What is a patriarchy?

In plain language

Here is an excerpt from my book Occupy Women that explains what a patriarchy is. This book is available in PDF on my website and for sale on Amazon if you want to read the whole thing.

Chapter 1

Acknowledge Our Thousand-Year-Old Hierarchy

“The damage of a patriarchal system not only comes from having men at the top, but also because in doing so, we de-value and push down everything below men to maintain the system. Dominance and control are sadly used to keep the system in place. The world is currently set up according to masculine models of thought and structure, and it has been for thousands of years. Aggression, force, domination and control have been at the heart of our social agreements. Organization, technology and rational analysis have been the order of this very long day.” ~ Marianne Williamson

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn created a world-wide movement to advance women around the world. In their best-selling book, Half the Sky, they describe the disturbing reality of women around the globe. Millions of women, even in North America, are kept as slaves in their own homes, being paid almost nothing for their work and being held back from educational and medical services ─ simply because they are female.

There are many books describing the plight of women in the world. There are also hundreds of academic texts and articles describing the causes of these problems and the reasons women are barely advancing in terms of status and power. All of them say pretty much the same thing: women are not advancing and there is one main reason why.

Professor Stephanie Vermeulen, in her book Stitched-Up, paints a distressing picture in a handful of statistics:

· 70% of the 1.3 billion people who live on less than $1 a day are women.

· The selling of girls and women earns human traffickers $7 billion annually.

· 700,000 women are raped annually in the US.

· Over 50% of the people murdered in India in 1995 were wives murdered by their husbands.

As for women’s advancement in the corporate and business world, here is an excerpt from my recent book Lean Out:

Every year corporations and academics gather data and statistics about women’s advancement. Year after year, the research shows that women are barely advancing at work and in business and in some cases are slipping back. Women hold significantly fewer numbers of powerful positions in corporations and government. Women are less likely than men to be considered for promotions and high-level positions. Women also earn less than men, are promoted less and have fewer mentors.

Here are a few recent statistics of women in various occupations in the United States from the article, “The Women’s Leadership Gap” (August 4, 2015) by the Center for American Progress (www.americanprogress.org):

· Doctors 35.5%

· Movie directors of top 250 films 17%

· US House of Representatives 19.4%

· CEOs in S&P 500 US corporations 4.6%

· College professors (full) 30%

In her best-selling book Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, recounts the depressing statistics about women falling off corporate ladders and lists the specific obstacles women face including, “blatant and subtle sexism, discrimination and sexual harassment. Too few workplaces offer the flexibility and access to child care and parental leave that are necessary for pursuing a career while raising children. Men have an easier time finding mentors and sponsors who are invaluable for career progression. Plus women have to prove themselves to a far greater extent than men do.”

These books and others not only describe “women’s problems” but also the reasons for these problems. And here is what they conclude: At the root of women’s problems lies a hidden secret. The one thing that these women share is that they live within a type of society that was built by men for the benefit of men. This type of society is called a patriarchy and has evolved over thousands of years.

In 1981 psychologist Anne Wilson Schaef wrote an international bestseller, Women’s Reality, shining a clear light on this patriarchal system. She defines it as a society-wide operating system that she calls a “White Male System” (WMS) because it has predominantly been influenced by white males over thousands of years and white males continue to hold the majority of power in our society.

One of the most important aspects of this system is that women are seen to be inferior to males. According to Schaef, “To be born female means to be born innately inferior, damaged, that there is something inherently wrong with us.” Schaef calls it the “original sin” of being born female because it is the birthright of women and that can never change, unless, of course, we change the system.

Within this system, women also lack power. Indeed this lack of power and lower status is every female’s biggest issue. It is central to all our so-called “female problems,” as beautifully described here by one of my favorite authors, Selma Greenberg:

In all cases feminists believe that the hard core of sexism is the unequal access to power and the use and misuse of power between women and men. … Feminists believe that women’s troubles are not usually the suggested ones: premenstrual cramps, postpartum depression, and hot flashes. Women’s trouble is basically our trouble. They remain second class in a world where they have never been first class.

As explained by Adrienne Rich in her famous book, Of Woman Born, “A male-based system is nothing more than a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men – by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male.”

According to Schaef this system, “Controls almost every aspect of our culture. It makes our laws, runs our economy, sets our salaries, and decides when and if we go to war or remain at home. It decides what knowledge is and how it is to be taught. Like any system it has both positive and negative aspects but because it is only a system it can be clarified, examined and changed within and without.”

Indeed Schaef discovered something quite remarkable. This entire societal operating system is based almost entirely on two ideas. The first is that everything in the world is one big hierarchy and the second is that the use of dominance is considered the best way to run the world. These two ideas, which are reinforced by the myth of “survival of the fittest” underlie our entire society and are seen as the guiding principles by which we can best control citizens, allocate resources and organize society.

In this big hierarchy, God (a man) is placed at the top, followed by men, then women, children, animals, plants and minerals, in that order. Men are most important (next to God) and everything else below men is valued less. Although this hierarchal “worldview” is really only a theory about how we humans can best function on earth (and thankfully it is slowly changing) the roots are obviously still firmly in place and are wreaking havoc.

Best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd describes how she untangled her deeply Christian beliefs that were intractably linked to patriarchal beliefs and draws particular attention to the fact that these beliefs are almost set in stone. She noticed that they have slowly become embedded in the human psyche, been passed on as the natural and “divinely created” order of life, and thus have become our way of life in Western civilization.

The concept of hierarchy and domination was re-visited by Riane Eisler in her books, The Chalice and the Blade and The Power of Partnership. Similar to Schaef, Eisler describes our current worldview and societal operating system as a dominance-based model. She compares this to a partnership-based paradigm wherein men and women could share power equally.

According to Eisler our dominance model has four key aspects to it. First, it is based on authoritarianism or “strong-man” rule. Second, it subscribes to male dominance where one half of the population is ranked over the other. Third, it accepts violence as necessary, from wife beating to war. And finally, it views dominator relations as inevitable and even moral, thus tolerating killing, enslaving and torturing those who are “inferior.”

In this hierarchy, where women are second-class citizens, there are patterns of behavior that impact not just women but husband-wife and all other relationships, including mother and child. Greenberg describes how this hierarchy plays out in our families through an example from a Psychology 101 textbook: “The boss yells at his employee, who stands there and takes it. When the employee returns home that evening, he yells at his wife, who stands there and takes it. When the wife catches sight of her children, she yells at them. They stand there and take it. Finally, the children turn on the household pet, which stands there and takes it.”

In this hierarchy, males are seen as having more value and so, too, are male attributes and traits. By observing thousands of cultural messages, Schaef was able to discern these values and labeled them “male values.” In the chart below she compares them to those she defines as “female values.”

Male Values - Female Values

One-upmanship - Equal peers

Zero sum and Win/Lose - Abundance and Win/Win

Individual focus - Relationship focus

Lead out front - Facilitate contributions

Direct and linear - Multi-dimensional

Logical - Intuitive and Multi-dimensional

Communicate to win - Communicate to bridge and clarify needs

Blame and accountability - Responsibility and action

Results and outcomes - Process

Strict rules - Consensual guidelines

In other words, to quote Monk Kidd, “It seem[s] clear that patriarchy has valued rationality, independence, competitiveness, efficiency, stoicism, mechanical forms and militarism – things traditionally associated with the ‘masculine.’ Less valued are being, feeling, art, listening, intuition, nurturing and attachment – things traditionally associated with the ‘feminine’.”

These differences were also discovered by linguist Deborah Tannen in her research on how men and women communicate differently. In her book, You Just Don’t Understand, Dr. Tannen explains that the reason men and women get into so many disputes is because men tend to see the world as hierarchal and women tend to see the world as connected.

She discovered, for example, that in conversations, men are more inclined to boast and play one-upmanship whereas women are more inclined to downplay their expertise in an attempt to include others. Men value winning and saving face as all important, whereas women do not. This fundamental difference really helped me to understand male-female conflict and communication and provided me with a whole new way of seeing how males and females view the world as collaborative and competitive.

A harsher perspective of patriarchy has been taken by many academics who see the subjugation of women as sinister. Vermeulen suggests that centuries ago powerful males abused their power by taking,

[W]hat was sacred in a woman and demonising it, or turning powerful female attributes such as our potent sexuality into a source of great shame. One of the most coercive methods that men used in biblical times was to appoint the Almighty as their spokesman. This is how the Jewish, Christian and Islamic view of women metamorphosed into God’s judgement, providing myths such as females being the source of all evil and the first woman being created from the rib of Adam.

All of our institutions, such as our economic, legal and even our educational institutions, were built within this system and it is reflected in all sorts of ways from boardrooms to bedrooms. Yet one example of these hierarchies crumbling is the modern corporation that is slowly moving from a top-down, command and control model of leadership to a shared or collaborative leadership system. Indeed, leadership expert Peter Senge predicted in 1997 that the old-fashioned control model of leadership would not survive in the 21st century (although it has!).

As a final note, it is important to avoid the trap of confusing patriarchy with matriarchy. Matriarchy is not patriarchy with a different sex. As Rich says, matriarchy is a society where “female creative power is pervasive and women have organic authority, rather than one in which women establish dominance and control over the man, as the man over women in a patriarchy.”

Unfortunately the word “patriarchy” has become so scary and dangerous and has now become “the word that shall not be mentioned” (as in the Harry Potter stories). Thus it is important to restate my position. Men are not to blame. Our whole system is. It is a terrible shame and lie to suggest that discussions of patriarchy involve any type of man-hating. Any labeling of this sort should be viewed as a tool to silence women

The Bottom Line. In North America we live within a patriarchal system of society that has evolved over thousands of years. It is a model of social governance that is reflected in our culture, politics, corporations and families. Although it is no longer considered the best way to allocate resources and keep order in society, it remains intact and holds many women back. Here are the essential components of this system:

· It assumes that the world and all its inhabitants exist in one big hierarchy.

· At the top of the hierarchy is a male god with men close behind.

· In this hierarchy women are below men in status and worth.

· Animals, plants and other living things fall at the bottom of the hierarchy.

· It assumes that only the fittest are meant to survive.

· It uses dominance to maintain control.

Because females are seen as second-class citizens under this system, they tend to be restricted from access to privilege, influence, status and power. Although it may be difficult to change, our patriarchal system is neither inevitable nor sustainable.

What To Do. The most important thing to do is to “un-shame” the word patriarchy so we can talk about patriarchy as a system. This avoids the defensiveness that can arise when men feel blamed or responsible. We must question everything about it, but particularly the idea that the entire planet is one big hierarchy as opposed to an organic, interconnected unit. We must question why we see men as most valuable in our society and why male-based values, such as competition and aggression, are the bedrock of this system. We must ask how we can create a system that embraces more feminine values, like collaboration and caring. END