Patriarchy

Patriarchy is an authoritative male system that is both oppressive and discriminatory. It is oppressive in social, political, economic, and cultural environments. It is discriminatory in its control of access to power, management of resources and benefits, and manipulation of public and private power structures. Patriarchy is grounded in the assumption that the individual European male is a universal reference point and the source of defining visions of the cosmos, society, citizenship, and the individual self within hierarchical concepts of gender, race, and class relations.

Although some authors contend that matriarchy preceded patriarchy, patriarchy did not replace matriarchy. The two social systems originated in different parts of the world, and they are antithetical systems in that they are based on very different principles. In the African conception, a matriarchy is a society in which maternal energy and mother love are socially cohesive forces. Thus matriarchy is not, like patriarchy, a dominating ruling system—it is a social organization focused on the power of women as mothers and on the matrilineal ownership of the home and wealth.

Patriarchy is an authoritative system, in a broad sense, that resulted from the Western European historical and sociological approaches to the development of social and family structures as addressed by Western scholars. Thus, the paradigm that underlies the modern assumptions of patriarchy may have emerged from the insight of specific European authors drawing on the patriarchal basis of Greek and Roman philosophies. These authors saw matriarchy, and the matrilineal system of the ancient southern societies, as barbaric and sexually promiscuous. This pervasive notion on which patriarchy has based its assumption of superiority has left an undeniable curse on women and it has always been and still is the ultimate reason for the oppression of women in society.