PATRIARCHAL HIERARCHIES - DO WE NEED THEM?

"You seem to miss the irony of yourself, a white, middle class, descendent of Great Britain defending women against nonexistent threats!"

Said Robert in a comment on my last post which was a satiric comedy clip 'Welcome to Britannia'.

This got me thinking as I was perusing Mary Becker's treatise 'Patriarchy and Inequality: Towards a Substantive Feminism' as you do when indulging in some light reading over a cup of tea on a sunny morning.

Becker proposes that both formal equality and dominance analysis are empty at their core of any values that might threaten patriarchy. It is relational feminism, with its valuation of caretaking, relationships, and empathy, that has the potential to improve well-being for women, children, and men. 

She identified patriarchy, meaning a male-centered, male-identified, and male-dominated social system, as the source of continuing inequality between women and men. 

The first and most important step to be taken, she suggested, is to step back far enough to view the big picture: the patriarchal social structure. Becker believes that today, the constitutional standard is part of the problem, with its narrow idea of inequality as occurring in isolated rules or policies but unfortunately, this notion has come to dominate popular and cultural notions of inequality. The first task must therefore be to change the popular understanding of equality and inequality between the sexes. 

The second is also cultural: to make it possible to at least criticise the current electoral structure as complicit in replicating patriarchal hierarchies she concluded.

Of course this was just a summary and, as I said I was merely perusing. If you like I can download, copy and paste the entire essay which I'm sure you readers, particularly Robert will find most interesting and challenging.

Anyway, I like Eleanor Morton. Here's another one of her clips.