From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Rogers on "Sacred B.S.; also on terminology
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:23:45 -0500 (CDT)


    Rogers's attack on Scheetz is totally justified; anyone who gives out such
nonsense as Scheetz on women is ignoring all the lessons of working class
history; only insofar as the working class places the struggles against racism
and sexism at the forefront of its class battles can those battles be won.

    But in reference to the specifics in Rogers's message: There is good
historical reason for being more careful in the use of the term "patriarchal,"
and in particular the term is always both broader and narrower than (say) "male
supremacy" or "subordination of women."

    In the decades before and after 1800 both the material base and the
ideology of oppression--class oppression, "race" oppression, gender
oppriession--changed radically. See, for one example, (name?) Laquer's _Making
Sex__. Also see Stephanie Coontz, _The Social Origins of Private Life_. She
argues (as does Fields) that "racism" only came into existence at that time,
and that the earlier oppression and exploitation of slaves should be seen as
patriarchal, not racist. (North Carolina executed a white man in 1806 for
kidnapping a black man into slavery; 41 years later the legislature affirmed
that anyone black could in priniciple be considered a slave.) So "Patriarchy"
should be identified with a whole pre-capitalist or early capitalist structure
of the social order, not merely (or even centrally) with male domination over
females; it included old over young; master over slave; master (and mistress)
over servant, and so on. Coontz is very good on this switch in the United
States between 1780 and 1840.

    Not calling the vicious male supremacy of the 19th and 20th centuries
"patriarchy" by no means is an "excuse" or "rationale" for that domination; it
just makes it easier to know the enemy, while using the term "patriarchy" can
obscure the enemy. Notice that in one famous patriarchy, that of Homer's
Odyssey--Penelope, though perhaps a traitress to her gender, still has more say
in things than did many 19th-c. "post-patriarchal" women.
        Carrol Cox
    ScheISU Normal ILLobscurantist on the question of gender in the 20th
century, and stupid or worse in trying to blow it away. But


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