Patriarchy

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Friedrich Engels associated the beginnings of patriarchy with the development of agriculture and private property. In order to ensure that their property would pass to their rightful heirs and to capture control of any economic surplus, men needed to be in command of women's sexuality and, implicitly, their labor. To this end, men established dominance within the family, household, and society, and they instituted patrilineal inheritance. This resulted in the female sex being subordinated to males, as women became servants of men and the vehicles for the production of workers and heirs. According to contemporary anthropologists and feminist scholars such as Gerda Lerner and Maria Mies, women themselves were the first property; they argue that patriarchy was established over millennia and that its origins date from the emergence of archaic states and militaries and the holding of slaves for agricultural labor.

Sylvia Walby argues that the private patriarchy of the agrarian family and social order has been largely replaced by the public patriarchy of the state and labor market in industrial societies. Contemporary forms of patriarchy are characterized by the concentration of power in the hands of men and in the institutions that support male power. This restricts the opportunities for women to have power over men or other women. Where women do have power over other women, it tends to be in face-to-face situations, such as the private domestic context, or in other arenas that are designated as feminine. Contemporary patriarchy is also typified by the control of sexuality and reproduction, including compulsory heterosexuality, concerns with female chastity, constraints on reproductive freedom, and motherhood norms.

Patriarchy continues to depend upon a gendered division of labor in which women perform the bulk of domestic and community unpaid work. This unremunerated and largely uncounted labor undergirds and subsidizes the more public spheres of society and what is commonly referred to as production (although feminist scholars also point out that this is a patriarchal construct in that males are thus generally characterized as producers while women are cast as consumers). Women working in paid employment tend to work a double or triple day, retaining much of the responsibility for domestic work even as they work outside the household. Women are overrepresented in jobs—sometimes called pink-collar ghettos—that most resemble their domestic roles within the gendered division of labor and are underrepresented in the spheres of work that historically have been recognized as requiring higher levels of skill and that are well valued and remunerated. Although this divide has begun to break down in recent years, the transition is less than complete, as evidenced in particular by the relative absence of men in “traditional” women's work.

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