Patriarchy is defined as the control by men (rather than women, or both men and women) of most of the power and authority in a society. As previously discussed, it is a result of sexual dimorphism, but not an inevitable one; it developed when humankind became settlers rather than hunter-gatherers. In today’s blog, I am going to argue that much of the feminist effort made towards equality over the last hundred years has, in fact, tended to consolidate that power and the structures that sustain it.
When we seek “women’s rights”, we generally seek ameliorations of a system run by and for men - a system that needs our reproductive labour. What we have been asking for is ‘patriarchy, but a bit kinder, please’. This has had the effect of reinforcing patriarchy and underlining women’s position within it as lesser beings receiving needed help, crumbs from the master’s table. We are getting Patriarchy 2.0.
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It is probably easier to illustrate this with an example. Maternity leave has been widely seen as a success story, enabling women to have a baby, take a career break and return to their previous employment. Not all countries have it, and it is more or less generous in those that do. In the UK, as a mother, you get a proportion of your pay for the first few weeks, then a statutory amount, and you can remain off work for a year. Your employer has to hold your job open for you. Sounds great. The father can even have a couple of weeks of statutory paternity leave, too, and very recently, arrangements have begun for shared parental leave.
Over the last thirty years, women’s educational attainment in the UK has caught up with and is now outstripping men’s. Not only that, young women are now earning as much as young men. So far, so good. However, the lifetime pay gap between men and women over their careers has remained stubbornly present, with typical women’s earnings being around two-thirds of men’s. Even hourly, the median pay gap is still around 15% and looks to be rising for full-time employees. Of course, we also have the right to equal pay for equal work, so we have to infer why this happens. Much of the gap, we are told reassuringly, is because women tend to work part-time and go into jobs in lower-paid sectors such as care work.
Women’s (apparent) inability to make economic headway is therefore framed as being a result of the choices that they make. They chose not to work. They chose to do less than equal work. This framing is unfair and inaccurate: the personal is political.
Is it a choice to have children? In most cases, though by no means all, women can exert control over their fertility. But men are generally part of that choice too, a fact that seems forgotten when the looming demographic crisis is discussed: the fertility crisis is deemed to be down to women.
And if it is a choice, is it really a personal choice made by women that they should be the ones to bear the burden of children, economically as well as practically, or is it political?
To start with, in the UK, historically only women got that vital year away with a guaranteed job. That places a check on that woman’s career - just as it is, perhaps, taking off. If a subsequent sacrifice is to be made by one of two parents, it is far more likely to be the career that has already been checked that is sacrificed - economically, it’s already damaged. The year with the child also builds bonds so that if a career change might be needed to fit around childcare, it seems quite natural that it is the woman whose career is affected - and this ‘choice’ is almost inevitable if she is single. Even with the new rules, other patriarchal concepts of childcare being associated with womanhood and mothering are likely to sway couples, and single mothers will not have the choice.
And these ‘choices’ do not only affect women with children. They affect all women. Especially in small businesses, holding a job open for a year can be a real pain, and many employees, especially professionals, are hard to replace with temporary staff. Studies repeatedly show that employers are reluctant to hire women of childbearing age. Because such discrimination is unlawful sex discrimination, employers have to guess whether a given woman is a ticking baby bomb and make excuses not to interview or employ them just in case. Similar prejudices almost certainly dog women’s careers in other ways. How far the new rules will change this is uncertain.
The mere possibility of the ‘choice’, therefore, affects even women who have chosen not to, or who cannot, have children. It isn’t personal; it is engineered this way. It is a political tax on women, framed as a woman’s right and a woman’s choice. That’s patriarchy.
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Abortion provides another example of a patriarchal wrong framed as a right. In the UK, and much of the West, women have what looks like the right to abortion. That’s a good thing, right?
No one wants a return to backstreet abortions or forced births (except Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson and a vast swathe of the Republican party in the USA, of course - and some Australian politicians - and I could go on). But it is worth examining our ‘rights’ to an abortion in more detail. Again, I will focus on the UK, but the wider principle is the same elsewhere.
Abortion rights are usually granted (by a male-dominated system, of course) to women on strict terms. In Britain, two doctors have to certify that not having the abortion would be injurious to the woman’s health - the usual reason given is that she would suffer distress and mental health issues if the abortion is not granted. Even then, abortion is only allowed (barring exceptional circumstances) in the relatively early part of pregnancy, before the competing right of the foetus overtakes the woman’s right. And finally, of course, it is not actually a right to an abortion at all. If these conditions are met, abortion is no longer a criminal act - and that is all. Barring immediate, grave threat to life, women in the UK have no legal right to insist on an abortion. Any doctor can refuse.
Despite this, when The Abortion Act was passed, it was rightly hailed as an important step in women’s liberation. Given the stress, uncertainty and atrocities perpetrated before, it was. But is that good enough?
Most abortion discussion centres around the idea of viability in the foetus. Abortion is described in emotive terms as "murder” and the foetus presented as a child or a baby, helplessly suspended and dependent on its mother for support. We previously looked at how our model of mothers posits them as self-sacrificing. Women in the UK have to be declared mentally unwell if they do not want to sacrifice themselves - is there anything more patriarchal than that?
A feminist approach to abortion does not turn on viability. It does not depend on the (lack of) personhood of the developing foetus. It depends on women’s personhood. Why are women expected to allow the state (that is, patriarchy) to coopt their bodies to support another human being? Would men accept similar impositions on their bodies? Suppose, for instance, a foetus was found to have a kidney defect, which only a transplant from the father could cure. Most fathers would probably willingly do this. But if they did not want the child, had commitments that made a serious operation very difficult, or did not want to have a lifelong relationship with the child or its mother, would it be acceptable for the state to force him to donate the organ? If not, why is it acceptable for women’s organs to be used against their will?
Framed this way, you can see that in many liberal democracies in 2023, abortion is not really a right: it is a way of reinforcing to women just how powerless they are under patriarchy. Even our bodies are not our own. Our rights are a wrong.
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Of course, I am not saying we shouldn’t have maternity leave or legally available abortions. We live under patriarchy, and we must avail ourselves of such liberties. But we should consider why our basic material needs have been met with such qualified ‘rights’. The solution to women’s oppression will not be found in rights that make us equal under patriarchy. When we do that, two things happen: the rights are reframed in ways that undermine our personhood; and every single right becomes a matter of justification and negotiation. We do not need that. We need the end of patriarchy.
It has become almost a commonplace joke that ‘on Wednesdays, we smash the patriarchy’. If you are merch-minded, you can even buy a t-shirt with it on - though be warned, smashing the patriarchy is not a part-time job, nor one helped by reinforcing capitalism, which places a higher value on creating and selling things destined for landfill than it does on reproduction, let alone on the planet. I might respectfully suggest you would smash the patriarchy far more effectively by using a biro on an old t-shirt and giving money to a women’s refuge or a women-run charity.
And best of all, if you want to tackle patriarchy, meet with other women. Discuss your lives. Find out what experiences you have shared, how they have been cast as your choices, and whether they really were. Might they have been the impact of patriarchal politics? This consciousness raising is vital to finding our freedom and our feminism. For what it is worth, there is one women’s right that is seriously under threat of male reversal: the right to have those discussions in women-only groups, without men present, in universities, in support groups and refuges. Why would that happen, I wonder?