File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9711, message 10


Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 13:06:47 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-FEM: Patriarchy (fwd)


I am re-posting this from the anarcho-feminist list, because it touches
on a discussion Yoshie tried to start here once, but which we never wound
up having.

-m

------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 11:08:05 -0500
From: Jacqueline Sokolinsky <sokol-AT-bway.net>
To: MujeresLibres-AT-tao.ca
Subject: Re: Patriarchy

Patriarchy is one of the most insidious and damaging of all systems of
oppression percisely because it disguises its presence and threats under
the mask of love and protection.  It is hard for me to write
"analytically" about a subject which is for me profoundly personal and
immediate -- my caveat at responding to this, because I really don't
want to resort to confessional cr stuff.  Women are trapped in abusive
marriages and other relationships all the time because they are so
deeply convinced that they are incapable of fending for themselves in
the world; this is a lesson taught them through "tenderness" as well as
through beatings.  How many vulnerable girls are trapped into
prostitution by the same promise that a bourgeois man gives his own
daughter: let me protect you?  How many other girls join the ranks of
disappointed women whose dreams of meaningful work were crushed by
self-doubt after a long parade of family and professors urged them to
use their educations to be "good mothers" instead of pursuing a career
-- because a "normal" (not-neurotic) woman WANTS to be sheltered in the
love of a man, goes the theory?  How many others suffered bouts -- or
worse -- of mental illness from the crushing of their personalities in
the homes of "protective" fathers, husbands, or simply in the world
which does not recognize the right of "unattached" women to exist?

To summerize, in a more "theoretical" style: patriarchy oppresses by
using emotional manipulation to trick women into trading their freedom
for "security".  When women subsequently experience the traumatic
consequences of their loss of freedom, they are labeled "neurotic" and
"maladjusted" and sent to psychiatrists or, alone and ashamed, read
piles of women's magazines trying to be a "normal" woman.

Patriarchy is, finally, probably the oldest of all the forms oppression
takes.  Before class there was patriarchy.  Before racial categories
were imagined, there was patriarchy.  (I don't say all over, and I don't
say it is something which simply "was" and is a part of humanity
forever, I am simply pointing to its great age.) My point: patriarchy is
the underpinning for the State itself, which borrows patriarchal
ideology.  You, as an American, are the vulnerable individual incapable
of self-determination, whom the paternal State must lovingly care for,
seperating you from a thousand "dangers" (war, "criminals", social
"instability"...)

But unlike the State, the powers of patriarchy are far more insidious
because the oppression is tied to genuine enough love.  I will stop here
because if I go on I WILL get personal.  Anyway, I'm sure there will be
plenty of other responses.

In solidarity,
Jackie Sokolinsky
sokol-AT-bway.net



   

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