Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression (Feminist Classics) by Delphy Christine

Author:Delphy, Christine [Delphy, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

* First published in Questions Féministes, No. 1 (1977). The first English translation was by Linnie Price, mimeo 1978.

8.Patriarchy, feminism

and their intellectuals*

The term ‘patriarchy’ was little used until the early 1970s, i.e. until the renaissance of feminism in western societies. The term was, however, part of everyday language, but it was used principally in the form of the adjective ‘patriarchal’. It was above all literature, and particularly the literature of the nineteenth century, which made it familiar. The human sciences, in contrast, ignored it, and still ignore it for the most part.

Curiously, authors such as Bachofen, Morgan and Engels, whose evolutionist vision of the history of human societies rests on the very dubious presumption of an original matriarchy which was later ‘overturned’, did not consider it useful to call the stages which followed this overthrow ‘patriarchal’. And when Marx uses the word it has the same atemporal, in a word poetic, connotations as are found when it is used by Victor Hugo. This adjective for them, as for almost all authors who use it, has an eminently positive connotation. It is generally followed by the word ‘virtues’, and the greatest patriarchal virtue is ‘moral simplicity’. In what do these ‘simple’ morals consist?

On examination, we find the poets who speak of patriarchal ‘virtues’ evoking the same sort of society as those sociologists who, like Tönnies and Durkheim at the beginning of the century, got excited about Gemeinschaft (olden communal society) and ‘organic solidarity’, in contrast to Gesellschaft (modern, atomized society) and ‘mechanical solidarity’. In the same way contemporary anthropologists, generally marxists, are inclined to oppose primitive societies (which are supposedly classless and with no exploitation) to modern stratified and exploitative societies. These oppositions, more or less clearly mythical, nevertheless all say the same thing. They show a nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of humanity, based on consensus and not conflict. This utopia is directly associated for them with an image of a human group where family organization is simultaneously the principal concrete base and the model for all social relations.

These myths – whether they are recognized as such or credited with an appearance of science – all reveal the same belief: that peace, social cohesion and the absence of hierarchies between ‘classes’ – meaning between men – require that familial hierarchy, which is good and natural (good because natural, in fact called natural because judged good) be established and accepted.

The introduction of the noun ‘patriarchy’ and its widespread use, however, are due to the feminist movement of the 1970s. And the feminist movement introduced this term not on the literary or the university scene, but in the place where such movements must situate themselves: on the political scene. Before the new feminism,1 the term ‘patriarchy’ had no explicit meaning, and above all no explicitly political meaning. This is not surprising. It is of the nature of patriarchy – as of all systems of oppression – to deny that they are such. Thus feminists in some ways invented the term, in the frequent and favoured use they give it, and above all in the role they had it play.

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