Abstract
In 1977, Rich (2016), then 48 years old and recognized for her talents and daring, published “Mother-Right,” one of her searing poems about patriarchy. She writes, “The man is walking boundaries measuring…He believes in what is his.” (p. 497)
In 2002, Gilligan accepted a full-time position at New York University and published The Birth of Pleasure. There she used the word “patriarchy” for the first time and established “a radical geography of love” as her great theme (Gilligan & Snider, 2018, p. 114). By that time, Richards had published 11 of his books (now over 20 in number) including Studies of Women, Gay Men and Lesbians, and The Constitution. Not surprisingly, they became collaborators, team-teaching a class (Resisting Injustice) at NYU Law School, and writing The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (2008). 1 Both of these 2018 books are indebted to that class and its students. Naomi Snider, the co-author of Why Does Patriarchy Persist? enrolled in fall 2014.
Both 2018 books should matter to wide audiences: practicing therapists and their clients, academics and their graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers who care about gender and the world. Why Does Patriarchy Persist? is the more seamless—a dialogue between a teacher and a student who became a colleague. Its focus is the more psychological. One of its intellectual heroes is John Bowlby (1907–1990), the British child psychiatrist and theoretician of attachment and loss.
Blending much of the earlier work of Gilligan and Richards, Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance is the more political. One of its intellectual heroes is Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the political philosopher. Another is the Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) who wrote Three Guineas in 1938, an account of patriarchy in a time of Fascism and war and a defense of the anti-Fascist values of justice, equality, and liberty.
Gilligan and Richards published The Deepening Darkness in the teeth of the Second Bush presidency. They launch Darkness Now Visible at the maw of the Trump presidency, which they call contemporary patriarchy and fascism. Yet neither book separates psychology from politics. Both map the psychology of patriarchy and of resistance to it. Because patriarchy is so toxic, the “psychology of patriarchy” is more accurately the “pathology of patriarchy,” the “psychology of resistance” more accurately the “psychological and political necessity of resistance.” One difficulty of resistance is that patriarchy is so much with and within us that it seems invisible, a “ghost,” as a student writes in the Gilligan/Richards law school class. However, Trump is stridently “The Big Daddy.” His misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and contempt for the rule of any law except his own are overwhelmingly there. We must see patriarchy—as if we had finally put on night vision goggles.
The definition of patriarchy, familiar from Second Wave feminism, is that of an old, common structure that organizes gender into a binary, hierarchical system. We label human capacities as either masculine or feminine and privilege the masculine. We “elevate some men over other men and all men over women” and then we “split” the self. Men get to be autonomous, but women are to be selfless and “serve men’s needs” (Gilligan & Snider, 2018, p. 6).
Children are sacrifices who must be initiated into patriarchy. These books do not offer extensive historical or anthropological accounts of such initiations, but Gilligan and Richards call on a range of literature to support this claim. In addition to Bowlby and Gilligan’s own studies of adolescent girls, the authors include theoreticians of the ethics of care, such as James Gilligan on male violence and Niobe Way and Judy Chu on boys. The initiation is a trauma, not a joyous dance into maturity.
Girls learn to disavow their capacities for telling the truth and exercising their own voice. Interestingly, very little or nothing is said about the particular experiences of lesbian girls and women. Boys learn how to detach from and “betray” their real feelings and convictions (Gilligan & Richards, 2018, p. 27). They fear that their connections to other boys will be “girly” and gay. How pertinent is Gertrude Stein’s (n.d.) remark, “What is the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man?”
Gilligan and Richards are careful to note other cruel structures of power. They stress that their focus on gender in no way “discount(s) or diminish(es) the importance of race and class, sexuality, religion, or any other…division of humans into the superior and the inferior, the touchables and the untouchables” (Gilligan & Richards, 2018, p. 2). We dwell at intersections.
However, gender is a major part of that. Given the miseries of patriarchy, its persistence is baffling. In part, patriarchy survives because it is “culturally scripted and socially rewarded” (Gilligan & Snider, 2018, p. 30). Moreover, it strips us of our ethical intelligence. We become dulled to the differences between fact and fiction and to the injustices meted out to ourselves and others. Rendered so barren, we are stumblebums in acting against them. Moreover, if we do love, we can suffer the loss of love. Love makes us vulnerable. But patriarchal psychology, with a dreadful efficiency, steels us against love and, voila, against the pain of the loss of love. It is a historical heartache, heartbreak.
Part of the moral attractiveness of Gilligan, Richards, and Snider is their hope. For we are born into a more benign state of nature. Take that, Thomas Hobbes. Potentially we are relational beings with the capacity for both voice and listening, empathetic, and co-operative. This makes us able to engage in democracy. Democracy depends on human talents for “equal voice and responsive engagement” (Gilligan & Snider, 2018, p. 119). Since we are resilient, “…repair is always possible, loss is never irrevocable” (Gillian & Snider, 2018, p. 143). Because this is who we are, patriarchy cannot eliminate the “seeds of resistance” within us (Gillian & Snider, 2018).
The psychological flowering of these seeds is love. A political flowering is feminism, which both men and women can join, as well as such linking movements as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Women Wage Peace.
The last words of Rich’s (2016) “Mother-Right” are: “…child and mother are running the boy singing the woman eyes sharpened in the light heart stumbling making for the open.” (p. 497)