Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | W | Women's Quarterly

Three cheers for patriarchy! Christine Stolba shows why patriarchy is a gal''s best friend.

Article Excerpt
PRAISE FOR PATRIARCHY? Surely only a victim of false consciousness would utter such blasphemy. Any sane person with a liberal arts degree knows that patriarchy is a pernicious beast-still only partly subdued by the efforts of the women's movement-that has ravaged the talents of women for thousands of years.

But can patriarchy be as bad as some would have us believe? Defined narrowly, patriarchy is "a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line." This is not always the preferred arrangement in modern families. But the brief against patriarchy encompasses more than relationships inside the family.

Since everything to emerge from Western civilization bears the stamp of patriarchy, the argument goes, Western civilization is inherently suspect. If you think this sounds nutty, then clearly you, dear reader, have fallen prey to patriarchy's wiles. For as theorists such as Andrea Nye-author of Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic-tell us, because of its roots in ancient patriarchal Greece, logic itself is suspect.

So is rigorous debate. Law professor Lani Guinier, for example, who had her fifteen minutes of fame when she was nominated as attorney general by former President Bill Clinton, took Socrates to task for developing a method of instruction that, two millennia later, supposedly still wounds the self-esteem of female law students. In Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change, Guinier argues that the often-combative Paper Chase-style Socratic method of teaching places far too much emphasis on combativeness, which is masculine. Guinier prefers inclusive, mentoring relationships to the orgies of Socratic rigor.

Patriarchy has for some...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!