As this concept is so key to my understanding of the world, I tend to assume that everyone knows and agrees on its meaning. But as I have been challenged on this, I have come to see that this is not the case and that actually there are understandable grounds for confusion; and so a brief excursus may be in order, all the more so since I need this concept for a general argument on theodicy that I want to make in a forthcoming article1.
By “patriarchy”, I do not simply refer to the anthropological concept whereby authority in tribes or extended families is vested in one single senior adult male who is normally the biological ancestor (or assumed to be) of other males and unmarried females in the tribe. To what extent, at any given period of history and in any given place, tribal units in fact conformed to such a pattern of organization can be left aside, though it should be noted that we largely project patterns onto others based on our own experience of the world, and careful anthropological research shows that the understanding of power within such communities is typically (if not invariably) quite different from how we conceive of it through our own lens.
Rather, for me, and I think at least implicitly for almost all critics of patriarchy, it is a concept which arises at a certain stage of capitalist development, when the notion of private property is already established in social morality and starts to be challenged by the state, or more generally by emergent supra-tribal social structures. These structures may initially have been voluntaristic, but in order to avoid free-rider problems came to assert their autonomy and to subjugate the constituent entities. They did so aided by religion and through systems of taxes, tithes, and military conscription. We may regret this, but we also have to recognize that it was a historical necessity and inevitability once communities began to amass stable productive capital assets which were alienable by force.
Under such circumstances, private property ceased to be an absolute concept, as it was contingent upon a grant of authority to superordinate political structures to enforce the rights in question against external and internal enemies. These structures could only exist if they could finance themselves from primary economic production. Inherent therefore in the notion of patriarchy is the - theoretically unlimited - power to expropriate private property, whether it be for legitimate goals of collective self-defense or, inevitably, in the private interests of those entrusted with this power of expropriation.
Note that it little matters whether these persons are male or female. Historically, however, these structures have tended to be dominated by males, and when females have assumed roles within them, it has been without disruption to their underlying principles of operation. Why is this?
When talking of emergent state structures we are probably thinking of complex ancient societies such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. However, it is their prehistory which is really determinative, not only in terms of their historical development (how did such complex societies come to coalesce out of smaller units?) but also to explain how they in fact operate, which is much more informal and less monolithic than this picture might tend to suggest. Even at late stages of historical development, and even to some extent today, we see that the formal structures of power within a society are only, at best, part of the picture. In more recent times, a variety of social structures have evolved which mediate power in society the membership of which is voluntary (clubs, trades unions, professional associations and so forth). These, however, evolved long after society had assumed complex and multilayered economic forms and are not part of its origin story. At an earlier stage we see, of course, aristocratic and feudal forms. These appear to be the residue of the constituent processes giving rise to the state in the first place. The latter emerges when voluntary forms of alliance are no longer sufficient to the external and internal challenges a society faces. The grant of authority to the state, meaning, until modern times, in almost all cases to a monarch, is never a frictionless one, but rather occurs only in extremis and in a conditional way (if it is not compelled). The history of the Magna Carta and the common law in England is a good example. Even though one political form may succeed another, acquired privileges always attempt to reassert themselves and to limit the power of the center (though some of course try also to co-opt that power for their own private gain).
So if state formation is, as it were, a last resort, it stands to reason that all other less restrictive alternatives will be explored first. Supra-tribal alliances initially relied on the exchange of gifts and trading relations. Inalienable assets such as craft skills, the use of which, moreover, could not be efficiently compelled (as economic critiques of slavery have pointed out), meant that incentives to expropriate by force were not absolute. To this one can also add (without comment) spiritual or superstitious considerations. Force is a blunt tool and deploying it comes at a cost.
Early supra-tribal congregations tended to be focused on trade. Ricardian specialization emerged endogenously. Alongside this, however, exogamous imperatives meant that contacts with other tribes were also an opportunity to broaden the gene pool. In most primates, already, we see tribal patrilocality, that is, a tendency for males to stay in the tribal group of their birth, whilst females migrate to other groups. This is enabled by much greater cultural plasticity amongst females, as has frequently been observed in human studies, for example that they are much better at learning foreign languages, and what goes for languages goes for social codes as a whole. (This also goes for diglossia - women are much better at imitating accents and dialects).
What we tend to see therefore is that there is not a clear distinction between exchanging gifts, barter, and the exchange of women between tribes. Whilst I am not trying to suggest an inherent or complete lack of agency on the part of the women concerned, it certainly is the case that children are a vital resource to the tribe and that expectations of reciprocity inherent to the exchange of goods and services might at least influence expectations regarding the migration of adolescent females between tribes even if they are not exactly thought of in the same way.
In addition to broadening the gene pool, this of course creates ongoing social links between tribal units. With their bi-cultural heritage and affinities, women are also well placed to smooth out and help to resolve any disputes which may arise. Exogamy therefore creates the beginnings of political community (without of course later notions of territorial exclusivity).
As economic development progresses, more and more is at stake in such exchanges. Formal methods of dispute resolution come into existence only at a late stage. Moreover, barter has well-known limitations, giving rise to the need for currency, the first form of which, as David Graeber has convincingly shown, was debt obligations2. The exchange of the most precious resource - females - also suffers from a lack of fungibility. The widening of exchange beyond barter brought with it an incentive to include them within debt reckoning. This, however, presumes a limitation of agency; in this manner, property rights over women were born.
Hence the key characteristic of patriarchy is the existence of property rights over women and their residual forms and consequences. Who exercises these rights is secondary: it is the gender of the object of those rights that is determinative (it would be better if we spoke not of patriarchy - literally male rule - but of female subjugation; “patriarchy” suggests all men benefit from these arrangements and this very clearly is not the case).
Even as society became more complex and other mechanisms of regulating it came into existence, the ability to secure power and influence by trading brides remained of capital importance: pun intended. It is very clear that as society “progressed”, such rights not only came into widespread existence, but were further structured. Even if brides may on occasion be ceded by entities more complex than simply the father, such as family or tribal councils, considerations of inheritance mean that the recipient of the right tends to be a named male. Valuable women are not normally available to the tribe as a whole (though slave women and those who have lost their value for one reason or another may be).
This is obviously insidious enough in and of itself, but it also has many further nefarious consequences. As the woman’s birth tribe retains interest in relations with the host one - frequently having paid a considerable dowry to place her there, which may otherwise seem paradoxical - a secondary market in brides is out of the question. Allowing the allochthonous woman, whose loyalties may be divided, to gain power within the tribal unit of her adoption is also fraught with difficulty (many viewed Helen herself as a Trojan horse!). From this arise norms of monogamy, opposable of course only to (certain) women and not to men as, for most of history, has been the case (though men do have some reciprocal obligations).
So this is patriarchy. Note that, whilst it may be unpleasant, it would be an error to view it as intrinsically unethical (at least if you are a consequentialist). It may be that this was the only way to organize society in order to avoid worse outcomes still.
Many seem to believe that this is still the case. If it is, though, this must be for quite different reasons, since no civilized person in the West would argue for property rights over female offspring any more, even of the most diluted kind, and in fact, such rights largely no longer exist and do not seem any longer to be of any importance to the organization of society. It would seem that we have found better ways. Nevertheless, many still believe in the importance to society of the family and of stable inheritance rights (though inheritance law has amply evolved to take into account all possible scenarios, and penalties for possible divorce are now for many a much more significant consideration in estate planning).
Whether or not there is a case to be made for the enduring social utility of monogamy, quite the contrary can also be argued. In a recent article here on Substack, Roman Kunitsyn recuperates the argument of Engels that extended families are inimical to social progress since they require the state to do less to maintain its productive labor assets and impede the development of class consciousness3. This results in a situation where the lower classes have interests which are “the same, but in no way common”. Monarchical or feudal systems are, on this view, the inevitable outcome of agrarian societies, and democracy (or the dictatorship of the proletariat) presupposes industrialisation4. In any case, we cannot simply assume that structures, even if they may have served a welfare-enhancing social purpose in the past, continue to do so in circumstances where their purpose can no longer be the same. Instead, we must ask ourselves whether these institutions have not been co-opted and molded further in the course of history in order to enhance wealth extraction by the elite. Since it was only ever aristocratic marriages that were of any interest to anyone in medieval and early modern times, and anyone else could pretty much do as they damn well pleased (at least elites would be largely indifferent), it seems pretty obvious that the extension of monogamous social norms to classes which throughout history were unconcerned by them (i.e. the peasantry and emerging proletariat) can no longer serve an analogous agenda, but must be an opportunistic recuperation.
So whilst the origin of patriarchy lies in the assertion of property rights to women, designed to underpin economic interests, the concept now englobes those institutions which have historically grown out of this assertion or been ancillary to it, foremost among them the claim of men to restrict the sexual behavior of women, or the one woman, wedded to them, which remains the most obviously egregious residue of bridal contract. (Most of us long ago let go of the claim of fathers to control the sexual behavior of their unmarried female offspring and society seems to have survived that just fine).
It is not sufficient to maintain a romantic attachment to the idea of sexual exclusivity within marriage if it has no valid social purpose which could not be achieved by less restrictive means, since it is more than evident that it is characterized by severe harms. Demands of sexual exclusivity amount to the wielding of powerful cultural norms to establish an arbitrary restriction on the freedom of another and so do not allow for ongoing free and informed consent. Monogamy and the nuclear family is the central institution of contemporary capitalism since it gives rise to debt and wage slavery as the inevitable result of seeking to satisfy a largely unavoidable biological impulse, generating the savings - and in previous times also the labor force - needed for militaristic expansion and war, and prompting unproductive resource accumulation and conspicuous consumption in order to signal male status (because it is males which have inherited reproductive and social privilege). At the same time, women become “slaves to beauty” and disincentivized to self-realize in ways which potential reproductive partners may find uncomfortable or threatening. Perhaps this is why gay rights were resisted for so long - and only started to be accepted when gay people often agreed to adopt analogous social forms to heterosexual ones (though they still usually have much more relative economic autonomy)5.
Certainly, patriarchy may have played a historical role in getting us some part of the way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the same time, it is pretty obvious that it has come at a considerable cost and stands in the way not only of the freedom and self-actualization of one half of the population, but of the other half too. Many of its precepts and the attendant institutions are already crumbling, but we must help it on its way and get rid of the final residues, and notably the ability of culture and the law to compel sexual exclusivity within marriage. My objection to patriarchy is not simply that it tends to make women relatively less well off within a system which overall is destructive of everyone’s well-being anyway, nor that there is some path-dependent overhang of accumulated male privilege (it is rather a question of elite privilege) which needs merely to be redistributed and all will be fine. It is my contention that, when reproductive contract is limited to what is objectively necessary to assure the rights of minors (which in any case are already assured by law), and more importantly all accompanying cultural shibboleths, which make such norms self-enforcing, have finally vanished, the artificial scarcity of sex and indeed of any form of affection will fall away, undermining many of the perverse incentives of capitalism and ushering in, perhaps, a new and more peaceful era.
It is very much my impression, in any case, that the status of this concept within feminist theory is also ambiguous and contested, so that I am not simply making up my own definition here. The concept has often been criticized as unduly universalist and ahistorical; in what follows I hope to address this criticism somewhat by attempting a genealogy and pointing to some structural parameters which may explain parallel cultural developments. That it still may be felt to be too simple a category to bear the weight I accord to it is acknowledged.
Graeber, D. (2011), Debt: The First 5,000 Years. (The title is unfortunate and largely inexplicable: this process has been going on for far longer than 5000 years)
This depends, of course, on what we mean by democracy, itself a contested concept, and who we admit within its perimeter.
On the other hand, it is clear that this era is now very much in its twilight (see this graph, where “queer” as a category is very ostentatiously omitted; other studies give much higher figures still.
TL;DR "patriarchy" == Statism