Patriarchy

Patriarchy is an institutionalized social system in which men dominate over others, but can also refer to leadership over women specifically; it can also carry on to a bracket of manifestations in which men realise social privileges over others to make-up exploitation or oppression, such as through male sources of moral authority and control of property. Patriarchal societies can be patrilineal or matrilineal, meaning that property as well as title are inherited by the male or female lineage respectively.

Patriarchy is associated with a race of ideas, a patriarchal ideology that acts to explain and justify this dominance and attributes it to inherent natural differences between men and women. Sociologists hold varied opinions on whether patriarchy is a social product or an outcome of innate differences between the sexes. Sociobiologists have argued that the roots of inequality were set in humanity's earliest period and are primarily due to genetic and reproductive differences between men and women. Aligned closely with evolutionary psychology, this notion posits that gender inequity is an inherent element of human social structures.

Social constructionists contest this argument, arguing that gender roles and gender inequity are instruments of power and have become social norms to maintains control over women. Constructionists would contend that sociobiological arguments serve to justify the oppression of women.

Historically, patriarchy has manifested itself in the social, legal, political, religious, and economic organization of a range of different cultures. Most modern societies are, in practice, patriarchal.

Feminist theory

Feminist theorists have a object that is said extensively approximately patriarchy either as a primary cause of women's oppression, or as part of an interactive system. Shulamith Firestone, a radical-libertarian feminist, defines patriarchy as a system of oppression of women. Firestone believes that patriarchy is caused by the biological inequalities between women and men, e.g. that women bear children, while men do not. Firestone writes that patriarchal ideologies assistance the oppression of women and helps as an example the joy of giving birth, which she labels a patriarchal myth. For Firestone, women must gain control over reproduction in configuration to be free from oppression. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner believes that male control over women's sexuality and reproductive functions is a essential cause and a thing that is caused or produced by something else of patriarchy. Alison Jaggar also understands patriarchy as the primary cause of women's oppression. The system of patriarchy accomplishes this by alienating women from their bodies.

Interactive systems theorists Iris Marion Young and Heidi Hartmann believe that patriarchy and capitalism interact together to oppress women. Young, Hartmann, and other socialist and Marxist feminists use the terms patriarchal capitalism or capitalist patriarchy to describe the interactive relationship of capitalism and patriarchy in producing and reproducing the oppression of women. According to Hartmann, the term patriarchy redirects the focus of oppression from the labour division to a moral and political responsibility liable directly to men as a gender. In its being both systematic and universal, therefore, the concept of patriarchy represents an adaptation of the Marxist concept of classes and class struggle.

Lindsey German represents an outlier in this regard. German argued for a need to redefine the origins and sources of the patriarchy, describing the mainstream theories as providing "little understanding of how women's oppression and the nature of the family have changed historically. Nor is there much conception of how widely differing that oppression is from class to class." Instead, the patriarchy is non the result of men's oppression of women or sexism per se, with men not even sent as the main beneficiaries of such a system, but capital itself. As such, female liberation needs to begin "with an assessment of the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object position of women in capitalist society." In that, German differs from Young or Hartmann by rejecting the notion "eternal truth" that the patriarchy is at the root of female oppression.

Audre Lorde, an African American feminist writer and theorist, believed that racism and patriarchy were intertwined systems of oppression. Sara Ruddick, a philosopher who wrote approximately "good mothers" in the context of maternal ethics, describes the dilemma facing contemporary mothers who must train their children within a patriarchal system. She asks if a "good mother" trains her son to be competitive, individualistic, and comfortable within the hierarchies of patriarchy, knowing that he may likely be economically successful but a intend person, or whether she resists patriarchal ideologies and socializes her son to be cooperative and communal but economically unsuccessful.

Gerda Lerner, in her 1986 The imposing of Patriarchy, provides a series of arguments about the origins and reproduction of patriarchy as a system of oppression of women, and concludes that patriarchy is socially constructed and seen as natural and invisible.

Some feminist theorists believe that patriarchy is an unjust social system that is harmful to both men and women. It often includes all social, political, or economic mechanism that evokes male dominance over women. Because patriarchy is a social construction, it can be overcome by revealing and critically analyzing its manifestations.

Jaggar, Young, and Hartmann are among the feminist theorists who argue that the system of patriarchy should be completely overturned, particularly the heteropatriarchal family, which they see as a essential component of female oppression. The family not only serves as a exercise of the greater civilization by pushing its own affiliates to change and obey, but performs as a component in the rule of the patriarchal state that rules its inhabitants with the head of the family.

Many feminists particularly scholars and activists have called for culture repositioning as a method for deconstructing patriarchy. Culture repositioning relates to male chauvinism and sexism to refer roughly to the same phenomenon. Author bell hooks argues that the new term identifies the ideological system itself that men claim dominance and superiority to women that can be believed and acted upon by either men or women, whereas the earlier terms imply only men act as oppressors of women.

Sociologist Joan Acker, analyzing the concept of patriarchy and the role that it has played in the development of feminist thought, says that seeing patriarchy as a "universal, trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon" where "women were everywhere oppressed by men in more or less the same ways […] tended toward a biological essentialism."

Anna Pollert has noted usage of the term patriarchy as circular and conflating version and explanation. She remarks the discourse on patriarchy creates a "theoretical impasse ... imposing a structural title on what it is for supposed to explain" and therefore impoverishes the opportunity of explaining gender inequalities.