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Quotes About Patriarchy

Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
Castles trump feminism every time.
~ Jojo Moyes
In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough "equality" of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.
~ Eric Foner
compensation that was often paid not to the victim herself but to her father or husband, since rape counted less as sexual violence against a woman than as a property crime against her male guardian.
~ Eric Jager
Patriarchal castration has two forms: captivity and possession. In captivity, the ego remains totally dependent upon the father as the representative of collective norms—that is, it identifies with die lower father and thus loses its connection with the creative powers. It remains bound by traditional morality and conscience, and, as though castrated by convention, loses the higher half of its dual nature.
~ Erich Neumann
Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets.
~ Beatrix Campbell
As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.
~ bell hooks
Nothing protects women from the patriarchy of military regimes.
~ Mona Eltahawy
The absence of men in the household has caused people to not know how to respond to authority with respect. There's a major problem with the patriarchs having been chased out of the house.
~ Alveda King
No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.
~ Gloria Steinem
The worst enemy women have is in the pulpit.
~ Susan B. Anthony
I do not celebrate the appointment of women to high positions in regimes where cruelty is a favored tool of governance by a patriarchy; if they accept, they are nothing short of foot soldiers of that patriarchy and the violence it has instituted.
~ Mona Eltahawy
Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
Patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet, and its essential message is necrophilia. All of the so-called religions legitimating patriarchy are mere sects subsumed under its vast umbrella/canopy. All— from buddhism and hinduism to islam, judaism, christianity, to secular derivatives such as freudianism, jungianism, marxism, and maoism— are infrastructures of the edifice of patriarchy.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
women's bodies are "inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology. For example, biologically and physiologically, women's bodies are seen as both disgusting in their natural state and inferior to men's'' (2001, p. 141).
~ Sheila Jeffreys
their bodies seemed to be a battlefield" between the values of the west, the "'capitalist' construction in which female bodies are 'sexualized, objectified, thingified' and the traditional in which women's bodies were 'chattelized,' 'propertized,' and terrorized as trustees of family (sexual) honor." (P. 524) Lama Abu-Odeh
~ Sheila Jeffreys
Caputi defines serial sex murder as 'gynocide, sexually political murder, an extreme form of terrorism in the service of the patriarchal state'. The result of this and other acts of sexual terrorism is that 'women are supposed to accept it as a "normal" , unavoidable consequence of modern life that we must conduct our lives in constant vigilance and fear, restricting our movements, staying inside at night'.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
Aunque las lesbianas tratan de imitar con servilismo las costumbres del heteropatriarcado para no parecer peligrosas, no pueden redimir su deslealtad fundamental.
~ Sheila Jeffreys
men were encouraged to punish any woman they regarded as unruly. If a woman tried to escape from a cruel or violent husband, she was considered an outlaw, and her husband had the legal right to imprison her.
~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
As Sister Joan Chittister, a direct descendant of Hildegard in the Benedictine tradition, says, the issue today is not "radical feminism," which the Vatican accuses Catholic sisters in America of, but "radical patriarchy.
~ Matthew Fox
A Goddess religion should be out in the open, not underground as it is right now. A Goddess religion would cause men to look at women differently.
~ Barbara G. Walker