uddhamsoto

It is generally accepted that Western (eastern as well) patriarchy has been much softened by the concepts of courtly and romantic love.
While this is certainly true, such influence has also been vastly overestimated.
In comparison with the candour of “machismo” or oriental behaviour, one realises how much of a concession traditional chivalrous behaviour represents – a sporting kind of reparation to allow the subordinate female certain means of saving face !

While a palliative to the injustice of woman’s social position, chivalry is also a technique for disguising it.
One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level.
Historians of courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women, and very little upon their social status.
As the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the romantic versions of love are “grants” which the male concedes out of his total powers.
Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western (and Eastern, as well) culture(s) and their general tendency to attribute impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a narrow and often remarkably conscribing sphere of behaviour.
It was a Victorian habit, for example, to insist the female assume the function of serving as the male’s conscience and living the life of goodness he found tedious but felt someone ought to do anyway !

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.
And convictions of romantic love are convenient to both parties since this is often the only condition in which the female can overcome the far more powerful conditioning she has received toward sexual inhibition. Romantic love also obscures the realities of female status and the burden of economic dependency.
As to “chivalry,” such gallant gesture as still resides in the middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which scarcely serves to mask the status situation of the present.

Within patriarchy one must often deal with contradictions which ale simply a matter of class style.
David Riesman has noted that as the working class has been assimilated into the middle class, so have its sexual mores and attitudes.
The fairly blatant male chauvinism which was once a province of the lower class or immigrant male has been absorbed and taken on a certain glamour through a number of contemporary figures, who have made it, and a certain number of other working-class male attitudes, part of a new, and at the moment, fashionable life style.
So influential is this working class ideal of brute virility (or more accurately, a literary and therefore middle-class version of it) become in our time that it may replace more discreet and “gentlemanly” attitudes of the past.

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One of the chief effects of class within patriarchy is to set one woman against another,
in the past creating a lively antagonism between whore and matron,
and in the present between career woman and housewife.
One envies the other her “security” and prestige, while the envied yearns beyond the confines of respectability for what she takes to be the other’s freedom, adventure, and contact with the great world.

Through the multiple advantages of the double standard, the male participates in both worlds, empowered by his superior social and economic resources to play the estranged women against each other as rivals. One might also recognise subsidiary status categories among women: not only is virtue class, but beauty and age as well.

and this is important
the chief contribution of the family in patriarchy is the socialisation of the young (largely through the example and admonition of their parents) into patriarchal ideology’s prescribed attitudes toward the categories of role, temperament, and status.

all are to be blamed, the father the mother the grandmother the grandfather the caste the system, the family system …. !
however modern or enlightened the present day parents’ grasp of cultural values is , it only goes to make a slight differences of definition in the attitudes

over a period of time,the general effect of uniformity is achieved, through various pressures and circumstances
and these are further reinforced through peers, schools, media, and other learning sources, formal and informal.
while we may niggle over the balance of authority between the personalities of various households, one must remember that the entire culture supports masculine authority in all areas of life and – outside of the home – permits the female none at all.

to insure that its crucial functions of reproduction and socialisation of the young take place only within its confines, the patriarchal family insists upon legitimacy.
Bronislaw Malinowski describes this as “the principle of legitimacy” formulating it as an insistence that “no child should be brought into the world without a man – and one man at that – assuming the role of sociological father.”
by this apparently consistent and universal prohibition (whose penalties vary by class and in accord with the expected operations of the double standard) patriarchy decrees that the status of both child and mother is primarily or ultimately dependent upon the male !
and since it is not only his social status, but even his economic power upon which his dependents generally rely, the position of the masculine figure within the family – as without – is materially, as well as ideologically, extremely strong.

although there is no biological reason why the two central functions of the family (socialisation and reproduction) need be inseparable from or even take place within it, revolutionary or utopian efforts to remove these functions from the family have been so frustrated, so beset by difficulties, that most experiments so far have involved a gradual return to tradition.
This is strong evidence of how basic a form patriarchy is within all societies, and of how pervasive its effects upon family members.
It is perhaps also an admonition that change undertaken without a thorough understanding of the sociopolitical institution to be changed is hardly productive.
And yet radical social change cannot take place without having an effect upon patriarchy.
And not simply because it is the political form which subordinates such a large percentage of the population (women and youth) but because it serves as a citadel of property and traditional interests.
Marriages are financial alliances, and each household operates as an economic entity much like a corporation.
“the family is the keystone of the stratification system, the social mechanism by which it is maintained.”

It is in the area of class that the caste-like status of the female within patriarchy is most liable to confusion,
for sexual status often operates in a superficially confusing way within the variable of class.
In a society where status is dependent upon the economic, social, and educational circumstances of class, it is possible for certain females to appear to stand higher than some males.
yet not when one looks more closely at the subject.
this is perhaps easier to see by means of analogy:
a low caste doctor or lawyer has higher social status than a poor upper caste farmer or labourer.
but the caste system which subsumes class, persuades the latter citizen that he belongs to a higher order of life, just as it oppresses the low caste professional in spirit, whatever his material success may be.
In much the same manner, a truck driver or butcher has always his “manhood” to fall back upon.
should this final vanity be offended, he may contemplate more violent methods.

the literature of the past thirty years provides a staggering number of incidents in which the caste of virility triumphs over the social status of wealthy or even educated women.
In literary contexts one has to deal here with wish-fulfilment. Incidents from life (bullying, obscene, or hostile remarks) are probably another sort of psychological gesture of ascendancy.
both convey more hope than reality, for class divisions are generally quite impervious to the hostility of individuals.
and yet while the existence of class division is not seriously threatened by such expressions of enmity, the existence of sexual hierarchy has been re-affirmed and mobilised to “punish” the female quite effectively.

the function of class or ethnic mores in patriarchy is largely a matter of how overtly displayed or how loudly enunciated the general ethic of masculine supremacy allows itself to become.
here one is confronted by what appears to be a paradox:
while in the lower social strata, the male is more likely to claim authority on the strength of his sex rank alone, he is actually obliged more often to share power with the women of his class who are economically productive;
whereas in the middle and upper classes, there is less tendency to assert a blunt patriarchal dominance, as men who enjoy such status have more power in any case.

Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family.
It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.
Mediating between the individual and the social structure, the family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient.
As the fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal society the family and its roles are prototypical.
Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which rules its citizens through its family heads.
Even in patriarchal societies where they are granted legal citizenship, women tend to be ruled through the family alone and have little or no formal relation to the state.

As co-operation between the family and the larger society is essential, else both would fall apart, the fate of three patriarchal institutions, the family, society, and the state are interrelated.
In most forms of patriarchy this has generally led to the granting of religious support in statements such as the Catholic precept that “the father is head of the family,” or Judaism’s delegation of quasi-priestly authority to the male parent.
Secular governments today also confirm this, as in census practices of designating the male as head of household, taxation, passports etc.
Female heads of household tend to be regarded as undesirable; the phenomenon is a trait of poverty or misfortune.

The Confucian prescription that the relationship between ruler and subject is parallel to that of father and children points to the essentially feudal character of the patriarchal family (and conversely, the familial character of feudalism) even in modern democracies.