Episode 119 - Patriarchy 101: How It Was Created and What To Do About It Now
Patriarchy is a system that has shaped our world for thousands of years, which can make unpacking the topic feel overwhelming. Today, I offer a basic overview of patriarchy with specific examples that show how we got here and how it continues to influence us today. Awareness is the key to greater power and greater choice in your life. I hope that this episode provides you with insights and practical ways to claim both. Here’s what I cover:
The complexities of patriarchy beyond the idea that “men are in charge”
How patriarchy was developed as a social technology in response to historical issues
Laws and political systems that were created to entrench patriarchy in society
How to recognize patriarchy in action in today’s society
The ways patriarchy is internalized by people of all genders
How humans created this system, so we can also choose to evolve beyond it
I can’t wait for you to listen!
Book Recommendations for Further Reading:
The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner - A comprehensive historical analysis of how patriarchal systems developed and became institutionalized
Untamed by Glennon Doyle - A powerful exploration of unlearning patriarchal conditioning and discovering your authentic self
The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart - Examines how women are systematically undermined and taken less seriously than men across all areas of life
bell hooks: All About Love by bell hooks - Explores how patriarchal systems damage our capacity for love and authentic connection
Research and Studies Referenced:
Archaeological evidence on egalitarian pre-agricultural societies:
“The Gender Equality Paradox” - https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/04/16/1717312115
National Academy of Sciences research on prehistoric gender roles - https://www.nationalacademies.org/based-on-science/prehistoric-gender-roles
Medical research gender bias:
“Gender bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations” - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11441203/
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics study on pain treatment disparities - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/jlme.12040
The mental load research:
Arlie Hochschild’s “The Second Shift” research - https://sociology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/faculty/hochschild/pdf/SecondShift.pdf
Emotional labor studies - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122412472680
Confidence gap research:
Kay & Shipman Harvard Business Review article - https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified
The Atlantic confidence gap study - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359090/
Language and gender studies:
Linguistic Society of America research - https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-gender
Gender bias in language patterns study - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-17914-001
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Transcript
00:57
Every once in a while, I get messages from people who listen to the podcast and I read and I respond to every single one. And a while back, I got two messages thanking me for the episode I did on why women are leaving the church.
01:11
That's episode 108. And both messages asked me to do a podcast episode specifically about like the basics of patriarchy. Many of us know the term and what it represents, but we still want to have a better understanding.
01:26
And so today's episode, calling it patriarchy 101, I'm going to try and give you an overview, more like a well-informed walkthrough of this system. It's not going to be a deep academic dive. In fact, as I was preparing it, and as I've been working on it for a couple of weeks, I just kept taking deep dives into really specific kind of subcategories of patriarchy.
01:48
It's almost at least it feels endless to me. So I'm trying to pull back and do more of an overview with some specific examples of not just how we got it. but how it influences us today. So this episode is for you, Jane, and for the author of the anonymous request, because it's really, really important that we understand this system that has been shaping our world for thousands and thousands of years.
02:15
Being aware is the key to greater power and greater choice. That's how it always is. And so as we kind of dive into patriarchy, I want you to understand that it's like the gravity or invisible water we're all swimming in or the operating system that is just kind of behind the scenes.
02:33
And it's important to see it that way, because although what we're looking at today is the result of thousands of years of patriarchy, it just becomes so normal to us that we miss it. But my hope with this episode is to give you some basic, a basic overview of how we got it and some things to look for and so that that greater choice and greater power is available to you.
03:00
So let's start with the basics. When most people hear patriarchy, they think it means men are in charge. And you're right. And it's also more complex than that. Patriarchy is a social system. So like the operating system running in the background of our entire society, it is a hierarchical structure that privileges or rewards masculine traits or traits that are typically associated with masculinity.
03:31
More masculine perspectives and devalues traits that are associated more with femininity. So aggression, competition, logic, emotional detachment, right? Those are associated with masculinity and traits associated with femininity, collaboration, intuition, emotional intelligence, nurturing are more associated with femininity.
03:59
And notice I'm saying associated with because these aren't inherently male or female traits. They're just labeled that way by the system. And the system of patriarchy gives the power and the control and the rulemaking ability to men in patriarchy.
04:20
Patriarchy wasn't always the default. In fact, anthropologists have identified at least 160 existing matrilineal societies across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. And in those societies, people belonged to their mother's family over generation and inheritance passed from mother to daughter.
04:43
Archaeological evidence actually shows us that many early human societies were actually more egalitarian labor was shared, there weren't certain jobs for certain genders. And that was how those communities operated and thrived.
05:00
So what happened? The shift began roughly 10,000 years ago with what we now call the agricultural revolution. So humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies, sometimes nomadic, sometimes not, but they made the transition to farming communities, where they stayed in one place, where they farmed land and used its resources to be able to survive.
05:27
And the reason that that is so important is because suddenly land ownership really mattered. Property could be claimed, property could be accumulated, and with property came the need to control inheritance.
05:44
And this, I think, is where it gets really interesting and dark. To control inheritance, what do you need to control? you need to control reproduction, right? Because if a man has amassed a bunch of property and he wants to pass it on, he needs a male heir.
06:02
But to control reproduction, you have to control women's bodies and women's sexuality because a man wants to make sure that his property is being passed down to his actual legitimate bloodline. And so you have to control what women are wearing, who they are sleeping with, what they do when they get pregnant.
06:25
And there is your foundation for patriarchy. Societies became more complex and these power structures become more entrenched. It wasn't just the agricultural revolution that contributed to the rise of patriarchy.
06:41
There was also a lot of war and conquest going on where violent nomadic culture sometimes attacked and pillaged more peaceful societies and that required men to defend and protect their homes and wealth because of their superior biology, they're bigger, they're stronger.
07:00
And that further established male dominance, right? Men took on the task of providing things that required physical strength and that often meant that women were relegated to domestic roles. And that led to that perception of value, right?
07:16
Who do we value more? The protectors, the ones who are stronger and bigger and the ones who are raising children in the home and cooking, not so much. And then as the agricultural revolution started and people began to own land and there was war and conquest, people needed to be protected.
07:33
And so states or entities formed where there were people in charge who had more money and more wealth protecting those who didn't have as much wealth, but that just solidified male authority because men were the landowners, men were the authorities, men were the soldiers, men had the tools.
07:53
and were capable of the violence in, again, broad strokes. And so all of this contributed to solidified men in power, solidifying men as the ones who were in charge and making the rules and protecting what they had amassed and what they wanted to pass on to their children.
08:13
And then you have religious institutions stepping in to make those rules consistent with the word of God then you have legal systems created to enforce those rules and then you have economic systems which reward this whole setup.
08:36
Marriage became a transaction in many ways. I love a good Jane Austen book and movie, but during that time women are exchanged for land, right? For status, for alliances. And women then become property adjacent, right?
08:57
They're owned, they're exchanged, oftentimes having no say in who they marry. And this is where we see the roots of things like dowries or a bride price. We also see the legal coming about of something called coverture, which is where a woman's legal identity vanishes into her husband's.
09:20
That's where we get the fact that I was Sarah Bybee. And when I got married, now I'm Sarah Fisk. You know, I lost my identity, my family, it was absorbed into my husband's. This is also where we get kind of the foundation of purity culture, because what started as maybe a practical concern about inheritance now becomes a complete worldview about human nature, women are lascivious and a whorish if we don't control them through what they wear, who they're allowed to be with, what parts of their bodies were allowed to see, and it becomes a social order. Now, this wasn't destiny or biology in action. This was humans making calculated decisions about power and resources.
10:18
Patriarchy was essentially a social technology, right? Designed to solve specific economic challenges and issues of the day, mainly to control inheritance when land became wealth, but it wasn't the only possible solution.
10:35
And many societies organized themselves differently for much longer. And what I want you to hear is that like any outdated technology, what solved yesterday's problems is creating today's problems. We created...
10:53
humans created this system of patriarchy, which means we can also choose to evolve beyond it. There are a lot of ways in which this sticky system kind of entrenched itself. Touching on just a couple, in terms of legal and political systems, I want you to just remember that women couldn't vote in the US until 1920.
11:19
That's only 104 years ago. And we are having to undo a lot of the ways that patriarchy was entrenched in the system for the thousands and thousands of years before that. Roe v. Wade happened in 1973, the year I was born.
11:36
And that established a woman's right to abortion in the first trimester, but it has since been overturned. And now bodily autonomy varies wildly from state to state. Marital rape. wasn't illegal in all 50 states until 1993, two years after I graduated high school.
12:01
Today, there's a lot of ways that this still shows up in our legal and political systems. Only 27% of Congress is female. That's wild. For being more than half the population, women have 27% female Congress people representing not just the people they serve, but representing the experience and with the context and the female experience being represented.
12:30
In terms of finances, this is one of the most important aspects of patriarchy because patriarchy essentially precluded women from any significant financial gain, autonomy, or being able to amass any kind of wealth.
12:47
That is what hobbles us for thousands and thousands of years because if you're going to leave your husband with no money, where are you going to go? Before the 1800s, English law is what established coverture that basically a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband.
13:08
She could not own property, she could not sign contracts, she could not keep wages she earned. Her children, her labor, and her earnings legally belonged to her husband. That continued for a while, and it's not really until the 1860s where Mississippi, ironically, passes the first law allowing married women to own property in their own name.
13:34
1860, not that long ago. Other states followed, and there was some expansion of women's rights to keep their income, their own property, and to enter contracts. There were some significant acts after that.
13:49
You may have heard of the homestead. Act that allowed single women and widows to claim federal land in the West. However, married women were excluded unless they had the permission of their husband. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s wage earning rights kind of begin to shift and kind of slowly married women gain the right to retain more of their earnings.
14:15
But it still was the men, the husbands who controlled bank accounts, who controlled access to credit, and most of the finances. The game changer really happened in 1974. I mean, let that date just sink in for a minute.
14:33
I had just been born. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal for banks to require a husband's signature for a woman to get a credit card, a car loan, a mortgage or any line of credit. And before this, many banks routinely denied women.
14:53
Didn't matter. Single divorce, widowed, it didn't even matter. Even if you had a steady income, it didn't matter. So that was the year, 1974, that women really have the full power of the economic engine that we contribute to in many different ways.
15:10
Unseen labor, unpaid labor, home labor, allowing husbands to go off and earn were taking care of everything at home. That was the first year where it became available, the full power of the economic engine of capitalism became available to a woman.
15:26
And so, so many women stayed in marriages that were unhappy, that were abusive, because they simply had no other choice. And then finally, in 1981, the Supreme Court struck down any state laws because they still existed, which allowed husbands to unilaterally control joint marital property, including wages and homes.
15:52
And so that really kind of firmly established equal control over shared assets, 1981. And so the effects, the financial effects of that legacy are still very obvious today, because today, women in general, if you take all women full-time, year-round working women, we earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by men.
16:20
And it gets worse when you break it down by race and ethnicity. Asian American women actually fare a little better, 93 cents on the dollar. But there's some variation in there, because I noticed that Vietnamese women, still are at the 82 cents, Bhutanese women are at 49 cents, per every dollar that white non-Hispanic men earn.
16:45
White women, 78 cents. $0.99 on the dollar, black women, 66 cents on the dollar, Native American women, 55 cents on the dollar, and Latino women, 52 cents on the dollar. Now, it's important to note that these numbers don't control for occupation, experience, or education.
17:06
They reflect overall wage gaps. But even when we look at those factors, women still experience a significant pay gap. Often, there is discrimination, unpaid labor expectations, caregiving penalties. Maternity leave is still woefully inadequate, and a lot of systemic bias against women that comes from these thousands and thousands of years when men controlled the wealth.
17:40
Okay, so how do you spot patriarchy in action today? It's everywhere once you know what to look for. Language. Oh my gosh, this took me down a rabbit. There are so many ways that we use language that is steeped in patriarchy that we're not even aware of.
17:58
The word hysterical, right? How many women are described, oh my gosh, she's hysterical, comes from the Greek word for uterus. Do you notice how calling someone a pussy is an insult, but having balls is how we describe bravery.
18:16
An older unmarried man is a bachelor, but what do we call an older unmarried woman? A spinster or a cat lady. Men are always just mister, while women are called by their marital status, miss or misses.
18:33
Miss, MS, the designation where you don't want to disclose your marital status was a scandalous addition to the English language. What do we call somebody who runs a board, the chairman of the board?
18:46
Police men, right? Man is just, it's assumed in so many different professions. We even describe penetrative sex from the man's perspective. It's him doing the penetrating, women are just the object. There is a social theorist and activist, his name is Jason Katz, and I love this quote from his TED talk.
19:10
It's linked in the notes. Whenever there are stories told about women's sexual assault and trauma in the news, he made this really brilliant observation. We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women.
19:28
We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not how many boys harassed girls. So you can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off.
19:45
of men and boys, and on to girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It's passive construction. There is no active agent in the sentence. So men get off the hook, even in our language, for the violence that is perpetrated by them in the way that we talk about it.
20:07
Language reveals our values, and patriarchal language consistently devalues the feminine and makes women objects that are just acted on by men. There is a lot of patriarchy that shows up in our professional settings, right?
20:24
The confidence gap that a lot of women experience. That's not because women are naturally less confident. It's because we've been socialized to doubt ourselves while men have been socialized to project confidence, even when they don't have it or it's not based on anything.
20:41
When women are assertive, they're bossy. when men are assertive, they're leaders. In relationships, we've talked a lot about the mental load phenomenon, where women carry the invisible burden of managing household logistics, even when both partners work full time.
21:01
Or the way women are usually expected to be the relationship managers, the emotional regulators, and social coordinators. Again, in broad terms, there are many individual couples who have flipped this dynamic, and there are men who participate fully in the emotional load and in relationship management.
21:22
Another really, really insidious place where patriarchy shows up for us today is in healthcare. Medical research. Until 1993, this one blows my mind every time, medical studies excluded women often and used men and then just applied the results to everybody.
21:41
It wasn't until 1993 that women were required to be part of medical studies. That led to so many misdiagnoses and inadequate treatment for women. In women's pain, it is much more likely for women's pain to be dismissed as psychological or emotional.
22:04
Reproductive health is a big place where patriarchy shows up for us today. Birth control side effects that would have never been tolerated in male medications are the norm for women. And also lack of pain management medication when it comes to things like IUD insertions are the norm.
22:24
We're just expected to put up with it. The assumption that birth control is the women's job underlies all of these issues that we're talking about. It's just the woman's job to prevent pregnancy. Did you know we have had latex condoms since the and no significant developments in contraception that are available to the public until today.
22:53
That's it, the condom. Since the 1920s, that's all we got. There is a male birth control gel that is known as ADAM, the name of my first son, interestingly enough, that was created in 2015. It is still in trials.
23:10
Some internet sources cited lack of funding because it's just not that important for men to prevent pregnancy because women have got it. But here was the kicker when I was reading about ADAM. ADAM qualifies for local anesthesia.
23:27
Yeah, pain medication included. Meanwhile, female IUD insertion is largely performed without any pain relief at all and can be incredibly, incredibly painful. The last place I want to touch on is media and entertainment.
23:44
Maybe this is because I sat through the first hour of the new Mission Impossible movie and just I had to get up because while there were some examples of women in leadership, I mean the president in the movie is a woman and the naval ship commander is a woman, I realized that there's some great placement of women in decision making and power positions.
24:08
Most movies fail what is called the Bechdel test and the Bechdel test is, are there two women talking in this movie about something other than a man? Most movies fail. In Mission Impossible specifically, there was a quote unquote strong female character but she can fight, she can defend herself very well but she still looks to Tom Cruise and is like, what's the plan?
24:42
What are we gonna do? Only you can save us and I just, I just couldn't, I just could not. Female characters in movies are often defined by their relationships to men, right? And male characters are characterized or praised for the action that they take and you know, I don't know what I expected from Mission Impossible, it's really just an homage to Tom Cruise but whatever.
25:08
It was interesting to me that even in 2025, you can have a quote unquote strong female character who can punch and kill and kick and fight but she can't make decisions on her own. So the reason that all of this matters so much is that patriarchy doesn't just exist in our movies and in our financial systems and in, you know, out there.
25:32
It lives inside our bodies and our heads and we've internalized all of these messages to some degree because we were raised in this system and so in turn, The internalized patriarchy just means the way that we think on the inside about our bodies, about our abilities, about our time and energy, about our voices and opinions, and all of the limitations that we place on ourselves because we have this patriarchal system playing in the background telling us what we can and cannot do.
26:11
So much of the messaging that we get about our bodies is so that we are meeting the quote-unquote beauty standards that were set by men so that we are, quote-unquote, pleasing to look at. Notice how even body hair on men, totally fine.
26:32
On women, it's disgusting, right? That's not actually true. I'm just repeating kind of widely believed social norms. So our menstruation, we have to hide it, right? I remember my mom teaching me how to wrap up a pad or a tampon so that, quote unquote, nobody knew what it was, right?
26:50
That was really important. A lot of us still obsess about what our bodies look like. I recently talked with a group of women and so many of them talked about how often we're thinking about our body every single day, every single time we stand in front of a mirror, every time we're putting clothes on, when we're getting undressed, right?
27:09
It's almost constant. There's so much internalized patriarchy around what we think we're good at, right? About our abilities, not wanting to seem too ambitious, thinking that we should be good at caregiving when it's not something that feels effortless to us.
27:30
So a lot of those ideas, I go into more depth in other podcast episodes, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. But what I do want to highlight is that because these thoughts just feel so normal or natural, we rarely question them.
27:47
But every single one of the ways that we are taught to be small, to be quiet, to be accommodating, come from patriarchy. Those are not our thoughts. They're patriarchy's thoughts that we have inherited and we just keep thinking.
28:03
And patriarchy hurts men too. For men, internalized patriarchy shows up as believing that emotions are weak, feeling the pressure to be the providers and the protectors at all costs. That's an incredible stress.
28:18
Difficulty with vulnerability or intimacy, not knowing how they feel, not being able to name their feelings or feel comfortable with feelings. They're competitive rather than collaborative in many relationships with other men or discomfort with women in positions of authority.
28:34
Those are just a few of the ways. And for everyone, we just need to constantly be aware. that leadership is designed to favor masculine traits, but leadership doesn't equal masculine traits. Caring doesn't equal feminine weakness.
28:55
There's so much suffering that we are now doing because we have not allowed women and traditionally more quote unquote feminine traits to be a part of our governing bodies, our leaders, those who are shaping the rules.
29:13
I wanna be really clear about something. Understanding patriarchy isn't about blaming men or making anyone feel guilty for existing in the system. We are all products of it. We didn't create it. Humans created it before we got here, right?
29:26
We're all products of it and men suffer too. Toxic masculinity is literally patriarchy harming men. This is about recognizing the system that we've inherited that is not working for most of us. It's creating stress.
29:43
disconnection, inequity, and a lot of missed opportunities for everyone. When women are discouraged from leadership, we literally lose half of the potential leaders in the world. When men are discouraged from emotional intelligence, we lose half the potential healers and nurturers.
30:05
When non-binary people are forced into boxes that don't fit them, we lose their unique perspectives entirely. So what do we do with this? Take a deep breath with me. It's a lot. And I want you to just give yourself permission to feel whatever you're feeling right now.
30:27
Anger, sadness, grief, overwhelm, maybe even some relief at having some of this named. It's all valid. Learning about this can feel pretty intense. Second, just remember, awareness is the key to choice and power.
30:44
You can't transform what you don't see. And then lastly, just notice the patriarchal patterns in your own life without judgment. Where do you police your own behavior? Where do you make assumptions based on gender?
31:00
When do you value masculine traits over feminine traits? It's just something to be curious and generous about. And finally, remember that this is about progress, right? It's not about perfection. Every single time we value emotional intelligence, collaboration, anytime we are kind of bringing those quote unquote more feminine traits.
31:27
And again, that's just how they're called in our society. I really don't even like the fact they're just more traditionally assumed than I guess I can get on board with that. But just remember that patriarchy is like gravity.
31:40
It's always here, affecting everything. and unlike gravity, it's a human creation, which means we can change it. So I want you to just let yourself feel what you're gonna feel and look at small ways in your life that you can value masculine traits and feminine traits together.
32:04
You can see where your own internalized patriarchy shows up with generosity and with graciousness. There are a ton of resources in the show notes for today. I wanted you to have everything that I looked at when I was preparing this.
32:19
And if you have curiosity, you can do some more deep diets there. And I even included some books that might be interesting if you want to continue to read. As always, I love your comments. Let me know what you think.
32:31
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.
