Adrienne Rich
THE KINGDOM OFTHE FATHERS
For the first time in history, a pervasive recogmtlon is
developing that the patriarchal system cannot answer for itself; that it
is not inevitable ; that male fear and animosity towards women can no
longer be either denied or defended. And when we acknowledge
this , we tear open the relationship at the core of all relationships, in
its tangle of lust , domination , violence, possession, fear , divisions of
labor , sexual longing , sexual hatred, and the sexual understructure of
social and political forms . For the first time in history we are in a posi–
tion to turn and look at the country of the fathers and see it for what
it is and has been. What we see is the one system which recorded
civilization has never actively challenged and which has been so uni–
versal as to appear a law of nature .
Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial, social, political
system in which men-by force, direct pressure , or through ritual ,
tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the
division of labor-determine what part women shall or shall not play
and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male.
It
does not necessarily imply that no woman has power or that all
women in a given culture may not have certain powers . Among the
matrilineal Crow, for example , women take major honorific roles in
ceremony and festival, but are debarred from social contacts and
sacred objects during menstruation . Moreover , where women and
men alike share a particular cultural phenomenon , it implies quite
different things according
to
gender. As Hannah Papanek has noted,
"Where men wear veils- as among the North African Tuareg-this
remoteness serves
to
increase the status and power of an individual,
Copyright
©
1976 by
Adrienne
Rich
