Unpacking Patriarchy's Impact on Childhood

"Wait, whaaaat?" (I can hear you thinking this now, as you're reading the title for this episode.) When I think of patriarchy, I usually think of a powerful guy in a suit. He's always White. He probably works in government or maybe high up in a corporation. He's part of The System, which is just The Way Things Are Done - and he's never going to listen to me. There's really not much I can do to impact this system. And patriarchy isn't good for any of us. It's not difficult to see how it represses women and any non-straight, White, hetero-presenting male. But the research base is also pretty clear that it harms men as well, by denying them the opportunity to express any emotion other than anger, which is linked to all kinds of both mental and physical health problems. But it turns out that a big part of perpetuating the patriarchal system is how women interact with men, as well as how we raise our children. And, suddenly, changing the patriarchal system becomes something that I can directly impact - and so can you. Listener Brian Stout and I interview the preeminent scholar in this field, Dr. Carol Gilligan, who is co-author (with Naomi Snider) of the book Why does patriarchy persist? In this episode we focus on the background information we need to understand what patriarchy is and how it impacts us, and in a future episode Brian and I return to discuss the implications of these ideas for the way we are raising our children. If you'd like to subscribe to Brian's newsletter, where he discusses issues related to Building a World of Belonging, you can do that here.   Dr. Carol Gilligan's Books: 

Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy's Resurgence and Feminist Resistance 

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 00:01:26 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. It's hard to know even where to begin on today's topic, which is patriarchy. Now, before you think to yourself, come on, Jen, aren't you overstepping your bounds a little bit here or maybe even am I listening to the right podcast? If you're seeing this topic as a bit of a non-sequitur with the kinds of issues that we normally discuss on the show related to parenting and child development, then I'd really encourage you to sit tight because this topic has everything to do with those things. I'm so honored that today we have an incredibly special guest to help us understand more about this topic and that's Dr. Carol Gilligan. I'm pretty sure there's a group of my listeners for whom Dr. Gilligan needs no introduction because they probably read and loved her work when they were in college, but for the rest of us, Dr. Gilligan received her Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from Swarthmore College, a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Her 1982 book In a Different Voice is widely regarded as a landmark and following her research on women and girls development, she began to study young boys and their parents as well as the relationship between men and women. Dr. Gilligan taught at Harvard for more than 30 years and is now on the faculty at New York University where she co-teaches a seminar on resisting injustice. That was the impetus for her most recent book. This was coauthored with one of her students Naomi Snider, and it's called, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Welcome Dr. Gilligan.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:02:47 Oh, thank you, Jen. My pleasure.   Jen: 00:02:49 And joining me today is the listener who's brainchild this episode was Brian Stout. Brian holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Amherst College and a Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins and he has a background in foreign policy, conflict prevention and international development. Brian's been exploring his role in dismantling patriarchal systems for some time now. So today we're going to explore what patriarchy is and why it matters to us as parents and then Brian and I are going to be back very soon in a second episode to think through, okay, now we know more about this. What do we as parents do about it? Welcome Brian.   Brian: 00:03:24 Thank you. I'm honored to be here.   Jen: 00:03:26 All right, so maybe we should start at the beginning. Dr. Gilligan I'm a reasonably well educated and widely read person and I'm really not sure I could have accurately defined what patriarchy is until I'd read some of your books and so I knew it was about men and I knew it was not really a good thing, but can you enlighten us a bit more and just give us a working definition, please?   Dr. Gilligan: 00:03:46 Well, you know, it's interesting because I myself, I mean I think I would have said what you said until I was doing research with girls actually and following girls from when they were beginning elementary school, six, seven years old, really through to 17 to the end of high school. And as they reached adolescence, I saw girls resisting something that was in a sense forcing them to make a choice, which the more articulate or the shrewder girls among them saw was a very problematic choice, which was do you want to have a voice? Meaning do you want to keep on being able to say what you feel and think and know or do you want to have relationships, in which case, you have to basically learn what other people want you to say rather than saying what you feel and think. And I thought this was--you could see it it was not visible, it was untangible but very palpable.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:04:49 And I had to think what is the force? And then I realized it's a force that takes human capacities. Things we all share as humans, boys, girls across the gender spectrum and divides them into either masculine or feminine. So if I said to you, what is the mind? You'd probably say masculine or what is reason that's masculine? Or what about emotion? Well, that's feminine. What about the self? That's masculine. What about relationships? That's feminine. But this makes no sense from a human perspective. So basically there was a tension between human development, which is what I study and something that was in the world that was dividing human capacities into either masculine or feminine and then privileging the masculine. And I thought, that's patriarchy and patriarchy that's when I got interested in because otherwise people sort of, their eyes glaze over and they think, Oh, it's some anthropological term about ancient tribes or it's about hating men.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:06:04 Actually, once I had seen this with girls, I thought, well wait a minute, aren't boys up against a similar force that says to a boy if you act or says, that's not how boys should be because boys don't cry. And you know, boys are kind of, they don't show kind of tender feelings. That's kind of girly or maybe gay. And so it's when children are suddenly up against a force that tastes their human capacities and divides them into either masculine or feminine and privileges the masculine ones. And that's patriarchy. So whenever you encounter that splitting reason versus emotion, the mind versus the body, the self versus relationships that privileges reason and mind and self over, you know, that's patriarchy. So that's how it came into my work. And I saw children resisting it and I said, is the healthy body resists infection? The healthy psyche resist patriarchy.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:07:09 I mean that's a sort of simple way of putting it. And I saw children resisting it and as graduate student at Harvard who worked, did the study with me where we followed little boys from pre-kindergarten to kindergarten and into first grade. She did that as her dissertation. Her name is Judy Chu and she's now written this beautiful book called When Boys Become “Boys”, meaning how boys are often said to be, but it's not really how boys are. And you could see these four-year-olds as they turned five and then six beginning to shield themselves and not show those qualities that would lead them to be seen as girly or gay. And you know, meaning their sensitivity and their emotional and intelligence really. So if you hear of a man described as emotionally clueless, I mean the question has to be what happened to this person? Because none of us start this way.   Jen: 00:08:08 Yeah. It seems as though these qualities, these masculine qualities are really privileged in a way, right? And it ends up elevating some men over other men. So it ends up elevating masculine men over gay men or any person not identifying as cisgendered male and even men of non-dominant cultures as well as of course all women.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:08:28 That's exactly right. It elevates some men over other men and all men over women. Right. So that's why usually it's women who start to speak up against this, but it's not a woman versus man problem. It's a culture versus human problem.   Jen: 00:08:46 Yeah. I think I remember Toni Morrison saying something about that. She said, “The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy.” It's not that we're saying, you know, men bad, men are evil, men need to stop doing these things. It's the idea of patriarchy, the system that we're working within that's not working for us.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:09:02 Well, yeah, I totally agree with Toni Morrison. I would say exactly the same thing. And it's the force that pushes men toward violence and that demands from women's silence. So in a certain sense, you know, it's intention with men's ability to use words rather than force. And I mean for women it's one of my girl in one of my studies said she was 17 she was a senior, she was the valedictorian of her class. She'd gotten into every college she wanted to get into. She said, “If I were to say what I was really feeling and thinking, no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud.”   Jen: 00:09:43 Yeah. I remember that quote from, I think a couple of your books.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:09:46 And which we have to realize is this was rewarded by the educational system. I mean, in other words, because she said what other people wanted her to say. In other words, she became the person other people wanted to be with rather than being herself.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:10:02 I mean, she was promoted, elevated, accepted and so forth. So these are real things in the world. Like the boy who was perceived as girly or gay gets often not only teased by other boys but beaten up and insulted and called not a real boy or not one of the boys and not included among the boys. And in a society where men are seen to be superior then that boy is regarded as inferior. That boy is shamed. We're not talking about some abstract thing. If you spend time as I did, you know, with girls at the time of this initiation, which is, you know, nine, 10, 11 moving into adolescence and these boys between four, five and six, you see it. I mean parents see it and we've called it growing up, but it's more accurately described as an initiation into a culture that elevates some human beings over other human beings and really is damaging to all human beings in that sense because it keeps everyone from being fully human.   Brian: 00:11:11 Carol, one of the things I loved about the title of the book, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? is that it begs the question or assumes that it didn't always, that perhaps there was a system before patriarchy. And so I'd love to invite you to speak a little bit about what you see as the origins of patriarchy. I know from some of your earlier writing, you've talked about Roman times and how sort of the systems of patriarchy came about. And I think maybe the other thought to name here is we understand that these systems intersect with White supremacy, with other legacies of oppression. And so we'd love to hear maybe just a bit of your thoughts on how do patriarchy come to be to the extent that we know eight thousand ten thousand years ago. I know this is not a perfect science, but I'd love just to hear your thoughts on how the system came about in the first place.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:11:56 Well first of all, let me just say that, you know, patriarchy elevates some voices over other voices. And so the opposite of patriarchy is democracy. And the thing about democracy is it's based on an ideal of equal voice where everyone has a voice. And if you have equal voice, then you can deal with conflicts in relationships rather than by the use of force or domination. So the other thing is to say that as human beings, we're all born with a voice. I mean if you are around babies, I mean even before language, babies have the capacity, they have a voice, they can communicate what they're feeling to other people. And so as human beings, we're all born with a voice. And also as all the evidence now is really adding up and showing we’re also born almost practically from birth with a desire to engage responsively with other people.   Dr. Gilligan: 00:12:53 So we're born with a voice and with a desire to live in relationships. So we're born with basically the requisites for democracy. So why does patriarchy exist? I mean, why does it exist and why does it persist and that, you know, you raise the issue Brian, because if you want to elevate one group of people that say White people over people of color or straight people over gay people or people from the West over people from let's say other parts of the world, then these relational capacities of humans are in the way. I mean the person on top will feel the feelings of the person on the bottom and the person on the bottom will have a voice and will start to say, I don't like being treated as inferior. So patriarchy exists at the point where you want to create and maintain structures of oppression, structures of inequality, White privilege, racism, sexism, homophobia. I mean you can in any way of dividing humans into some are superior and some are inferior and it's antithetical to democracy. So it's at the point where you want to set up a system that's not democratic and some people trace it to the beginnings of agriculture where there's private property involved. And some scholars you can certainly see heightened Rome, how the Republic gave way to the empire and it was at that point that you could see democracy giving way to patriarchy.   Jen: 00:14:29 Brian, I want to just quote, I want to raise your Game of Thrones quote. Do you want to say it or do you want me to?   Brian: 00:14:37 No, go ahead.   Jen: 00:14:38 So you quoted Tyrion Lannister. It’s not often we quote Game of Thrones on the show so I don't want to let it slide. Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones said, “It's easy to confuse what is with what ought to be, especially when what is has worked out in your favor.” And so it seems to me as though it's kind of like White privilege. I mean it's essentially is White privilege. If you're on top, if you're part of that privileged group then you don't even see it. The systems are there and they exist and you operate within them and nobody I think explicitly designed them or maybe they did I’m kinda thinking this on the spur of the moment, but they are designed in such a way that the people who sit within them don't have to examine their role within them. They just get to take advantage of the privilege that they have. What do you think about that?   Dr. Gilligan: 00:15:21 Well, what I'm thinking is the window that I had into all of this is I was studying child development and so for example, one of the surprises of the work that my graduate students and I did, this was the Harvard project on women's psychology and girls development, and it really was the first project that connected women's psychology with studies of girls and following girls development. And we were mostly a group of women and we were surprised at how in a sense how outspoken girls were. I mean how strong their voices are is a wonderful story of an eight-year-old. We called our eight-year-olds whistle blowers in the relational world. And there was an eight-year-old who we called Diana and she said that she felt bad because every night at the dinner table when she tried to speak, her brother and sister interrupted her. And this is what Diana said, stealing her mother's attention. I think of that as sort of relational crimes and misdemeanors, stealing someone's attention. So the interviewers said, was there something you could do? And Diana said, “I brought a whistle to dinner.”   Dr. Gilligan: 00:16:36 And every time they interrupted me, I blew the whistle. At which point they stopped talking and turned to me. And I said to them, she said, this eight year old in a nice voice, “that's much nicer”. So these children were really reading what was going on between people and naming it and taking action when relationships they felt bad because they were being ignored or not listened to or excluded or whatever. They would do something about it. So that's actually, I mean, in terms of psychological health, what we know now is relationships are not steady state. They're like the tide, they go in and out. We lose touch, we move in and out of touch with ourselves and with other people really all during the day and so forth. The key to relationship is when you lose touch, do you know how to find the other person again?   Dr. Gilligan: 00:17:33 Can you repair the rupture? And what we saw is that those abilities are present right from the beginning. And it was children's resistance to losing these capacities to basically, you know, to have a voice that live in relationship that was making us aware there was a force in the world that was basically putting pressure on them to do so. So I'll tell you about the work with little boys and what the surprise was there with the four-year-olds and this is Judy's work and it's so beautifully observed. It's in her book When Boys Become Boys, because what struck her with four-year-old boys, the pre-kindergarten boys was how attentive, how articulate, how authentic and direct they were in relationship with one another and with her. I mean I thought one four-year-old said to his mother, “Mama, why do you smile when you're sad?”   Dr. Gilligan: 00:18:31 So he's reading not only what she's presenting, but the feeling that's hidden behind her face, if you can think about it that way. And from four the boys moved from pre-kindergarten through kindergarten into first grade, Judy saw them becoming gradually less attentive, less authentic, less articulate and more indirect with one another and with her. And...