Have to admit, this is one of the reasons I was cheering for the violent overthrow of the Taliban as early as the mid-nineties. Any society so ignorant that they’d deliberately keep half their population in greater ignorance is just too fucking ignorant to have around. Gender aside, it offended my sense of economic efficiency.
Aside from everything else that’s been mentioned, isn’t there a case to be made that, hey, we’re just more enlightened and, well, nicer than we used to be? We could still beat our wives and force them to do nothing but cook and clean for us, and that might give us by some measure a more comfortable life. But who really wants to do that? Heck, we could still import slaves to work our plantations and make us iced tea if we really wanted to, but that would be morally unthinkable to virtually everyone.
The real cause is this–all things change with the passage of Time.
This cuts a lot closer to my original question than much of what’s been posted (not that it hasn’t been interesting.) ISTM that IF we postulate that [ol]
[li]Our society used to be a patriarchy in which men as a group posessed absolute power (as is often asserted), and used this power in order to get what they wanted from women (sexual relations, children, a de facto domestic servant, etc.)[/li][li]This state of affairs was desirable to men[/li][/ol]
then things would still be that way. Obviously, they are not. So, is one of those postulates incorrect?
Rodgers01, you seem to be implying that in some sense #2 was false, or at least became false as men’s sensibilities changed. Many of the other replies seem to take for granted that #1 is false; that women always had some power.
In those criteria, doesn’t 2 rely on 1? So saying that 1 is the false statement automatically invalidates the second. Right?
OK, let me rephrase #2 then. Let’s say that by “this state of affairs” I mean not men possessing absolute power, but only the general social order which is said to have resulted from that, in which all women did was get married as soon as they were old enough and spend their lives bearing children and attending to domestic duties.
As someone already said, in times past this was about the only way to continue the species. Except for the privileged few, people had to conceive as many children as possible, for 2 obvious reasons:
- Reliable birth control other than abstinence was not available and
- Many, many children died in infancy.
Women spent much of their adult lives pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Because of this and poorer medical resources in general, many women did not live to the ripe old age of menopause. So they never really had much time to exercise much power anyway.
If boys survived childhood, and as young men avoided death due to war or disease, they had the chance to develop leadership skills outside the home. Or, at least, they had the necessary role of protecting the home and earning money outside of the home. Even if they were tyrannical and brutal, their wives and daughters had few or no options.
There are obvious exceptions, but in speaking of the common or average person, there were practical advantages to the status quo.
I think you will find over time that women’ positions in society have varied greatly, and that the most important element has to do with how well off their family/husband was, rather than how well off women in general were within that society.
There also has to be a distinction made between what’s legal in a society and what the mores of that society are. Frex, up until the 70s/80s, marital rape was legal in most states in the United States. That if if a wife didn’t wanna have sex, and the husband did wanna have sex, and he more or less forced her to have sex, she couldn’t charge hubbie with rape in most states. In fact, I don’t believe the last state outlawed marital rape until the 90s.
That being said, back in the 50s and 60s when marital rape was not only not a crime but not recognized as such, life wasn’t a live-action enactment of “Slave Girl of Gor” for most women.
As I understand it, we’re now asking which of the following is false:
1- That society was once a patriarchy & that, almost by definition, this gave men power & dominion over women.
2- That an atmosphere of men go to work while women remain at home & cook & clean is/was desirable to men.
I thought ShagNasty’s point on number 2 was interesting, to wit: this wasn’t necessarily desirable to men, it was just the only feasable option in days of yore. Less technology meant travel & work took longer, so, tasks had to be split. Women reared children while men went to work. It’s an Occam’s razor sort of thing: it’s simple and it makes sense. I think perhaps some of the beliefs of a women’s inferiority grew from this scenario as opposed to them existing prior to it.
I also don’t think this was particularly desirable to men. Most jobs are fairly heinous. Sure, there are those who’d rather NOT spend time with their families, but they have deeper problems that don’t stem from a social system. To those men, the dad-works-mom-cleans scenario (simplifying here) was desirable. I wouldn’t say they were the norm.
So I’ll go with number 2.
I don’t think patriarchy existed because of any quality-of-life benefit accruing to individual males. Power is not a zero-sum game, and oppressing women made it possible for powerful men to use access to women (which they could control as a consequence of women’s oppression) to oppress less-powerful men — most classically, the older men doing this to the younger men, i.e., “work your butt off for us and we’ll let you have a wife, otherwise you ain’t getting laid”
Nearly every radical feminist who ever wrote a theory piece has said that males are less well off under patriarchy than they would be in its absence, especially in broad quality-of-life terms rather than narrowly defined who-has-power terms.
Certainly, intimacy has its own agenda. Humans have a thirst for true sexual intimacy of a sort that simply can’t thrive when the participating individuals are of unequal power. Count me in as one male who would far rather women be free of any need for males (as specifically male people) other than as erotic and romantic partners, and would gladly toss away all that remains of male privilege to see that occur. The resulting erotic and romantic opportunities, no longer poisoned by patriarchal sex-polarized bullshit, would be way beyond merely “worth it”.
What he said.
Lump me with the folks that say that your first assumption is incorrect.
Men might have held absolute societal power, but not all men held true absolute power over women. I’m reminded of the line in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” of something like ‘the man may be the head of the household, but the woman is the neck; she tells the man which way to look.’
It’s not just a question of who could vote, own land, etc., but of who controlled it. A man may own a business, but it could easily be his wife who makes the decisions. That ain’t absolute power.
“This state of affairs was desirable to men”
I think it was but it relied on the unfairness not being publicised or brought into our immediate awareness. Once activism took off, we had to actually justify to ourselves ‘whats always been the case’ and thats a lot harder if the case is inherently unfair or inaccurate. We can do it as human beingsa but it takes a lot of effort to maintain and over time we generally tend to let go of it.
Basically men were given a choice between ‘I am a fair person’ and ‘I want to be the master of my house’ and something had to give. Before that choice got put in our faces we could tell themselves we were both.
Fairly crudely put of course. A ton of other things came into it, not the least of which was better paediatrics.
Otara
I disagree with much of the OP’s premise especially this:
As to why men allows women fair access to the ‘male’ parts of society, my WAG is that they didn’t have much of a choice.
What would happen if ALL the women there revolted? They couldn’t all be killed, the entire society would dissapear with no more children. Could it ever happen that they would succeed in getting rights?
The OP seems falsely predicated on the fact that men ever actually wielded the real power in the world. They didn’t. Women lead them to believe they did. Women are much more powerful than they’d have you believe.
Very true. The women’s movement started in the Victorian Age when women were seen as having the moral authority to take on issues such as temperance and preaching the Gospel.
As for the Rosie the Riveter image post-war, think about our vision of 1950’s Americana. Doesn’t it include the stay-at-home mom baking cookies? Most women actually left the job market after the war (remember there weren’t enough jobs for men in 1941). I don’t have the figures offhand, but I remember the the percentage of women in the workforce in 1940 and 1946 are about equal.
Oh yeah? So when the young woman I met on a bus in India who asked me if I had a live-in boyfriend, and then when I balked (cohabitation is completely unacceptable there) confided to me that she watched Sex and the City on TV, and that if she lived in the US she would live like that, and that she would be in the US if her parents hadn’t decided to turn down her chemistry grad school scholarship and marry her to a religious guy in a small town, and now while I was out travelling the world and having a good old time she was, at my age, raising three kids and cooking for her whole family (she shared her potatoes with me, and confessed she hates cooking and rarely bothers to put spices or anything in her family’s meals) she was really wielding more power then she’d have me believe? For reference, this was her first time leaving the house alone since her marriage. Her moment of freedom was on a two hour busride between her husband at the bus station and her mother-in-law at the other.
There is very real oppression out there. And not just in places that are easy targets. Women are still killed in our own country with some degree of social approval when they are sexually transgressive. Look at that young woman in Aruba. Sure, the nation was sad. But a good bit of them were also going “Thats what happens when you go to a foreign country and sleep with the natives.”
The reason why they don’t all revolt is that the lines of communication are cut. Women are pitted against each other. Social networks are discouraged. Many women rarely interact with anyone, male or female, outside of their family- for fear of gossip or worse. Other women are complicit in this. “Honor” is the only value they’ve got, and the actions of those close to them reflect on them. They arn’t going to risk losing it for an action that may not ever even be noticed. The stakes here are very real. It’s pretty easy to ruin your life when you don’t have a support system, profession, travel rights, or way to get money. Few people are willing to give up all they have on a longshot. Most people are willing to make the best life with what they’ve got.
So we’re talking about India. What happens when India goes to war with Pakistan? Lots of men go off and get themselves killed while women stay home and cook, and clean, and continue having babies.
Who’s got the power?
Okay. Would you rather have power or quality of life?