers to institutions, the term is sometimes used less effectively in describing societal attitudes. It has been argued, "institutions are very persistent and may last, with little change, into a period in which attitudes have altered considerably since the institutions were devised." Gordon Rattray Taylor used the words "patrist" and "matrist" to describe attitudes (as opposed to institutions), and noted that the outlook of the dominant social group seems to swing between the two extremes. However, the patrist assertion that the patriarchal system of authority was the original and universal system of social organization, invariably leads to the establishment of corresponding institutions.

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History

According to Robert M. Strozier, historical research has not yet found an "initiating event" of the origin of patriarchy.

Domination by men of women is found in the Ancient Near East as far back as 3100 BCE, as are restrictions on a woman's reproductive capacity and exclusion from "the process of representing or the construction of history". The hegemonic spread of patriarchy is linked with the Kurgan hypothesis, by now widely accepted among scholars.

In the 3rd century BCE, Aristotle taught that the city-state developed out of the patriarchal family, although the two were different in many regards.

Other ancient societies contemporary with Aristotle, as well as many Athenians, did not share these views of women, family organization, or political and economic structure.

From the time of Martin Luther, Protestantism regularly used the commandment in Exodus 20:12 to justify the duties owed to all superiors. ???Honor thy father,??? became a euphemism for the duty to obey the king. But it was primarily as a secular doctrine that Aristotle???s appeal took on political meaning. Although many 16th and 17th Century theorists agreed with Aristotle???s views concerning the place of women in society, none of them tried to prove political obligation on the basis of the patriarchal family until sometime after 1680. The patriarchal political theory is associated primarily with Sir Robert Filmer. Sometime before 1653, Filmer completed a work entitled Patriarcha . However, it was not published until after his death. In it, he defended the divine right of kings as having title inherited from Adam, the first man of the human race, according to Judeo-Christian tradition.

In the 19th Century, Sarah Grimke dared to question the divine origin of the scriptures. Later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used Grimke???s criticism of biblical sources to establish a basis for feminist thought. She published The Woman's Bible, which proposed a feminist reading of the Old and New Testament. This tendency was enlarged by Feminist theory, which denounced the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition.

By 1673, Fran??ois Poullain de la Barre, "On the Equality of the Two Sexes", had turned feminism into a systematic Enlightenment philosophy (as opposed to the previous Renaissance feminism). However, in 1861, Johann Jakob Bachofen, a German romantic and writer of the counter-Enlightenment said that matriarchy preceded patriarchy, and is superior to patriarchy on moral grounds. Bachofen influenced Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Marxist analysis has been a basis for subsequent feminist thought. From the beginning, socialist feminists in France, for example, were challenged by the republic, which "oppressed them as workers and women; by Marxism, which ignores gender; and by the misogyny of their socialist brothers. This struggle continues within all parties of the left."

Some 19th-century scholars formulated a unilinear theory of cultural evolution. One hypothesis suggested that human societies evolve through a series of stages: sexual promiscuity was followed by matriarchy, which was in turn followed by patriarchy. This description was later refuted by most experts studying the subject.

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Sociobiology versus Sociology

Sociobiologist Steven Goldberg wrote in 1973, "The ethnographic studies of every society that has ever been observed explicitly state that these feelings (feelings of both men and women that the male???s will dominates the female???s) were present, there is literally no variation at all."

Most sociologists reject predominantly biological explanations of patriarchy and contend that social and cultural conditioning is primarily responsible for establishing male and female gender roles. According to standard sociological theory, patriarchy is the result of sociological constructions that are passed down from generation to generation.

There is considerable variation in the role that gender plays in human societies. Although there are no known examples of strictly matriarchal cultures, there are a number of societies that have been shown to be matrilinear or matrilocal and gynocentric, especially among indigenous tribal groups. Some hunter-gatherer groups have been characterized as largely egalitarian .

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Patriarchy in anthropology, archaeology and mythology

In simple societies, which match evolutionary conditions, women are not occupied solely with caring for children and they contribute about 44% of the food. In one study, one third of the societies studied were egalitarian. The men were not warlike or controlling of women and many other adaptive behaviors evolutionary psychologists would expect were not present.

In the case of mate selection, a core area of evolutionary psychology, it has been shown that choices can be influenced by the observed choices of others. In fact, it is thought that in some cases, cultural evolution may change ???the extent to which biological evolutionary accounts work at all.???

A third study suggests that egalitarianism is a matter of degree. Susan Kent found that egalitarianism ???is a continuum, not an absolute entity; societies are only more or less egalitarian.??? Recent studies show that divisions of work, wealth and political power produce ???inegalitarian??? social structures.

In the 1970s, mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote in ??? The Power of Myth???, that the Hebrews were part of an invading force consisting of Indo-Europeans and Semites who drove out the goddess sacred to the Canaanite people. Campbell said these goddess-worshipping people were agricultural, whereas the Semites and Indo-Europeans were herding/hunting peoples and natural killers. He lauded the Greeks for the fact that Zeus was married to a goddess, giving them credit for the tradition of the virgin birth. (see, virgin birth (mythology)) and condemning the Hebrews for having no comparable mythology. He observed that the Hebrews referred to the Canaanite goddess as the abomination.

However, archaeological evidence has shown that when the Hebrews began to settle in Palestine, there was already extreme economic stratification under an Egyptian administration. It is likely the Hebrews belonged to marginal units consisting of permanent peoples and nomads with distinct values and principles. ???One of the cultural traits of the rulers of Palestine in the Middle Urban age is their custom of burying the dead with their horses and donkeys. The best examples in Palestine of the custom were found by Sir Flinders Petrie at Tell el-Ajjul, ???the tell of the chariots,??? near Gaza.??? This represents Hyksos and not Hebrew influence, as the Hebrews did not bury humans with animals.

When the Hyksos rule ended in Phoenicia about 1600 BC, it brought no changes to the social and political structure of Palestine. Canaanite divinities were ???ruthless, atrocious and fearful???. There was human sacrifice, sacred prostitution, and serpent worship. Totalitarianism virtually enslaved the majority of the population, and so the nobility lived in fortified cities. Archaeologist Emmanuel Anati found a lack of creativity and individuality in the art and material culture in this period and attributed this to the hardships of the feudal system and the brutal religion.

Many of the Hebrew tribes were not able to continue their nomadic lifestyle in Canaan because there were too many other tribes already occupying the land, so they lived in close proximity to the Phoenician cities. Taking up agriculture was not always viewed as an advance for nomadic people. Even after settling down, the Hebrews retained their nomadic sensibilities. Evidence for this is the Hebrew belief that Cain sinned by forcing the ground. Cain, a red and hairy man, was part of a solar myth. City-building and agriculture are the domain of solar figures. Solar figures are typically male.

In the wake of Masters and Johnson's pioneering research on female orgasm, a new theory of patriarchy was proposed. Mary Jane Sherfey, suggested that the "ungovernable cyclic sexual drive of women" had to be forcefully suppressed by social codes in order for settled agrarian societies, composed of stable biological families, to exist.

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