Let's Talk about what Patriarchy Is

If Boris Johnson had gone to North Hackney Comprehensive would he be prime minister?

@HH160bpm

Competence? Nothing to do with the fact that Eton educated men are 15% of MPS despite something like 0.01% of the population could be educated at Eton. Clearly an ability based selection.

And pull anyone of the street? Really? The most vulnerable members of our society need carers. If you reduce the job of a carer to the physical tasks it still requires skill but it’s so much more than the basic physical tasks.

And if it takes so much skill to be a carer then they would be paid more money. Thats how capitalism works. You are only worth the value someone is willing to trade in return for the alienation of your labour. It is a voluntary trade in which you set the demand. It is the most moral system we have to date.

Competence?
Nothing to do with the fact that Eton educated men are 15% of MPS despite something like 0.01% of the population could be educated at Eton. Clearly an ability based selection.

And pull anyone of the street? Really? The most vulnerable members of our society need carers. If you reduce the job of a carer to the physical tasks it still requires skill but it’s so much more than the basic physical tasks.

You are seriously deluded if you believe value in areas like care is anything remotely whatsoever to do with any influence of men. The 'value' is based on the fact that you can pull anyone off the street to do that job so theres no reason why that persons labour is worth more. Try asking anyone to do the job of a dentist or doctor and you'll have to pay more for the expertise and labour that person has to offer.

Whether you find it ridiculous or not competence is the standard requirement unless theres some other unknown quality you know of. And whether you think they're competant, again, is irrelevant, the person that chooses them for the particular position did. For example our prime minister was voted into office based on competance, theres no other standard.

men were more often the ones who had a steady employer from outside and increasingly over time that capitalist model came to dominate, this created a sense of a gap between home and work. The important point though was that this was not some real advantage to men

And yet male led trade unions developed closed shops and fought the idea of equal pay, using the argument that men should be paid more to support their families. Women were excluded from the early guilds.
Again child allowance has only recently been paid directly to women.
Patriarchy is indeed pervasive, it's an invisible web which very few women can escape. The fact that some men exploit other men as well doesn't change the specific position of women.

This is why I think you are being blinkered:
"men were more often the ones who had a steady employer from outside and increasingly over time that capitalist model came to dominate, this created a sense of a gap between home and work. The important point though was that this was not some real advantage to men*
Work provides the ability to be financially independent. Women are less likely to have that now and historically. That is an advantage to men, caused by patriarchy.
In a non-patriarchal society child rearing work would be compensated (or work would complement child rearing) so women could be financially independent in the same way as men.

You aren't taking on board the posts laying out the financial and power differentials between men and women. So I dont think this is a debate at all.

Ok goose I can't be arsed talking about it with you. I was posting for the workers really.
You don't believe in patriarchy. Fine. A debate isn't just labouring your point ad nauseam.

So what would we think that would realistically (not pie in the sky) look like if we were trying to produce a non-patriarchal society?

I think it's to do with who loses out because of the fact of reproduction.

Your post about capatilist structures vs patriarchal structures is interesting.

'Because of' reproductive roles, in a pariarchal society women are at greater risk of being financially disadvantaged. They are left with vastly reduced wages after only 6 weeks statutory maternity pay. In a society where childcare is largely seen as 'women's work' and where paid for childcare is very expensive, it is women who end up on reduced hours in less well paid jobs to facilitate looking after children.

So it's more likely to be women who end up financially disempowered and reliant on a man than vice versa.

Obviously loads of things have happened in society to try and counter balance this, like women being entitled to a share their husbands property in the event of divorce etc, but i guess that props up the patriarchal structure.

Women will get pregnant. People will reproduce. This will happen. But current structures mean that 9 times out of 10 women are much more at work of a financial/power deficit compared to men as a consequence of reproducing.
Amen to that

As well as looking at definitions, I find it useful to go behind them and ask "but why patriarchy"? And to my mind it's very simple - female biology. We have hidden fertility, and our bodies are required to produce offspring - man need to control that. And they are able to because we have smaller weaker bodies (on the whole). Nothing new there but I find it helpful to remember that it all springs from that.
(I went back through that and removed some of the qualifications I always feel the need to add whenever I'm asserting anything. Damn female socialisation! I'm 41 and I've got 3 degrees for fuck's sake!)

While I’m ranting

It supports and feeds the idea that men are innately superior in all ways that count and they are entitled to have dominion over women. Men decide what counts.

It’s embedded in language, in gender roles, in EVERYTHING.

Living in the patriarchy is why you start with a base assumption that childcare and work are two separate things.

I also agree. And central to the detriment that this does to women is the consequent reduction in power (i.e. money) available to them.

It took me ages to really understand what feminists and women's rights campaigners were saying when they talked about the 'unpaid work' undertaken by women, and the unfairness of that. On one hand it sounds bizarre to suggest that women should get paid for looking after their own children.

But it is less bizarre when you look at it from the perspective that patriarchal structures (where maternity and caring are wholly devalued in economic terms), leave women without significant financial means powerless.

How things are structured now, to an extent denies the fact and reality of parenthood/maternity. Women will get pregnant. People will reproduce. This will happen. But current structures mean that 9 times out of 10 women are much more at work of a financial/power deficit compared to men as a consequence of reproducing.

Packingsoapandwater
Some very good stuff in here.
It’s the structuring of society where men are people and women and children are possessions. In the uk it trickled down from the men who had rights like the vote, to men who did not, but both those groups had rights women did not. In fact primogeniture still exists giving some men rights that are not available to women.

When 50% of people are 100% of the people making laws and products it creates a systemic imbalance favouring the 50% in myriad ways from obvious to difficult to quantify.

If you look at the last 100 years you can see where women were pushed back out the workplace post war by government initiatives, women’s jobs being created as a subclass of employment in the NHS early days. The civil service marriage bar. The changes to child residence arrangements on divorce, equal pay, maternity rights and pay, women being seen as separate to their husbands for taxation and on and on.

There’s an example hitting the news today about women who could have been claiming higher pensions but the information was only sent to their husbands.

All of that - patriarchy.

Living in the patriarchy is why you start with a base assumption that childcare and work are two separate things.
Exactly. Perhaps we should try a thought experiment where everyone gives birth (there was a Dr Who episode where men gave birth to boys and women girls). How would we organise society then. This is the most fundamental issue.

An example of this might be what someone upthread said, many women would be quite happy to live in a society where women were given space to step back from career when childrearing, and even resent what is often a necessity to maintain a career. But we also see people who would like to make sure that men and women maintain similar levels and types of employment, and that differences in employment histories don't create pay gaps, and to achieve this would insist of equally split parental leaves

Living in the patriarchy is why you start with a base assumption that childcare and work are two separate things.

In a society that truly recognised childrearing as work and valued it accordingly, there would be probably be a very different approach to "work" overall. Childrearing is seen as incompatible with job because we live in a patriarchy so the workplace structures and norms have grown over the years to suit the majority of people in that workplace i.e. men.

If we started again now with workplaces that were inclusive and with childrearing recognised as work it would look very different. We wont though because it's much more comfortable to say women are natural child carers so childcare isn't work, it's a woman's birthright.

This is also covered in Caroline Criado Perez's book in depth and will give you the empirical evidence you want.

For me it does come back to the arbitrary application of sex based stereotype, and subsequent differences in expectations (both positively and negatively)

A society set up this way is inefficient and unfair. People will be unhappy if they are placed in a gendered box they don’t fit well in, and will tend to do worse work because of lack of motivation and skill.

So whats in the way? Sex role stereotypes are very sticky, and are policed by everyone. But progress in the west for women has shown that they can change. The biggest sticking point seems to be broadening men’s Attitudes. Men seem entirely uninterested in giving one another The space to live outside the man box. There’s not a lot feminists can do about this though - such men are unlikely to listen to women at all.

Meanwhile There’s no recognition at all in some societies that women are even human. there’s a lot further to go when female infants are being murdered, and women are forced to keep their adult sons around to protect them and any daughters from roving bands of young males. We can help to some extent with this via political action, and possibly via organizing things like boycotts, and by encouraging immigration of Persecuted women from places where women’s rights don’t exist. Once in the west, Immigrants historically have been among the strongest advocates for reforming their nation of origin.

Not sure why anyone would think we shouldn't use patriarchy because we aren't livingin ancient Rome or something.

As others have said upthread it is about women living in a world that is run by and for men, and that women are expected to fit in with it.

If you want to picky about is "patriarchy" linguisticaly correct you could say that the start of the entitlement that men feel irrespective of race or class is the status boys are given in their homes by their fathers.

Rather than spend time on mumsnet niggling about are we using the word correctly wouldn't it be more productive to look at ways we as women can challenge the male world, and get more people to recognise that on every layer of life, from male violence, to design or space suits, to really mediocre white men getting into positions of power, men are the beneficiaries and women the victims.

And when it is recognised what pro active steps are going to be taken to take away that male presumption of being the yardstick by which things are measured.

For me, that we still live in what is in many ways what I consider a patriarchal society became much more evident when I became pregnant and then had children.

I agree with @QuentinWinters that our society isn't structured around what works, rather what works for men. It can be very hard to really step back from how things are to re imagine them in a radically different way that doesn't centre male biology, and instead is much for fair to women.

I think that patriarchy is essentially about power, and in our society an enormous amount of that power comes from controlling and having money. When a woman becomes pregnant, unless she works somewhere with a very generous maternity leave policy there is very high percentage chance that after 6 weeks she will suffer a significant reduction to her access to money.

While hopefully the woman will have saved up or be otherwise financially stable enough for this not to be problematic, the reality is that for many women, after those 6 weeks she will then be reliant on a man to continue to support her in her absence from work. She loses her money (her power) with the expectation that he will support her. And hopefully he will. But she is now in a much more vulnerable position.

I appreciate there have been recent changes re the introduction of shared parental leave t try an balance this out, but in a system where men (in general) earn more than women (in general), you will still more likely than not end up with the woman taking the extended leave, as the family can m ore readily absorb her lost earnings rather than the mans.

A non- patriarchal system would recognise the value of child bearing and maternity leave, the biological necessity of large elements being undertaken by a woman (espec if breastfeeding), and would consider it unfair to financially penalise and disempower women, compared to men, because of it. I don't know exactly what that would look like, but it involves a radical shift away from viewing things through the normal lens to consider a more egalitarian and less patriarchal system.

It would be wrong and a catastrophic assumption to make it 50% women and %50% men as that would be giving people positions based on sex and not how competant they are at doing that job.
Are you suggesting the sex imbalance in top positions is because women on average are less competent than men? Interesting position for a feminist

Thats just it though its not actually 'designed' around those features at all. Its designed around the things that work.
It's designed around things that work for men. Not consciously but subconsciously as women often don't have a seat at the table and their needs are either not even thought about or are assumed.

It's exactly the same mechanism that causes structural racism. White people creating social structures that work for them without considering if those structures could be a barrier to other ethnicities.

I strongly suggest people read the book "invisible women" for a very compelling illustration of what "the patriarchy" is in practice. She has collected evidence based, practical examples from around the world.

Really I struggle to see how anyone on a feminist board can dismiss the patriarchy but there you go.

To me, modern patriarchy describes a political, social and economic system that is primarily designed around the male life experience. So it assumes male conventions are the fundamental parameters.

It could be better described as the andrarchy, I suppose, as we no longer subscribe to Victorian (and Roman) notions of male household headship.

I entirely agree with this. The term patriarchy seems to belong to a structure that has now gone in the West. Although I have been asked to get a male signature for an HP agreement, so not that long gone.
It is really the shadow that still falls on society due to this history.

Thats just it though its not actually 'designed' around those features at all. Its designed around the things that work.
Actually you need to add works for men to that. Our economic system ignores women's unpaid work for instance, just like it ignores natural resources like wetlands, ecosystems. The value placed on jobs like care work, etc is a due to using the patriarchy's value system. I quite honestly find the competence argument ridiculous, I see little competence in evidence in the leaders of business, politics, universities at the moment.

For me it comes down to whether the male model is seen as default or whether society is co-created by men and women to the benefit of everyone, rather than the current system where women have been permitted to play a part in a man made world.