Patriarchy

Early Studies of Patriarchy

Patriarchy derives fundamentally from early forms of family organization, and this theme was early explored by several noted scholars, including John Locke's The Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) and Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law (1861), Early History of Institutions (1875), and Early Law and Custom (1883). The most accessible and comprehensive survey of this early literature, together with a detailed explication of the origins of patriarchy, was provided in 1904 by George Elliott Howard in his massive study the History of Matrimonial Institutions. Howard, the founder of what he called “institutional history,” applied the interdisciplinary perspectives of history, sociology, jurisprudence, and feminism to unlock and describe the primitive manifestations of patriarchy, especially in England and the United States, including wife purchase, marriage contracts, property rights, and husband's prerogatives in divorce. As a subsequent topic of theoretical discourse, patriarchy has been subjected to sophisticated analyses by leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

Matriarchal Hypotheses

Patriarchy is instructively contrasted with its mirror image, matriarchy, the rule of society by women rather than men. The Swiss scholar Johann Jacob Bachofen argued in Das Mutterrecht (1861) that patriarchy followed an earlier period of mother right, or gynocracy, wherein maternal lines of descent reigned supreme in all matters religious and political. Margaret Mead's important findings on the malleability of human personality and socialization notwithstanding, the empirical documentation of early female-dominated societies is controversial and sketchy. Bachofen's view that matriarchy was a universal precursor to patriarchy is at best a highly speculative conjecture. Nonetheless, hypotheses concerning the character and potential of full-fledged female-dominated societies have provided lively themes for imaginative theoretical debate and fictional exploration. Among the most perceptive of these is sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's two-part Herland/Ourland saga, published during 1915 to 1916. Gilman wrote in a popular voice and published her sociological observations in her own monthly journal, The Forerunner. In the instructive, imaginative, and often playful Herland/Ourland saga, Gilman vividly compared and contrasted her conclusions (based partly on theory and partly on direct sociological observation) about societies run by males in Ourland versus females in Herland. Gilman clearly saw many virtues in women's values and condemned the destructive results of generations of male-dominated rule in the real world, but her primary deduction was that the highest and most progressive societies will someday combine the best of both worlds, with men and women ruling together in genuinely equitable partnership. Thus, for Gilman, it was not an either/or problem of matriarchy versus patriarchy, but rather a question of how men and women can share power together and build truly egalitarian relationships. This remains today a pragmatic goal for many feminists and political progressives.

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