Quotes About Patriarchy

After much diligent research, aided by other women, I gradually came to understand that beneath the familiar Goddesses of the patriarchy, there is a much more ancient Goddess.

The women's movement will present a growing threat to patriarchal religion less by attacking it than by simply leaving it behind.

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh' (Genesis 2:24 NRSV). This radically upside-down statement would have shocked the original readers of Genesis and should shock us too. I don't know of any culture where men are depicted as clinging to their wives. Certainly within a patriarchal world, this is getting things backwards. There the wife leaves her parents and is absorbed into her husband's family.

Jesus didn't come to give us a kinder, gentler patriarchy or a new-and-improved version of any other social system known to humankind. In his own words, he came to bring a "kingdom that is not of this world" (John 18:36, emphasis added)—the kingdom we lost in the fall, a kingdom that is utterly foreign to us.

Jesus firmly and consistently reinforced human equality by spending a lot of time in the margins of society, most notably in relationships with women. He didn't simply bring relief and comfort to the down and out. He engaged, recruited, and mobilized for his kingdom people who didn't count for anything in the eyes of society or of religious leaders. His interactions with women violated patriarchal propriety and repeatedly shocked his disciples.

I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

The male sex still constitute in many ways the most obstinate vested interest one can find.

Patriarchy is impotent and qualitatively unable to solve even the most simple problems in the cosmos such as picking up their own socks or placing a carton of milk back in the refrigerator after drinking from it.

Submissive men, men who desire to serve as consensual slaves, are on one of the most difficult journeys in the world today, because they have rejected patriarchal privilege and embraced their own heart's calling instead.

Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman.

The common law of this state held man and wife to be one person, but that person was the husband.

There must be an authority, and we believe that the most qualified authority in a household is the man's.

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

In an earlier part of your history, you lived on this planet in a matriarchal society. Then there was a shift, and the patriarchy emerged. When you made that shift, you moved away from expressing your emotions. You labeled it "weak" to do so. It was during this period that males also invented the devil, and the masculine God.

It went on like that till some guys got together and came up with the one-god thing—him being God, the Father, and male and all that—and things went downhill for girls ever after that, far as I can figure. It was always, 'Get in your dress, girl, your smock, your shift or your burnoose or your veil, but whatever it is, girl, put it on and shut the hell up,' is how I see it.

Man fucks woman, subject verb object.

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining "respectability

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.

Men are liked better when they win. Women are liked better when they lose. This is how the patriarchy is enforced every day.

It seems more hopeful to talk about what came before patriarchy--and could show us a way beyond it.

People nod at the idea that when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women's birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, elaborate concepts of Heaven and Hell didn't seem to exist before patriarchy;

the design of many patriarchal religious buildings resembles the body of a woman. Think about it: there is an outer and inner entrance (labia majora, labia minora) with a vestibule between (an anatomical as well as architectural term) and a vaginal aisle up the center of the church to the altar (the womb) with two curved (ovarian) structures on either side. The altar or womb is where all-male priests confer everlasting life—and who can prove that they don't?

In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory In

Patriarchy in all its forms is still about controlling reproduction, and thus the bodies of women, which is why invading a female body is still less likely to be punished by law than invading private property.