Patriarchy

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Patriarchy

Patriarchy is an important category for social analysis in feminist theory and theology. Patriarchy refers to societies where the rule of the father is the basic principle of social organization of the family and society as a whole. Patriarchal systems seem to have arisen first in nomadic herding groups in the tenth to fifth millennia bce in various centers of social development: the ancient Near East, the Indus Valley in India, in China, and in Mesoamerican cultures. Gathering and gardening societies seem to have taken on the patriarchal order as they moved to larger scale agriculture, property ownership, and urbanization. This process took place over a period of time in the ancient Near East, but was well developed by the time written codes of law were developed in the third millennia bce.

Patriarchy means the "rule of the father." Patriarchy refers to systems of legal, social, economic, and political relations that validate and enforce the sovereignty of male heads of families over dependent persons in the household. In classical patriarchal systems, such as were found in Hebrew, Greek, and Roman societies, as well as classical India and China, dependent persons included wives, unmarried daughters, dependent sons, and slaves, male and female. In Roman law, the term familia referred to all persons and things ruled over by the paterfamilias, including animals and land.

While male slaves and dependent sons were ruled over by the patriarch, women were more thoroughly subjugated. Sons grew up and male slaves could be emancipated to become independent householders. Women—as daughters, wives, and widows—were defined generically as dependent persons under the male head of the household in which they lived. The female slave, combining the subjugated statuses of female and slave, was even more vulnerable, having no protection from physical or sexual abuse.

Patriarchy as a social system is found in classical societies around the world. Some anthropologists, such as Elman Service, believe that the patriarchal family was the aboriginal order of human society and hence is "natural" and inevitable. But others, especially feminist anthropologists, have challenged this assumption. They argue that patriarchal systems arose at a particular time in human history with the change from food gathering and gardening to plow agriculture, private landholding, urbanization, and class stratification. In the ancient Near East this happened sometime between the seventh and fourth millennia bce. Thus the classical societies and religious cultures of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans that predate Christian society and theology were shaped by patriarchal ideological and social patterns.

The status of women in patriarchal societies has many nuances, depending on such factors as how women's physical protection and the property deriving from their own families of origin are related to their status within their husband's family. Economic and legal liberalization and the spread of women's education also modified women's subjugation in classical times, particularly during the Hellenistic and the later Roman periods. However, in classical antiquity women never gained the status of citizenship with its independent legal political status, the right to vote, or the right to hold office.

Although one cannot define a single system that would be true of all patriarchal societies at all times, one can generalize about the characteristics usually found in patriarchal societies. The general characteristic of the status of women under patriarchy is one of subjugation without legal status in their own right. Several other aspects of this subjugated status include the following:

Lineage of children is passed down through the father
Male children are preferred to female children
As wives, women's bodies, sexuality, and reproductive capacity belong to their husbands
The sovereignty of the husband over his wife includes the right to beat her and to confine her physically, sometimes even to sell her into bondage
Since women do not have public roles in politics and culture, their education is usually limited to household skills and sometimes minimal literacy
Women's right to inherit property as daughters or widows is restricted, and what property they do inherit is usually administered by a male relative or guardian

The exclusion of women from public political and cultural offices and from the higher education that prepared men for such offices accounts for the almost exclusively male elite formation of public culture under patriarchy, and for the definition of women from this male point of view. Women typically have had great difficulty gaining visibility and credibility as creators of culture, even when they manage to gain education and skills and produce cultural creations of comparable quality to those of ranking males. Since the cultural creations of women have not been incorporated into the public heritage that is taught to the next generation of students, such cultural accomplishments that women did achieve have been continually lost, erased from public memory, or else have survived by accident, often by being attributed to a male.

These patterns of patriarchy were reconfirmed in early modern European law codes and continued to define women in Europe and North America until the feminist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries succeeded in winning for women the legal status of citizens, with the right to vote and hold political office, as well as to make property transactions in their own names and have access to higher education and professional employment. Similar changes in women's social status have taken place in other parts of the world in the twentieth century through liberal democratic or socialist revolutions.

However, many remnants of patriarchal ordering of society still remain in "modern" societies. Women are seen as the primary house-workers and child-raisers, and their capacity to compete economically with men is thereby limited. Cultural patterns and legal restrictions continue to limit women's economic, political, and social equality, and to ratify the view that women are subordinate to men as a gender group, a subordination that is interstructured with class and racial subordination.

The major world religions have been deeply shaped by the patriarchal ordering of the societies in which they developed. Christianity inherited patriarchal religious and cultural patterns both from Greek and Roman philosophy and law and also from the Hebrew world. Patriarchy rooted in these ancestral sources shaped a Christian worldview that took for granted the male hierarchical ordering of society and the church as the "order of creation" and the "will of God."

God is typically imaged as a patriarchal father and lord. The patriarchal hierarchies of male over female, father over children, and master over slave are reduplicated symbolically in the relationship of God and Christ to the Church as bridegroom to bride, father to sons, and lord to servants. The image of Christ as Head and the Church as his body reduplicates the legal view in which the wife lacks her own "head" (self-direction) and belongs as body to her husband.

For some church fathers, such as St. Augustine, this concept of male-headship led to the conclusion that women lack the image of God in themselves and are included in the image of God only under their husbands as their "head." Women are seen as naturally subjugated and inferior by nature, more prone to sin, lacking reason and self-control, and defined by their body and sexuality. As such, women cannot represent Christ in the ordained ministry. These views have flowed from patriarchal patterns taken into Christian theology and church polity.

Feminist theology arises by challenging this patriarchal distortion of Christian theology. Feminist theology dismantles the legitimization of patriarchy as God's will and the "natural order" and redefines it as sinful distortion of good human relations and as an apostasy from God's true mandate for creation. Feminist theology builds on the partial liberation of women in modern societies and calls for a completion of that liberation in society and in the church and its theology.