Why Patriarchy?

Can the term ‘patriarchy’ be applied to other times and places? The Munduruçu, a horticultural society of the Amazon basin. How widespread is patriarchy? What are its basic causes? How patriarchy is also socially constructed. Why feminism is such a successful movement today.

Transcript

Chapter 6: Why patriarchy happens
In the last chapter I looked at how you might define patriarchy. In this chapter I will consider whether patriarchy is transhistorical and cross-cultural. What is the basic cause of patriarchy? What makes patriarchy vulnerable today.
 I will argue that patriarchy is pretty well universal in human societies, but that doesn't mean it's always equally oppressive. That does not mean that it's inevitable or necessary. In fact, we have the means to overthrow patriarchy now, and we're doing that. 
My analysis differs from dominant views on the left and the right. The dominant view on the left is that patriarchy is socially constructed. Typically, the left argues that patriarchy is a consequence of class society, going back to the ancient civilisations of the fertile crescent. Popular versions of this position assume that patriarchy is an effect of capitalism. The view from the right is that patriarchy is totally universal, inevitable and that nothing can be done to get rid of it. Even that it is God’s will. Right wing people who think like that get themselves into all kinds of trouble. Because we now have the conditions that allow us to ditch patriarchy. Right wing women talk the talk, but rarely walk the walk. 
Looking back to the previous chapter we might conclude that the definition of patriarchy that I develop could be applied to any society. I claim that patriarchy can be understood as exploitation and relate that to basic drives of human nature — autonomy, sexual pleasure, physical wellbeing, social pleasures, creativity, hunger. So, we could look at other societies to see how this analysis might be applied. What do we know about this? 
Is patriarchy universal?
We can have no doubt that societies with written history have been patriarchal. The ancient Greeks, the Babylonians, the Chinese and so on. We can look at accounts of daily life, as well as the material evidence. For example, poetry, novels, histories, religious texts. There is no doubt that they were patriarchies, in the sense that I explained. 
It is unlikely that an original matriarchy preceded patriarchal societies and was maintained in some corners of the globe up to colonial times. Archaeological evidence adduced to support the theory of a primal matriarchy looks at depictions of female goddesses, sites without walled defences, and mythologies of a past dominated by women. Yet such indicators are not convincing given other evidence. For example, Catal Huyuk in Turkey has been presented as a matriarchal urban civilisation. This is on account of the goddess clay figurines discovered there. However other finds challenge the matriarchal account of the site – ritual spaces with horned bull’s head statues, male warrior graves with weapons, elite graves of women with jewellery.
For, stateless societies, which do not leave a written record, it’s more difficult. If we wanted to go back 80,000 years, it's incredibly difficult to say what gender regime applied in those societies. And I think we have to say that and just admit that that's the case. If we are looking at societies which were stateless when Europeans invaded the rest of the world, we are relying on oral histories of the descendants of these people. An oral history that is inevitably coloured by everything that has happened since then. Along with the views of missionaries, explorers, and anthropologists. Older accounts may be close to contemporaneous with the pre-colonial social order. But inevitably, they are written in the context of the Western colonial gaze, not to mention the gender bias of the male authors. 
My own bias is for anthropological sources. There is at least a commitment to describe accurately and to live with the people you are writing about. To explain the view from the inside. The theoretical constructions of long dead anthropologists are often readily perceived and can be set aside as a clunky and awkward after thought. Like the attempt to prove an original condition of group marriage. These can be ignored while their descriptions of events are still useful. Most feminist anthropologists of more recent vintage (e.g. Michelle Rosaldo, Ernestine Friedl, Nancy Chodorow) stress the universality of patriarchy. They also acknowledge the variety of patriarchal gender regimes in different societies.
Reading any ethnography of an Indigenous pre-class society you will soon see why recent feminist anthropologists are arguing that patriarchy is close to universal — despite the diversity of gender regimes. For both hunter gatherer and horticulturalist stateless societies. For examples see: Colin Turnbull on the Mbuti; Marjorie Shostak on the !Kung; Yolanda and Robert Murphy on the Munduruçu; Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, Phyllis Kaberry, A.P. Elkin, Kenneth Maddock, W.H. Edwards (ed.) on the Australian Aborigines; anything at all on Melanesia (e.g. Harris; Meggitt; Gregor & Tuzin).  

There is a small school of academics who argue that stateless societies are also gender egalitarian. What I find in this writing is a blindness to issues that contemporary feminism is concerned with. Authors with this perspective rely on older ethnographies that describe what was going on before colonial influences. For example, Phyllis Kaberry on Indigenous Australia (1938 – the Kimberleys). These anthropological sources are setting up their descriptions in the context of their day. A context that treats Indigenous societies as atavistic and brutal. The imperial project is being justified by presenting Indigenous women as downtrodden slaves — who had to be rescued by civilisation. These early ethnographies want to set the record straight and explain the errors in those Victorian assumptions. Women were not slaves and drudges, their opinions were important, they had choices about marriage, there were secret women’s ceremonies. More recent authors take these early ethnographic writings as evidence of gender egalitarian societies — rather than looking at the patriarchal social order that these writings also reveal. 

There are various concerns feeding into the depiction of stateless societies as gender egalitarian. One is loyalty to the Marxist explanation of gender. Engels in his famous book The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State explains gender inequality in terms of social class. Prior to social class, he maintains, there were primitive matriarchies. Class society instituted private property. Ruling class men corralled their wives to protect their dynasty. The capitalist class divides the proletariat into opposing genders to more effectively rule them. These claims of an original matriarchy maybe made sense in the nineteenth century and reflected some of the research coming out of the Americas at that time. More comprehensive research since then demonstrates Engels’ theory as implausible. 
Another concern is the stigma placed on global South societies by a dominant colonial culture and its associated social science. Peoples condemned as simple, savage, uncivilized. The awful history of Western colonialist powers justifying their domination via prejudicial accounts of gender. We are here to rescue the women. A re-evaluation of these societies in the light of the environmental crisis and the social disasters of class societies. The massive inequality, the famines, the terrible plagues, the awful wars of class societies. If we look at Indigenous stateless societies, these problems were absent. These societies were egalitarian and looked after the environment. Extrapolating from that, people want to say that they were also gender egalitarian. A neat package. Something we could go back to if class society implodes.
Then there is the social constructionist view of gender. Conservatives argue that gender inequality is innate, a part of the human condition. To refute this, the left argues that gender is socially constructed. If this is the case, we would expect gender to be constructed in radically different ways in different societies. There is certainly some truth in this claim. Surely there must be societies that construct gender to be equal. So let us scour the anthropology and pick likely examples. My problem with this is that the examples do not actually stack up. The Iroquois, the Minangkabau, the Mbuti, the !Kung, the Australian Aborigines. The detail of the ethnographies shows these societies to be patriarchal. Notwithstanding that they are different from the gender regimes of the colonizing countries – and in some cases a lot less oppressive for women or non-binary people.
An example
Let us now take an example from a society that, according to Engels, should be gender egalitarian. A communitarian stateless horticultural society of the Amazon. The Munduruçu. Robin and Yolanda Murphy visited this group in the seventies. Their account focuses on the experience of women and is informed by the feminist critique of patriarchy. They call their book Women of the Forest. Their older informants were able to describe life before the massive intervention of the national state put an end to aspects of their original culture. The anthropologists supplemented this with a close reading of contemporary life. My main purpose here is to show how we can describe patriarchy in this context using the same analytical tools as the ones I use for the London housewives. An inequality of transactions related to basic drives of human nature. 
Let us start with an accounting of leisure versus obligatory work. Men spent a lot of their time in the village in the men's house. Communally owned by the men. They would be in their hammocks, or they might be doing a bit of craft work, repairing a net or similar. Meanwhile women were working in the gardens or preparing the cassava crop to make flour. Hours of mashing and washing the tubers to remove toxins. They might be in their family’s private house cooking. The children under five accompanied the women, so childcare was always a part of their work. Maybe once a week the men might go hunting for a few days and return bearing meat. A moment celebrated by the whole community. 
What does this broad picture suggest? A woman’s day was almost all taken up with activities that were mundane but necessary. By contrast, a lot of men’s time was leisure. Their obligatory work in hunting was exciting and their contribution of meat was highly praised. An incident took place while the anthropologists were there. Some of the women started calling out to the men. Asking them to come and help mashing the tubers. They looked a bit embarrassed but would not budge from their hammocks. An acknowledgement of the tedium of women’s work and its low status. 
In pre-colonial times, men would also gain status through raids on other villages. They would arrive in the middle of the night and kill people. They would demonstrate their bravery by bringing heads back to their village. High status through violent attacks on neighbouring people. The realm of politics was dominated by the men — who constructed alliances and broke them. 
This inequality was backed up by a semiotics of bodily deportment. Women would walk and sit behind men in gatherings that linked both sexes. Women were meant to keep their legs closed. Not to do so was construed as an invitation. The forest itself was counted as a no-go area for women. Women who strayed into the forest alone could be raped by a man from their own community. Women who offended against the authority of the men could be gang raped. For example, a girl who left the village to attend a school. Women have less autonomy. They are punished for flouting the men’s authority. Sex was in the missionary position and was designed with men's pleasure in mind. 
The Munduruçu men possess sacred flutes that house powerful spirit beings. These are held in a special sanctuary of the men’s house and brought out for ritual occasions. They say that women originally owned the sacred flutes. Then, because the men were able to hunt, they could offer meat to the sacred flutes and took possession of these spirits. As they took control, the women were forced to do housework, childcare and gardening. While the men were released from these chores. An origin myth that endorses and celebrates their patriarchal regime.
In an initiation ritual for boys, the men go to the forest dressed as dangerous spirit beings. They play the sacred flutes and enter the village. They seize the boys who are to be initiated and take them away. The women are not permitted to leave their huts or even to look at the ceremony being enacted. On pain of death. 
Again, what we are seeing are politics of patriarchy played out with symbols of domination and actual barriers to women's autonomy. 
The global picture
As I have been arguing, the global picture is that patriarchy may not be universal, but it's close to it. This leads to a key question. Why is patriarchy so pervasive? And obviously, the right wing has a field day with this. Well, it's inevitable, it's part of human nature. It's temperamental and intellectual differences between men and women that are reflected in hormones. I find this explanation massively implausible. If you look at an AFLW match in Australia, a women's football match, the women are clearly capable of a competitive spirit including enthusiastic attacks on other players. Usually tackles that are expected within the rules of the game — but also in outbreaks of violent confrontation that break the rules. 
Accordingly, I do not find the hormonal explanation persuasive. I doubt whether patriarchy can be explained in terms of sheer physical difference. That men’s physical strength gives them a capacity to inflict violence that women cannot match. Since the development of weapons, it has always been possible for a woman to kill a big man with a weapon. The fact that women don't have weapons, aren't in the military, they aren’t the warrior class is a construction of patriarchal society rather than its basic cause. The history of the world shows us that sheer physical strength is often of less significance than weapons and tactics. The Romans took over Europe despite their small stature.
I would not completely rule out these typical explanations of patriarchy. Nevertheless, I find the explanations provided by early second wave feminism more pertinent. Shulamith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson are key authors. I like the way Atkinson puts it. Men have discovered that they have an advantage in struggles with women as a class. This is because they're not tied to childbirth and to the intimate ties with infants that come out of childbirth and lactation. This is a political discovery, a discovery by men as a gender class. This discovery and strategy has been recreated in different kinds of societies in completely different ways. Different gender regimes in different societies, different roles for men and women. But basically, men have advantages in political conflicts with women that are related to women's key role in childbirth. In pre-modern societies, women were having between five and 10 children in their lifetimes. Spaced apart at four-year intervals. With each child on the breast for up to four years. These commitments have had huge consequences for the gender politics of daily life. 
Confirming this analysis is the history of the feminist movement itself. The first instance of the feminist movement was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when family size started to drop in the middle class in Europe. Florence Nightingale pioneered the fight for women to enter the professions. The suffragettes campaigned for the vote. Marie Stopes popularized contraception. More recently, the second wave of feminism coincided with the widespread use of the pill as a contraceptive device. These feminist campaigns were not determined by new technologies. They were conceived and organized by women acting on their own behalf. Nonetheless, they were enabled by changes that reduced the reproductive disadvantage that had allowed patriarchy in the first place. 
So, is patriarchy socially constructed? Up to a point. Men make an ongoing choice to take advantage of these life differences to dominate women. Patriarchy is not given by biology. It is enabled by biological differences, but not created by them. That is one reason why it's not inevitable. The second reason is that it's not inevitable now, given that women have much more control over reproduction. The size of the family has dropped away to two or less.
What all this means for men is complicated. On the one hand, patriarchy has given certain benefits to men. That is why it is so common. But of course, these benefits have come with some costs. As the next chapter on toxic masculinity explains. These costs have now escalated — as women have the capacity to push back and make life difficult for patriarchs. There is a pathetic nostalgia informing the manosphere these days. Aiming at hegemonic masculinity it is impossible to really make friends with women. If you insist on maintaining patriarchal power, it doesn't really work. Men who take this path end up alienated from their children. You are cut out from a large part of life's pleasures. The last disadvantage is the one explained in the next chapter. The insecurity that comes with an attempt to occupy the hegemonic position. Always having to compete and show dominance, a huge psychic pressure. You might say, well, okay, in previous patriarchies the game was worth the candle, but it's not now.
I am sorry to have written such a grim chapter. The ray of hope that we can get from stories of an original matriarchy is misplaced. We are on uncharted territory and doing something completely new. If we slip up and make a tactical error, it is clear where we will end up.