Three cheers for patriarchy! Christine Stolba shows why patriarchy is a gal's best friend - the benefits of patriarchy

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Christine Stolba

PRAISE FOR PATRIARCHY? Surely only a victim of false consciousness would utter such blasphemy. Any sane person with a liberal arts degree knows that patriarchy is a pernicious beast-still only partly subdued by the efforts of the women's movement-that has ravaged the talents of women for thousands of years.

But can patriarchy be as bad as some would have us believe? Defined narrowly, patriarchy is "a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line." This is not always the preferred arrangement in modern families. But the brief against patriarchy encompasses more than relationships inside the family.

Since everything to emerge from Western civilization bears the stamp of patriarchy, the argument goes, Western civilization is inherently suspect. If you think this sounds nutty, then clearly you, dear reader, have fallen prey to patriarchy's wiles. For as theorists such as Andrea Nye-author of Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic-tell us, because of its roots in ancient patriarchal Greece, logic itself is suspect.

So is rigorous debate. Law professor Lani Guinier, for example, who had her fifteen minutes of fame when she was nominated as attorney general by former President Bill Clinton, took Socrates to task for developing a method of instruction that, two millennia later, supposedly still wounds the self-esteem of female law students. In Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change, Guinier argues that the often-combative Paper Chase-style Socratic method of teaching places far too much emphasis on combativeness, which is masculine. Guinier prefers inclusive, mentoring relationships to the orgies of Socratic rigor.

Patriarchy has for some time been the star of the women's studies classroom. There, it appears as a hyphenate epithet, as in "hetero-patriarchy," or in combinations such as feminist theorist Bell Hooks' "heterosexist white supremacist patriarchal culture." University presses churn out big-ticket titles such as Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, and Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy that document this menace.

One women's studies professor told Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge in their book, Professing Feminism, "If there were no patriarchy, there would be no oppression. If there were no oppression, there would be no need for affirmative action. If there were no affirmative action, we wouldn't be here acting like pigs trying to shoulder each other away from the trough!"

Patriarchy even serves as a convenient villain for a generation of young women who are some of the wealthiest and best situated on the planet. At the University of Oregon at Eugene, for example, students recently organized a conference called "Against Patriarchy." Conference participants engaged questions such as "How do we identify male privilege?" and "How does male domination connect to other oppressions, like racism, heterosexism, ableism, classism and capitalism, government and speciesism?"

Patriarchy--read: Western civilization--doesn't deserve this treatment. In fact, it could be argued that it's the best thing that ever happened to women. To understand how womankind has benefited from the last two thousand years of patriarchy, one must examine the status of women at the dawn of the present era.

Athens, whose name is synonymous with high cultural and philosophical achievement, did not allow women to be citizens or own property. Roman husbands were free to engage in any kind of sexual adventure, but a wife who committed adultery could be put to death--the doctrine of patria potestas guaranteed it. A Roman father acted as priest, judge, legislator, and, indeed, high executioner in his own household, with nary a concern for the rights of his wife and children. If this were all patriarchy had to offer, feminists would be right to regard it as the epitome of evil.

Truth be told, however, the patriarchal institution that feminist scholars most love to hate--the Catholic Church--began to make the earliest inroads into this system. First, there was the revolutionary idea that all people--including women--were precious and important beings. That was so attractive to downtrodden--truly downtrodden--women that they flocked to that now maligned institution--so much so that a pagan emperor once forbade missionaries to set foot in any pagan house where women resided--there was too much danger of conversion.

Second, women in the ancient world rarely had a say in choosing their spouses. But the medieval Church insisted that the woman s consent was of equal importance with the groom's. No, this didn't mean that there were no politically arranged marriages between royal infants or that fathers immediately ceased forcing their daughters into miserable marriages. But it did mean that there was now a new ideal, a new right of women that, over time, became a reality instead of an abstraction. Another change: Fidelity, long demanded of women, was now required from men.