Matriarchy and Patriarchy Research Paper

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Patriarchy (literally defined as “rule by the fathers”) and its opposite, matriarchy, are terms used to account for the historical development of systematic societal relationships between men and women, especially in feminist and gender studies regarding the male dominance and oppression of women and children.

Patriarchy has emerged as an important explanatory concept in contemporary feminist theorizing and research to account for the development and maintenance of systematic gender inequality through male dominance that resulted in the oppression of women and children. Like other widely used terms in feminist research and theory, such as feminism and gender, there are several views of patriarchy and its usefulness as an explanatory concept for understanding women’s oppression.

Matriarchy, on the other hand, has not received as widely accepted a response as an explanatory concept in feminist theorizing about the historical development of social relations between men and women. Of particular concern here is the debate concerning the existence of matriarchal societies in the emergence of human societies. Specifically, this debate centers on the notion that a pre-matriarchy existed prior to the emergence of patriarchal societies in the foraging and Neolithic eras. This debate has emerged in feminist religious studies, particularly in relation to finding the historical antecedents of contemporary feminist goddess spirituality and documenting what might be called a sacred history for the movement. Also relevant here are the recent attempts of U.S. historians to explain the unequal economic and political position of African Americans as a result of the myth of the “black matriarch.”

Through the discussion of matriarchy and patriarchy as explanatory concepts, this article will highlight the ways in which these concepts constitute a form of discourse about power in social and relational terms as well as in institutionalized contexts. It will underscore the shifting and changing explanatory modes of the terms matriarchy and patriarchy while providing an overview of the associated meanings of these concepts.

What is Patriarchy?

In its simplest terms, the word patriarchy draws its roots from the Greek (pater = father and arch = rule; literally, “rule of the fathers”). (Patriarchy can also be used in a generic sense to mean rule by men, and sometimes more narrowly to mean a society where a father rules his wife, children—usually not adult— and any employees in the household.) But the concept of patriarchy encompasses more than the organization and social relations of power within families and households. It also addresses the systemic discriminatory practices of unequal power that institutionalize male dominance in social, cultural, economic, and political life with the attendant ideological justification in religious and legal frameworks that serve to both institutionalize and naturalize this power dynamic.

The theoretical studies of the sociologist Bonnie Fox allow for four major perspectives on patriarchy as an explanatory principle in feminist theorizing and research, including their limitations and insights. These include (1) patriarchy as “collective male dominance”; (2) patriarchy as a “self-contained system”; (3) patriarchy as a system of reproduction; and (4) patriarchy as a “sex/gender system.”

In the first instance, “patriarchy as collective male dominance,” the perspective defines patriarchy in universal terms. The lack of attention to causality and the resultant ahistoricism and essentialism of this perspective renders it problematic, since it asserts that all men, at all times, have sought out dominance over women. For Fox, attention to causality through a focus on social relations is crucial.

The second perspective, “patriarchy as a system,” addresses the problem of causality by locating the material basis of patriarchy in the domestic, household relations between men and women. From this perspective, the basis of patriarchy is the economic dependence of women on men and the control of their sexuality through heterosexual marriage. What the theorist Heidi Hartmann calls a sexual division of labor, which allows men to benefit from women’s domestic labor, is the basis of men’s dominance over women. The critique of this perspective is the problem of motive: from this perspective, male agency expressed as the desire to dominate women is seen as the motivation for the establishment of patriarchy.

In the third approach, “patriarchy as a system of reproduction,” the problem of motive is located in the reproduction of human beings. Patriarchy, from this perspective, is rooted in the control and management of human reproduction in the context of capitalism. The focus here is on the control of women’s sexuality and fertility as capitalism and patriarchy are seen as “dual systems.”

From the fourth perspective, “patriarchy as a sex/ gender system,” the emphasis is on the production of gendered and sexed individuals in traditionally defined terms. From this perspective, patriarchy is intimately concerned with both the production of “gendered subjectivity”—the production of “men” and “women” as culturally defined and the production of “gendered subjectivity itself”—that is, the production of two distinct sexes and genders. Thus, patriarchy is a “system involving the production of two distinct sexes and genders that are disposed to mutual sensual attraction and dependence in terms of labour, ensures biological reproduction, and a functioning economic unit consisting of a man and a woman” (Fox 2001, 325). The sex/gender system is a basic part of the way in which human societies have developed and is historically variable.

The synthesis that Fox highlights is that patriarchy from the perspective of being a sex/gender system is involved in both the production and the reproduction of people and the social organization of societies in a fundamental fashion. In situating patriarchy as a sex/gender system involved with the production of gendered subjectivity, it is important to look at three interrelated areas: the production of subsistence, the production of people, and the production of sexuality as integral at the level of both social structure and the individual, including both interpersonal relations and subjectivity.

Resisting Patriarchy

Since patriarchy is a fundamental aspect of how human beings’ subjectivity and social organization is organized and given its inherent inequality, how can it be resisted? On what basis can the struggle to end gender inequality and women’s oppression be waged? The answer to this question has occupied feminist theorists and activists across a variety of political strata and involved both the transformation of interpersonal relations and the wider social structure. One idea that has received particular attention is that dismantling patriarchy lies in challenging the normative definitions of subjectivity in the production of masculinities and femininities under capitalist production.

Thus, lesbianism, for instance, is seen as a political resistance to patriarchy by the theorist Adrienne Rich precisely because it challenges the sex/gender system’s reproduction by removing women from their historical subordinate role in heterosexual marriage and sexuality. From this perspective, “compulsory heterosexuality” is the fundamental means through which male dominance is perpetuated. Compulsory heterosexuality points to a situation in which women are compelled through cultural norms imposed by men to enter into the system of heterosexual sex and marriage that ultimately does not benefit them and maintains their subordination. Lesbianism, therefore constitutes a form of resistance to heterosexuality. But as compelling and influential as Rich’s thesis is, the concept of compulsory heterosexuality was challenged on the grounds that the locus of women’s oppression is not based in marriage or heterosexuality but rather in the supervaluation of masculinity and masculine desire over women’s sexuality.

Challenging Patriarchy as an Explanatory Concept

One of the main challenges to patriarchy as an explanatory concept for all women’s oppression emerged from the theorizing of black women and other women of color who criticized the essentialism and universalizing tendencies of an explanation that did not take into consideration the importance of race, color, and class as social relations of power. Their critique addressed the notion that all women’s experiences are based in gender oppression and argued for a consideration of the interrelated matrixes of power based on race, class, and gender. Women’s lives were affected differently in different parts of the world during different historical time periods, depending on their relationship to race, class, and gender power relations.

From this perspective, white women married to men who owned enslaved Africans in the U.S. South and elsewhere in the slaveholding societies of the Americas did not experience gender oppression due to patriarchy in the same way that enslaved black women did. In fact, their gender, class, and race status in a society in which chattel slavery was intimately tied to hierarchies of race and color gave them privileges that distinguished them from enslaved black women. Thus, the histories of slavery, racism, and sexual exploitation experienced by black women need to be addressed to understand black women’s oppression. By assuming a singular feminine experience through the uncritical use of the concept of patriarchy and failing to consider women’s divergent historical experiences, feminist analysis runs the risk of repeating the inequities based on race and class. The charge is that because the normative feminine experience is invariably layered by class- and race-based assumptions, white, middle-class Western women’s experiences become central to feminist analysis and theorizing.

In the face of such theorizing, the concept of patriarchy continues to be used with attention to historicity. The theorist Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, for example, defines patriarchy as a pyramid of interlocking dominations. She uses the term kyriarchy from the Greek kyrios (lord or master) to describe the patriarchal power that operates on the basis of interlocking systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, culture, and religion.

Matriarchy and Myth

While the use of the concept of patriarchy to explain women’s oppression has gained currency in contemporary feminist theorizing, its opposite—matriarchy (literally, from the Greek, “rule of the mothers,” but understood more commonly as rule by women)—has not been as widely accepted, and some have doubted the past that it describes. A debate emerged within feminist religious studies circles concerning the reality of pre-patriarchal cultures in which women’s lives and interests were celebrated. Evidence of this time in human history when the feminine principle was not devalued is directly related to the evidence of religious practices and imagery that celebrate the feminine principle in the form of a mother god (as opposed to the father god of patriarchal cultures).

The work of scholars such as Carol P. Christ, Merlin Stone, and Marija Gimbutas recast and reinterpreted the historical record. Christ, for example, challenged the historian Mircea Eliade’s account of religious development as androcentric or male-centered and recast the role of women in the foraging and Neolithic eras as vitally important. She used the notion of “woman the gatherer” to challenge the assertion that “man the hunter” was central to the social reproduction of human societies. But these reinterpretations have largely been dismissed as unfounded and wishful, based more on a desire to create a sacred history than on sound archaeological interpretations. In fact, the use of archaeological evidence to further contemporary feminist views of prehistory has been seriously questioned. From this vantage point, the complexities of hunter/gatherer societies are largely erased in favor of speculations about the role of women in these early societies. But it is difficult to sufficiently reconstruct foraging era or Neolithic social structure from archaeological evidence in order to draw accurate conclusions about the religious systems and symbols, and a reconstructed religious role may not actually represent the status of women or their social roles.

In fact, the assumption of a matriarchy based on the existence of matrilocality and matrilineality has been questioned. (Matrilocality refers to situations in which a husband lives with the wife’s family on the wife’s family’s land. Matrilineal descent traces lineage through the mother’s line.) Matrilocality and matrilineality, however, are distinct from matriarchy because their existence is not based on women’s having political and social power over men. Finally, the overwhelming focus on the goddess, especially through the female body, life cycle, and reproduction potentiality, may produce a kind of essentialism about women’s experiences that could, ironically, reinforce dominant patriarchal notions of femininity. But while these criticisms have been launched against the search for a history of the goddess in pre-patriarchal societies, they do not negate the importance of historical reinterpretation in creating a sacred history for feminist spirituality. Indeed, the recasting of history from this viewpoint serves a powerful ideological role in contemporary feminist spirituality.

One aspect of the matriarchy/patriarchy debate is the importance of female power and claims of matriarchal social order among many first peoples. Whether some of these societies were or are matriarchal, the claim that women had much more power and authority in them, and the claim by some that they are now and then were matriarchal, are important aspects of their ethnic identity. Matriarchal or at least non-patriarchal social organization functions to distinguish these societies from the patriarchal societies that took over their territory.

In another instance of contemporary myth making, the concept of matriarchy was invoked to suggest that black women’s emasculating dominance of black men was directly responsible for the social and economic inequities evident among black populations in 1960s America. In a 1965 study, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan suggested that a matriarchal black family structure was directly responsible for the inequities faced by black men and women. Black male patriarchal authority was seen as necessary for rectifying social and economic disparities with the wider society. In other words, rather than citing systemic inequality in all areas of social life, from slavery through the era of segregation known as Jim Crow, Moynihan placed the responsibility for the black community’s disparity at the feet of black women. The political philosopher Angela Y. Davis critiqued this thesis as a continuation of a line of thinking that suggested the deterioration of black family life under slavery and its continuation into the post-slavery era. Davis noted that instead, black women’s experiences under slavery, including acts of resistance and the protection of themselves and their families, created the legacy of a new womanhood for their descendants.

The Ongoing Debate

A review of perspectives on patriarchy shows that patriarchy produced a sex/gender system that led to gendered subjectivities. Matriarchy, on the other hand, is not as widely accepted as a way of understanding the development of relations between men and women and gendered subjectivities. The ongoing debate over the veracity and relevance of pre-patriarchal goddess-based societies shows that while the accuracy of such scholarship may have been questioned, it helped to create a sacred history for the contemporary feminist spirituality movement. Second, the myth of the black matriarch as espoused by Moynihan’s 1965 study may be seen as simply another instance in which the concept of matriarchy was used to reinforce long-standing racial stereotypes about black women as emasculators of black men, who inhibited the exercise of patriarchal power within black families. This particular construction of a black matriarchal family structure upheld patriarchy as normative in American society.

Both the Moynihan study and the reinterpretation of foraging era and Neolithic human societies to create a sacred story for feminist spirituality and to challenge male-dominant accounts of religious history point to the use of matriarchy and patriarchy as concepts that speak as much about interpretations of historical relations between men and women as they do about contemporary gender relations and the nature of theorizing and knowledge production. These concepts are clearly not neutral, and their use to address the development of gendered subjectivities and gender relations in human societies continues to be contested.

Bibliography:

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Christ, C. P. (1987). The laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a journey to the goddess. San Franciso: Harper and Row.
Christ, C. P. (2001). Mircea Eliade and the feminist paradigm shift. In D. M. Juschka (Ed.), Feminism in the study of religion. New York and London: Continuum.
Davis, A. Y. (1983). Women, race and class. New York: Vintage Books.
Fiorenza, E. S. (1992). But she said: Feminist practices of biblical interpretation. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs 5(4), 631–660.
Stone, M. (1976). When god was a woman. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, Brace.
Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mother’s gardens. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

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