Part of feminist refusal to contend with the extent of patriarchy present across civilizations is that feminism was predominantly a white western movement for many decades. They felt intensely personally frustrated with the white men of their own society as many of them had been belittled or abused by their own white men. When they saw white men’s disdain (stated or unstated) for other cultures in the mid 20th century and bias against such men, I think many feminists harbor a sort of enemy of my enemy must be my friend mentality. The last thing they can stand is to feed a narrative that white man can save brown woman from brown man. So they are loathe to admit that concepts from western civilization alone must be the core of feminism in other civilizations. Furthermore, women in some of these non western societies are extremely disempowered, and it’s difficult for them to fully advocate against their patriarchal constraints. So they do so in a way that basically sucks up to their own men. This is what hijabi “feminists” do when trying to claim Islam promotes women’s rights.
Ultimately, all pre modern civilizations were highly patriarchal, and the degree they were patriarchal varied. Some offered more concessions to women than others. Among pre modern civilizations, European Christianson offered some of the greatest number of concessions towards women- monogamous marriage, unusually late age of marriage, lower prevalence of cousin marriage, more permissiveness in allowing girls some degree of choice in who they married. White feminists never seem to admit this and want to judge every other civilization as at least as patriarchal as their own. But reality is that most civilizations were far more brutal and restrictive to women than Western Europe was.
Good comment. Fundamentally, what drives so many if not all leftist movements is hatred towards Whites and Western civilization. Once you start noticing this, you will notice this pattern over and over again.
The Politics of Piety is one of the most idiotic things I've ever come across. The author appears to be entirely ignorant of feminist theory. Yeah, no shit sherlock, in patriarchal societies women are rewarded for conforming to patriarchal norms and punished for disobeying, and on an individual basis women can benefit themselves by adhering to (or enforcing) practices which harm women as a whole. The patriarchal bargain, anyone????
For me, there are two key sentences in this writing:
"The real puzzle is why women worked so hard, but struggled to capture the rewards. What prevented women from organizing powerful networks, capable of challenging patriarchal authority and impunity?"
and
"To understand how our world came to be, we need to study how male fraternities consolidated power, and why this persisted for so long. That means studying long historical processes, tracing the interplay of political, economic and cultural shifts, and comparing societies to understand what sustained (or weakened) patriarchal authority."
As you pointed out, the world has become more equal in the last decades, in the extended West especially.
This proves things *could* change. This proves that women, who had been subjugated and powerless for so long, *could* organize and effect change. So why now, why not 1,000 or 10,000 years ago?
I find this question fascinating.
I hold the view that both men and women benefitted from the previous setup. With high mortality, resource scarcity, etc, men specialized in violence and women in child-rearing. Patriarchy came about as a side effect of this. And the moment this stopped being necessary (IR, econ growth, moving away from a sum-zero world), things changed.
But I hate this view. It's very... crude... And I womder if it's actually supported by research, data and science or if an alternative view is possible.
(Gosh, if I had time I'd do a master's of phd on this lol)
“But why are we elevating a hard slog? The overwhelming majority of Aztec mothers woke early, spent five hours a day grinding maize for tortillas, scrubbing their children’s clothes. Women’s work is often thankless.” Okay but what were men doing during that time and was their work any less thankless?
It is definitely true that there is a tendency to go from: "the cushy warrior elites enslaving everyone were men" to "men had it good" and ignore the fact that most men were likewise brutally subordinate to those elites (the elites being small in number and unrepresentative).
Men also sometimes faced sex-based fates that were worse (conscripted for war as levies [which is uniquely terrible work], and then exterminated by conquering opponents if they lost, rather than being captured as slaves or wives, for example [both bad to be clear; being captured to be a slave is awful! but revealed preference suggests it beats being executed on the spot]. Life used to be really tough for almost everyone!
That doesn't change the fact that women still usually got the short end of the drudgery stick in household economic tasks, because they were subordinate to the men in their lives (husbands, brothers, fathers), not just elites, and we should not lose sight of that fact.
> what were men doing during that time and was their work any less thankless?
I can’t confidently speak to the Aztec in particular, but oftentimes, yes, men’s time was comparatively easy—politics, games, leisure, drugs, as well as hunting and agriculture. The plains Amerindians such as the Comanche and Apache provide particularly good examples of how unequal the burden of hard labor could land on men and women.
At least until the 19th century, I’m not aware of any societies where it is even plausible to claim that the opposite was true—i.e. that men did most work while women had unequal access to leisure, although for most people in most societies for most of human history, life was simply hard.
I think the emphasis on division of labor comes from a historical anachronism. The idea that only men participate in economic production in the public sphere, whereas women are confined to domesticity, is a specifically European, mostly post-Enlightenment idea that has to do with economic changes and beaurocratization. There's an interesting book about this by Marion Gray, Productive Men and Reproductive Women. Basically, work that was strictly removed from the house was new, and only applied to educated middle class labor in the public sector (clerks, jurists) and later to industrial work (factories). Nobles, famers, artisans, shopkeepers and even merchants worked mostly where they lived, and labor was distributed within the entire family. It was only the expansion of the middle class and correspondingly of higher education and specialized labor that gave rise to the notion that leaving the house for work is a a form of self fulfillment and public agency and as such, a male privilege. This of course did not apply to factory work, which included women and children from the very beginning.
Just another thought- I think Sherry Ortner's distinction between power and prestige is useful to disentangle women's tangible influence in terms of resources and even decision making, from their oppression in systems that devalue them.
If we factor in women's physical vulnerability and the lack of state security in medieval times and before, along with the advent of secure borders, is there such a thing as patriarchy?
Patriarchy under those circumstances is real but it was inevitable. Gender equality before the Industrial Revolution made men's physical strength less relevant is impossible.
Quite likely. If we account that mortality was high, people were young (and dumb), resources were scarce (poverty, sum-zero), and the world was very violent, it would probably make sense to ahve a setup where men had power but died in wars, aggression, etc and women had as many babies as possible.
A very brutish world... But it's probably what we had until tow days ago.
I suspect the whitewashing is the result of the interplay between "men essentially enslaved most women throughout history" and "most impactful and historically notable stuff was done by men [because of said slavery]" (which isn't to say grinding maize and raising children isn't crucial, it just doesn't make the history books).
Efforts to challenge that second point by highlighting exception women and get women "credit" for various things in ancient and contemporary foreign cultures we like has the tendency to undermine that first point.
This article is correct of course, but it's also a case of shooting fish in a barrel. It's clear what the goals of previous feminists were - political equality, and then social equality, and the right to be treated as individuals. But what are the current goals, and how does that relate to describing patriarchy and history?
Most of the discussion of the evils of patriarchy recapitulates the evils of living in capricious, non-liberal regimes. In all such societies power is ultimately derived from either personal or derived military/violent force, and that trickles down to how both women and powerless men are treated. At the core of liberalism is the repudiation of this and it's replacement by a legal regime for dispute resolution, backed by violence only under legal circumstances.
Unsurprisingly, liberalism led to progressively more rights and powers for women until the current era of full formal equality. Of course, legal equality is not the same as equality in all spheres or pursuits.
But that's all boring, and old by now. So what's the interesting academic angle?
Good paper. There is fear among some feminists that not having examples of “bad ass” women will somehow entrench the view that women are inferior, when in fact it only illustrates the scale of the oppression of women. Since the discrimination is culture-based, it is not widely and properly recognised. Here is this little but crucial point explained in greater detail:
Part of feminist refusal to contend with the extent of patriarchy present across civilizations is that feminism was predominantly a white western movement for many decades. They felt intensely personally frustrated with the white men of their own society as many of them had been belittled or abused by their own white men. When they saw white men’s disdain (stated or unstated) for other cultures in the mid 20th century and bias against such men, I think many feminists harbor a sort of enemy of my enemy must be my friend mentality. The last thing they can stand is to feed a narrative that white man can save brown woman from brown man. So they are loathe to admit that concepts from western civilization alone must be the core of feminism in other civilizations. Furthermore, women in some of these non western societies are extremely disempowered, and it’s difficult for them to fully advocate against their patriarchal constraints. So they do so in a way that basically sucks up to their own men. This is what hijabi “feminists” do when trying to claim Islam promotes women’s rights.
Ultimately, all pre modern civilizations were highly patriarchal, and the degree they were patriarchal varied. Some offered more concessions to women than others. Among pre modern civilizations, European Christianson offered some of the greatest number of concessions towards women- monogamous marriage, unusually late age of marriage, lower prevalence of cousin marriage, more permissiveness in allowing girls some degree of choice in who they married. White feminists never seem to admit this and want to judge every other civilization as at least as patriarchal as their own. But reality is that most civilizations were far more brutal and restrictive to women than Western Europe was.
Good comment. Fundamentally, what drives so many if not all leftist movements is hatred towards Whites and Western civilization. Once you start noticing this, you will notice this pattern over and over again.
Thank you. This needed to be said.
The Politics of Piety is one of the most idiotic things I've ever come across. The author appears to be entirely ignorant of feminist theory. Yeah, no shit sherlock, in patriarchal societies women are rewarded for conforming to patriarchal norms and punished for disobeying, and on an individual basis women can benefit themselves by adhering to (or enforcing) practices which harm women as a whole. The patriarchal bargain, anyone????
Thank you. I loved this piece.
For me, there are two key sentences in this writing:
"The real puzzle is why women worked so hard, but struggled to capture the rewards. What prevented women from organizing powerful networks, capable of challenging patriarchal authority and impunity?"
and
"To understand how our world came to be, we need to study how male fraternities consolidated power, and why this persisted for so long. That means studying long historical processes, tracing the interplay of political, economic and cultural shifts, and comparing societies to understand what sustained (or weakened) patriarchal authority."
As you pointed out, the world has become more equal in the last decades, in the extended West especially.
This proves things *could* change. This proves that women, who had been subjugated and powerless for so long, *could* organize and effect change. So why now, why not 1,000 or 10,000 years ago?
I find this question fascinating.
I hold the view that both men and women benefitted from the previous setup. With high mortality, resource scarcity, etc, men specialized in violence and women in child-rearing. Patriarchy came about as a side effect of this. And the moment this stopped being necessary (IR, econ growth, moving away from a sum-zero world), things changed.
But I hate this view. It's very... crude... And I womder if it's actually supported by research, data and science or if an alternative view is possible.
(Gosh, if I had time I'd do a master's of phd on this lol)
Spot on! I love this angle!
Thank you so so much Gerard!!
“But why are we elevating a hard slog? The overwhelming majority of Aztec mothers woke early, spent five hours a day grinding maize for tortillas, scrubbing their children’s clothes. Women’s work is often thankless.” Okay but what were men doing during that time and was their work any less thankless?
It is definitely true that there is a tendency to go from: "the cushy warrior elites enslaving everyone were men" to "men had it good" and ignore the fact that most men were likewise brutally subordinate to those elites (the elites being small in number and unrepresentative).
Men also sometimes faced sex-based fates that were worse (conscripted for war as levies [which is uniquely terrible work], and then exterminated by conquering opponents if they lost, rather than being captured as slaves or wives, for example [both bad to be clear; being captured to be a slave is awful! but revealed preference suggests it beats being executed on the spot]. Life used to be really tough for almost everyone!
That doesn't change the fact that women still usually got the short end of the drudgery stick in household economic tasks, because they were subordinate to the men in their lives (husbands, brothers, fathers), not just elites, and we should not lose sight of that fact.
> what were men doing during that time and was their work any less thankless?
I can’t confidently speak to the Aztec in particular, but oftentimes, yes, men’s time was comparatively easy—politics, games, leisure, drugs, as well as hunting and agriculture. The plains Amerindians such as the Comanche and Apache provide particularly good examples of how unequal the burden of hard labor could land on men and women.
At least until the 19th century, I’m not aware of any societies where it is even plausible to claim that the opposite was true—i.e. that men did most work while women had unequal access to leisure, although for most people in most societies for most of human history, life was simply hard.
I think the emphasis on division of labor comes from a historical anachronism. The idea that only men participate in economic production in the public sphere, whereas women are confined to domesticity, is a specifically European, mostly post-Enlightenment idea that has to do with economic changes and beaurocratization. There's an interesting book about this by Marion Gray, Productive Men and Reproductive Women. Basically, work that was strictly removed from the house was new, and only applied to educated middle class labor in the public sector (clerks, jurists) and later to industrial work (factories). Nobles, famers, artisans, shopkeepers and even merchants worked mostly where they lived, and labor was distributed within the entire family. It was only the expansion of the middle class and correspondingly of higher education and specialized labor that gave rise to the notion that leaving the house for work is a a form of self fulfillment and public agency and as such, a male privilege. This of course did not apply to factory work, which included women and children from the very beginning.
Just another thought- I think Sherry Ortner's distinction between power and prestige is useful to disentangle women's tangible influence in terms of resources and even decision making, from their oppression in systems that devalue them.
If we factor in women's physical vulnerability and the lack of state security in medieval times and before, along with the advent of secure borders, is there such a thing as patriarchy?
“If we factor in the threat from foreign invaders, is there such a thing as a military dictatorship?”
This question is ill-posed and collapses under the weight of its own inanity.
Harsh but true
Patriarchy under those circumstances is real but it was inevitable. Gender equality before the Industrial Revolution made men's physical strength less relevant is impossible.
Quite likely. If we account that mortality was high, people were young (and dumb), resources were scarce (poverty, sum-zero), and the world was very violent, it would probably make sense to ahve a setup where men had power but died in wars, aggression, etc and women had as many babies as possible.
A very brutish world... But it's probably what we had until tow days ago.
Interesting perspective.
I suspect the whitewashing is the result of the interplay between "men essentially enslaved most women throughout history" and "most impactful and historically notable stuff was done by men [because of said slavery]" (which isn't to say grinding maize and raising children isn't crucial, it just doesn't make the history books).
Efforts to challenge that second point by highlighting exception women and get women "credit" for various things in ancient and contemporary foreign cultures we like has the tendency to undermine that first point.
This article is correct of course, but it's also a case of shooting fish in a barrel. It's clear what the goals of previous feminists were - political equality, and then social equality, and the right to be treated as individuals. But what are the current goals, and how does that relate to describing patriarchy and history?
Most of the discussion of the evils of patriarchy recapitulates the evils of living in capricious, non-liberal regimes. In all such societies power is ultimately derived from either personal or derived military/violent force, and that trickles down to how both women and powerless men are treated. At the core of liberalism is the repudiation of this and it's replacement by a legal regime for dispute resolution, backed by violence only under legal circumstances.
Unsurprisingly, liberalism led to progressively more rights and powers for women until the current era of full formal equality. Of course, legal equality is not the same as equality in all spheres or pursuits.
But that's all boring, and old by now. So what's the interesting academic angle?
Good paper. There is fear among some feminists that not having examples of “bad ass” women will somehow entrench the view that women are inferior, when in fact it only illustrates the scale of the oppression of women. Since the discrimination is culture-based, it is not widely and properly recognised. Here is this little but crucial point explained in greater detail:
https://www.jandehn.com/post/culturalism