The Persistence of Patriarchy in History Matters
Julia Adams
(Yale University)
Judith Bennett’s History Matters is an analysis of how feminism and the discipline of
History came together in the 1970s, to great effect, but then drifted apart. It is a call for
more feminism in History and more history in feminism. It is theoretical and practical; it
offers us deep history and contemporary urgency. History Matters is a wonderful book. It
is also disturbing. The main argument is that the subordination of women has persisted,
relatively unchanged, over centuries, and perhaps longer. It has not changed or eroded.
The book has many other facets, some of which are canvassed in this symposium. In this
short comment, however, I explore the underpinnings of the book’s overarching claim.
Bennett deploys two interlocked concepts -- patriarchy and equilibrium – to suggest, if
not an answer, then at least a way to respond productively to this big question. By
patriarchy, she means a general system by which women are subordinated to men. That
seems a reasonable starting place for analysis and research. But what about equilibrium?
There are several distinct concepts tacitly operating in the book, I think, and explicitly
distinguishing them will be helpful. One is equilibrium as continuity – let’s call this
Equilibrium One. An excellent illustration is the maintenance of relatively fixed sexspecific wage differentials between women and men in the English brewing industry
between 1300 and 1700 (History Matters, pp.105-6). When she wrote her famous work
on the brewsters, Bennett interpreted their particular history in a more optimistic light.
She now considers them a case study of enduring continuity in women’s relatively
disadvantaged status.
Bennett insists on this notion as a corrective to some Anglo-American historians’
whiggish insistence on there having been – and continuing to be – a beneficent historical
transformation in the position of women over the longue duree. As an historical
sociologist, I recognize as an analogue my own discipline’s investment in modernization
theory, with its embedded assumptions about the inevitability of national and
international progress (for further discussion, see Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005).
Modernization theory flourished in mid-twentieth century America, but it is far from
dead. In fact it has recently made a comeback in some interesting and strongly argued
books touting the gradual equalization of women’s worldwide status (see Robert Max
Jackson; Norris and Inglehart). History Matters may be thought of as the diametrical -and for feminists, gloomy -- opposite of such texts.
Of course equilibrium can mean more than mere continuity, particularly if it involves
some social process that produces a stable outcome. Any recursively-structured bundle of
processes and institutions would fill the bill. With respect to gender arrangements, two
noted examples that come to mind are the systematically complementary sex/age relations
characteristic of the prototypical mid-twentieth-century middle class American family
described by Talcott Parsons (1955), and the modern state’s role in reproducing gender
hierarchy, as envisioned by radical feminists like Catherine Mackinnon (1989). The
alternative meaning of equilibrium that characterizes both of these lines of thinking – think
of it as Equilibrium Two – entails a patriarchal structure that is reproduced insofar as it
serves particular societal functions.
Finally, there is Equilibrium Three, as when Bennett writes about equilibrium as an
outcome or upshot of actors’ having completed some process of optimizing their wants,
desires, or goals. This concept of patriarchal equilibrium involves more agency; the status
quo is underpinned by multiple and many-leveled individual bargains. Bennett adopts
and extends Deniz Kandiyoti’s (1988) work on ‘classic patriarchy’ in sub-Saharan Africa
and the Muslim Middle East to include all “gender bargains” that signal “how women
strategize within the constraints of any patriarchal regime”, creating “strategic
opportunities for women” and “investing women in patriarchy” (59). Although History
Matters draws on, and fluctuates among, all three understandings of equilibrium, this third
concept is in my reading the most important one.
Patriarchal equilibrium in this third sense is a pervasive state of affairs, according to
History Matters. It seems to span all of human history, up to the present day. It certainly
structures the academy and academic knowledge. For example, it includes present-day
historians, now that the feminist scholarly movements of the 1970s and 1980s have failed
– perhaps, in Bennett’s view, were bound to fail -- and the field of History reasserted its
own patriarchal equilibrium. Bennett envisions today’s feminist historians making the
best of this unfortunate situation, and striking a “patriarchal bargain” with respect to
contemporary history textbooks that will at least get some of their – i.e. women’s and
gender history -- story told. She ponders and hopes for “a sort of artisanal marriage
between women’s history and master narratives” (137) that themselves remain
relentlessly ungendered.
In the face of such major problems, why bother with this conceptual dissection of
‘equilibrium’? First of all, I think it’s important to pin down the precise dimensions of
the claim about what persists and what changes. If we do that, we can better tell whether
“patriarchy” is or isn’t being reproduced or undermined. We can then say whether
specific empirical observations, like male/female wage ratios, are in any way related to
patriarchal patterns, actions or principles. Are they indices of one underlying structure or
system? Why or why not? How do we know? These are big epistemological questions,
and it won’t surprise you that I am not going to try to answer them here.
Second, we should recognize that the concept of continuity as persistence (Equilibrium
One) is logically subordinate to the question of what persists and why (Equlibria Two and
Three), such that indices of continuity may or may not bear on the question of
patriarchy’s persistence. Take Bennett’s important example of female-male wage
differentials, the male-female wage gap. I’m not in any case ready to agree with her
empirical claim about the persistence in women’s relative wage deficit within a relatively
narrow band, for the spread in women’s wages is much different, and much more
differentiated, than it was in medieval England. But let’s imagine for a moment that
Bennett is right, and the wage gap is more or less the same today as it was in medieval
England. Even if so, this wouldn’t tell us how or why. It is not prima facie evidence of a
singular and persisting patriarchal system, or even of a variegated and intermittent one.
So while we consider further exploring Bennett’s very big claim about the ‘fundamental
persistence of patriarchy’, therefore, we must simultaneously ask what it would require
to rigorously examine, sustain or dismiss it.
Let me raise another important question relevant to this collective intellectual enterprise,
one involving patriarchy and history. How far should the concept of patriarchal
equilibrium be extended? I confess that I see real ‘cons’ to such an expansive concept of
patriarchy. How can one expand or extend the concept of ‘father rule’ to include ‘unequal
outcomes flowing from equal bargaining’? The mechanisms are not the same; the roles of
actors differ, particularly in modern, post-medieval, systems in which the exchange of
resources (economics) and the wielding of authority (politics) are disaggregated, and one
doesn’t necessarily entail the other. I am hard put to see them as the same thing.
Perhaps that is why there is real ambivalence in the book on this point. On the one hand,
Bennett draws in all of recorded history, across the globe. There are outstanding women,
to be sure, whom Bennett believes should be better recognized, but they don’t dislodge
the fundamental synchronic stasis. On the other hand, Bennett is careful to mark local
differentiations across time and space, to recognize diachrony as something more than the
shift between one order and the next – in which latter case we would all still be located in
the stage of pre-history to women’s equality.
So if there are internal differentiations, what are the important ones and why? Even if she
doesn’t want to use ‘patriarchy’ to denote systems built on father-rule and cultures of
paternal control, I wonder whether Bennett would agree that women’s emergence from
such systems in the western societies highlighted in History Matters, and into more
autonomous statuses paralleling men’s, constitutes an important historical break point. Is
patriarchy finally, in some parts of the world, eroding or being overthrown, or is this shift
just ‘froth’ on some more basic Braudelian waves of history? Or would Bennett argue
that such a change has happened, but is in the process of being re-enfolded in continuing
subordination, in a sequence of slightly remodeled patriarchies? If so, why? What would
be the explanation, or even the materials for an analysis?
With these important questions, we seem at first to be back in the most recent era of
debates among liberal, radical, socialist feminists. But some things have changed since the
1970s. We can now also draw on a variety of approaches, not simply Marxist or liberal or
radical but culturalist and psychodynamic approaches; advances in behavioral economics;
new methods of historical and social research; our ever-expanding knowledge of the nexus
between biology and the social, and who knows what else to come.
And we also have Judith Bennett’s stimulating book, and larger work, to hand, to help us
confront these questions and problems anew. For that I am very grateful.
References
Adams, Julia, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff. 2005. “Introduction: Social
Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology,” pp. 1-72 in Remaking
Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Judith. 2006. History Matters. Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
----- 1999. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World,
1300-1600. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris. 2003. Rising Tide: Gender Inequality and Cultural
Change around the World. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, Robert Max. 1998. Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women’s
Status. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1988. “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society, vol. 2 #3, pp.
274-290.
MacKinnon, Catherine. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Boston, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Parsons. Talcott. 1955. “The American Family: Its Relations to the Personality and
Social Structure,” in R. F. Bales and T. Parsons, Family, Socialization, and Interaction
Process. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.