The term ‘patriarchy’ appears constantly — in social media captions, corporate diversity statements, and the language of political parties across the spectrum — yet it is almost never explained. Most often it functions as a synonym for ‘bad attitudes towards women’, as though the problem were a cultural mood that better education and more enlightened men might eventually correct. This evasion is not accidental. When patriarchy is reduced to a set of unfortunate prejudices, the structural analysis it was built to carry is discreetly discarded.
It did not begin with the second wave
The insight that women’s domestic labour serves male interests through the institution of marriage — and is not a natural or freely chosen way of life — is older than the women’s liberation movement. Eighteenth‑century writers such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft were already describing marriage as a hard bargain in which women were effectively sold into dependence on men, some even calling it a kind of ‘legal prostitution’. In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued in Women and Economics that marriage was an economic arrangement in which women’s reproductive and domestic service was exchanged for material survival, and that the romantic framing of that arrangement was precisely what made it so durable. The second wave did not invent this analysis. It inherited it, tightened and sharpened it, and gave it the political framework it needed.
The cage
Marilyn Frye’s 1983 essay ‘Oppression’ offers the most precise image we have for why patriarchy is invisible to those not constrained by it. Look closely at a single wire of a birdcage, she wrote, and you cannot understand why a bird would be confined: the wire is thin, the bird could fly around it. It is only when you step back to take in the whole cage — the network of wires, each bracing all the others — that the structure and its power become visible.
Women’s lives under patriarchy work the same way. No single wire explains the pattern. It is the interlocking of workplace discrimination, male sexual violence (or just the threat of it), economic dependence, domestic labour, reproductive control, and cultural objectification that constitutes the cage. This is why Frye insisted that oppression is a macroscopic, not a microscopic, phenomenon: it cannot be seen from close up, one incident at a time. It requires stepping back far enough to see the whole.
Four structures, not one
Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971) argued that women’s oppression is produced by four distinct, semi-autonomous structures: paid work, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialisation of children. Because they are semi-autonomous — moving at different rates, in different directions — progress in one area rarely produces the transformation that seems promised. Women’s mass entry into the paid workforce from the 1960s onwards did not dissolve the other structures. The sexual division of domestic labour largely survived it. Rates of male violence did not fall. And the socialisation of children into gendered patterns continued.
Mitchell’s framework explains (with perhaps uncomfortable precision) the pattern of the last five decades: real gains in one area, absorbed and compensated for by structures left untouched.
Contract as the mechanism
Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) made the argument that liberal political theory has always suppressed: the social contract — the founding story of civil freedom and equality — has a hidden other half. The sexual contract establishes, alongside civic rights for men, men’s political right over women. Modern patriarchy is not paternal: it is fraternal, the shared claim of men as a class. And its instrument is contract itself: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract all appear as free agreements between equals while being constituted by, and reproducing, an order in which one party enters already as a subordinate.
“Contract”, Pateman writes, “is the means through which modern patriarchy is constituted”, not its opposite.
Adaptation is a characteristic of patriarchy
These frameworks were developed between 1898 and 1990. None of them has been superseded, because the system they describe has not been dismantled. What has changed is the form it takes.
Where patriarchy once operated through explicit legal exclusion, it now operates through softer mechanisms: cultural norms that shape women’s aspirations; economic structures that penalise caregiving; legal frameworks that offer formal equality without accounting for the material conditions in which women exercise it. One of the most effective contemporary adaptations is the co-optation of feminist language itself. ‘Neoliberal feminism’ — that is, feminism reduced to individual women’s advancement within existing structures — leaves all of Mitchell’s structures intact while appearing to support women’s progress.
A second adaptation concerns the displacement of sex-class analysis by identity-based frameworks. If ‘woman’ is redefined as whoever self-declares as one, the category that makes structural analysis possible dissolves. The cage remains. The wires are simply described differently.
Why the word is still relevant
Patriarchy names a system, not a collection of bad actors. It says: this is structural; it is reproduced through institutions, contracts, and ideology; and it will not be resolved by the good intentions of individuals, however many of those individuals happen to be women.
When we at AAWAA argue for female-only spaces, we are arguing against one of Mitchell’s structures. When we oppose surrogacy and prostitution, we are arguing against Pateman’s sexual contract — the extension of men’s sex-right through new contractual forms. When we resist the redefinition of ‘woman’ as a matter of self-declaration, we are insisting on the category without which the structural analysis cannot be conducted at all.
The analysis has not changed because the structure it describes has not been dismantled. Until it is, the word is indispensable.
Further reading
- Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700)
- Mary Wollstonecroft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898)
- Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970)
- Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (1971)
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970)
- Ti‑Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (1974)
- Marilyn Frye, Oppression (1983)
- Christine Delphy, Towards a Materialist Feminism? (1979) and Patriarchy, Domestic Mode of Production, Gender and Class
- Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, (1987)
- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)