Quotes About Patriarchy

Men impinged upon women without thought; another male right in a world of male rights.

As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.

Male experience is what patriarchal culture uses to represent human experience, even when it is women who most often live it.

Women's potential to disrupt patriarchy and make men vulnerable is why it's so easy for women to make men feel foolish or emasculated through the mildest humor that focuses on maleness and hints at women's power to stop going along with the status quo.

A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.

The more powerful a woman is under patriarchy, the more 'unsexed' she becomes in the eyes of others as her female cultural identity recedes beneath the mantle of male-identified power and the masculine images associated with it. With men the effect is just the opposite: the more powerful they are, the more aware they are of their manhood. In other words, in a patriarchal culture, power looks sexy on men but not on women.

The guardianship of the weaker sex has survived in the family law which still states, 'And he shall be your master.'

Marriage has been a way of attempting to ensure the replication of power and wealth from one generation of another, passing it down from men to men.

Antiracists must acknowledge that patriarchy has long been a weapon of racism and cannot sit comfortably in any politic of racial transformation.

There are cis women who are being attacked and called men because they are wearing makeup and because they are too tall, and they might have an Adam's apple. Once cis women start to realize it's not just harmful to trans women, then we'll start to come together more and attack this together. It sucks, but we're all under the patriarchy.

As I grew up and began identifying myself as a feminist, there were plenty of issues that continued to make me question marriage: the father 'giving' the bride away, women taking their husband's last name, the white dress, the vows promising to 'obey' the groom. And that only covers the wedding.

Weddings are such a microcosm of norms, of traditions, and in those traditions, there are a lot of things that have been sort of codified: misogyny and ownership and the patriarchy. So what happens when two very, very disparate families come together for one wedding?

I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.

In a patriarchal society like ours, women have to fight hard for a seat at the table. Boys are privileged over girls from birth. Equal opportunity and access for both girls and boys must become the norm.

Washing the men's clothes, caring for their rooms, serving them at table, listening to their orations, but themselves remaining respectfully silent in public assemblages, the Oberlin "coeds" were being prepared for intelligent motherhood and a properly subservient wifehood. (Flexner 1959:30)

where coercive alliances regulate societal rules, conflicts between the interests of men and women consistently end in men's favor. Patriarchy in this sense is currently a human universal.

Dominance of males over females seems to be one of the symptoms.

Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman's face is her husband's business only.

Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? ... a resounding NO: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, it's baked in.

There were many groups working for women's rights, but none of them dealt with the root cause of women's oppression-religion.

One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.

In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.

Patriarchy has been the norm in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. It has tenaciously weathered political upheavals, social revolutions and economic transformations.