Patriarchy
Patriarchy – from the Greek patēr, meaning “father,” and archē, meaning “beginning,” “rule,” or “power” – is an androcentric organization of society in which inequality is institutionalized and sex-role relations are strictly regulated.
Societies are called patriarchal when men function as the dominant element in family, economic, and public life. This phenomenon is also known as andrarchy or androcracy.
Patriarchy is characterized, in particular, by such features as:
- patrilineality, in which children’s descent, kinship, and inheritance are determined through the father’s line;
- patrilocality, in which the wife lives in the husband’s family or household and the place of family residence is chosen by the husband;
- monogamy, understood here as a two-parent family, or polygyny, that is, plural marriage involving one man and several wives; and the concentration of rights to dispose of property and to manage the economic life of the family in the hands of men.
Patriarchy is characteristic of most traditional societies.
In older evolutionary and anthropological schemes, the term patriarchy was also used to denote the last period in the history of primitive communal society, which was believed to have followed matriarchy and preceded class society.
From the perspective of gender and feminist theory, patriarchy is significant because it describes not only male dominance in the family, but also a broader system of social relations in which men’s authority, experience, interests, and power are treated as normative. Feminist analysis examines patriarchy as a structure that shapes gender roles, inheritance, labour, sexuality, political power, symbolic representation, and unequal access to resources and decision-making.
Leave a Reply