Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 51

The root that Sarachild and Morgan identified was patriarchy; something defined by Sylvia Walby as “a system of interrelated social structures which allow men to exploit women” (Walby 1986, p. 51). bell hooks later elaborated on these ideas:

Patriarchy is a political‐social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

(hooks 2004, p. 18)

More than just the vague notion of male privilege, patriarchy describes the everyday practice of sexism and, as Bryson (2003) notes, the word became shorthand for male domination and female subordination. The aforementioned Redstockings – a radical feminist group founded in 1969 by Sarachild, Shulamith Firestone, and Ellen Willis – made it clear that their movement was distinct from what had gone before. Radical feminists were breaking away from Marxist understandings of class and from the socialist promise of liberation once capitalism is overthrown⁴; something they articulated in their manifesto:

Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives… Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition … We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination

(in Morgan 1970, p. 598.)

Patriarchy is identifiable throughout social structures and institutions. In the workforce, it is apparent in the gender pay gap, in men's dominance in science, technology, engineering, and math professions, and in women's disproportionate occupation of caring careers like nursing, aged care, and teaching. In political life, patriarchy is evident in male dominance of elected office, in legislation restricting women's reproductive rights, in law and order, in rape myths, and in the infrequent prosecution of sex offenders. In personal relationships, patriarchy is witnessed in women's disproportionate burden of housework and child‐raising, and in women's career interruptions. In intimate relationships, patriarchy manifests in boys' and men's sexual expectations and the orgasm disparity. Patriarchy is also effortlessly identifiable in mass media through the premium placed on beauty, on femininity, on youth, and increasingly on sexiness (Rosewarne 2007, 2017). Globally, son preference, the authority of patriarchal churches and, in turn, the harmful cultural practices and honor crimes inflicted on the bodies of women are also examples.

Violence against women became a central focus of the movement and, as addressed later in this chapter, an area where radical feminism has left a legacy on theory and practice.