From domination to partnership: reclaiming our future - sex roles and society

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Riane Eisler

The humanist rejection of ancient stories about an innately evil humanity in need of saving from above--and what follows from that, the humanist commitment to the value and dignity of the individual, to civil rights, and to ethics--fits into a much larger conceptual framework that is every bit as revolutionary as the demonizers of humanism fear. In my work I have identified this wider context as the movement of society toward what I call a partnership rather than dominator model for structuring human relationships.

To give you a sense of what I mean by these terms, let's take a look at some societies which, on the surface, seem to have little or nothing in common: the Masai of Africa, Khomeini's Iran, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the Christian fundamentalist would-be state of today. Here we have a tribal society in Africa, a Middle Eastern theocracy, a highly technologically advanced fascist nation, a communist state, and a possible future United States. Yet if we look at three key, mutually supporting parts of their configuration, we can see important similarities.

First, we see strong-man rule. Whether it is in the family or the state, it is a normative ideal. It is not coincidental that, when both Hitler and Stalin came to power, the rallying cry was the same as the one we hear today: "Let's go back to the traditional family." We know now that traditional in this context is a code word for the male-dominated family in which one-half of humanity is modeled as being the half that gets served and has control. That is a centerpiece.

Second, we see rigid male dominance. There are certain gender stereotypes that are appropriate for a dominator society. As historian Claudia Kuntz observed, the ideal Nazi man was a warrior, and the ideal Nazi woman was his mother. Period. End of story. So it's easy to understand the coded meaning behind the effort to get women back into their "traditional" roles. The fundamentalist men's group, Promise Keepers, for example, gives men the false choice between either irresponsibly abandoning their families or responsibly regaining patriarchal control--never considering the possibility of a partnership family.

Third, we see a high level of institutionalized social violence. Although any society is going to have some violence--it's part of the human repertoire--in these societies domination, violence, and conquest are equated with "real masculinity." Remember, the ideal Nazi man is a warrior. The ideal Masai man was a warrior. Khomeini promised the young men he sent into battle that each would receive four female sex slaves in heaven as a reward for his "heroism." Thus the stereotype of women as merely there to serve men (sexually and otherwise) goes along with a high level of social violence--all the way from wife- and child-beating to rape and warfare. This is a built-in feature in dominator societies.

Now, by the measure of our own lives, social transformation away from this dominator model seems to have progressed slowly. Not only has it been retarded by constant resistance but it has been punctuated by periods of regression. I submit that we are living through just such a period now. Yet, depressing as much of today's culture and politics are, by taking a longer view we can see a larger picture. Societies are living systems that need to be looked at not in terms of simple linear cause and effect but in terms of interactive system dynamics. And from the standpoint of evolutionary time, changes involving disequilibrium and social transformation have taken place relatively rapidly, spanning mere hundreds or thousands of years.

A shift away from the dominator and toward the partnership model began in the Renaissance but surfaced about 300 years ago, early in the Enlightenment. Technological change was destabilizing entrenched structures, habits, and beliefs. With this came the questioning of much that had been taken for granted as "just the way things are." One social movement after another began to challenge entrenched patterns of domination, including the "divine right of kings" to rule over their subjects and the "divinely ordained" authority of men over women and children in the "castles of their homes." By the nineteenth century, there was also a growing questioning of the domination of one race over another, leading to the abolitionist and then the civil-rights movements. Social injustice was challenged. Economic injustice was challenged. Colonialism was challenged. Even today, in the environmental movement, what has really been called into question is the so-called conquest of nature which had earlier been idealized.

Humanism, very clearly, has been part of this movement for fundamental social change. It has philosophically challenged some of the underpinnings of domination--including the idea that the world was created by a male god giving orders. (Naturally, those who were in the thrall of a despotic society didn't find this story as incredible as do its critics, which is how some of these stories evolved--not from some human perversity but simply out of the circumstances of people's lives.)