Top 100 Quotes About Patriarchy
#1. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy - enforced through the rights of the firstborn son - has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.
Hanna Rosin
#2. Patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all
even as we forge different individual choices within them
just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.
Gloria Steinem
#3. Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?
Bell Hooks
#4. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.
Bell Hooks
#5. The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
Toni Morrison
#6. Force, punishment, and violence are patriarchy's answer to conflicts and social problems. Patriarchy finds its ultimate expression in war.
Starhawk
#7. In using terms like patriarchy, hermeneutics, and sexual/textual, I do not wish to misrepresent the Qurn as a feminist text; rather, the use of such terminology shows my own intellectual disposition and biases.
Asma Barlas
#8. I think what's been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that's really what's going on everywhere.
Eve Ensler
#9. Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.
Roxane Gay
#10. The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.
Phyllis Schlafly
#11. Because patriarchy uses redemptive theology to legitimate itself, all believers who embrace the redeemer complex are accessory to the master scheme of domination.
John Lamb Lash
#12. Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As
Kate Millett
#13. By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.
Simone De Beauvoir
#14. Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.
Bell Hooks
#15. Women's potential to disrupt patriarchy and make men vulnerable is why it's so easy for women to make men feel foolish or emasculated through the mildest humor that focuses on maleness and hints at women's power to stop going along with the status quo.
Allan G. Johnson
#16. When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers.
Audre Lorde
#17. Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power
Andrea Dworkin
#18. I will outlaw bullshit. After the passage of this law the patriarchy will inevitably start to crumble as will the concept of war itself which is largely a large load of bullshit.
Roseanne Barr
#19. In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy.
Marilyn French
#20. Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society.
Ani DiFranco
#21. Judaism is one of the last of the world's matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don't spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey.
Roseanne Barr
#22. Patriarchy is women structuring lifelong decisions around men they haven't met.
Maggie Young
#23. Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.
Roseanne Barr
#24. Patriarchy is bestowed on men at birth. Whether you want it or not, you have a privilege as a man, and you either fight against it and reject it by becoming a feminist man, or you enjoy the privileges that come with it.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
#25. Creation myths are not about the origins of the world at all, but about the origins of patriarchy which has claimed itself as the world
Jane Caputi
#26. I feel sometimes with boys that the tyranny of patriarchy has had a much more devastating blow on boys than it has on anyone. Because they have literally been forced to disassociate from their hearts.
Eve Ensler
#27. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.
Lierre Keith
#29. Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.
Sue Monk Kidd
#30. The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world.
Shereen El Feki
#31. There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy.
Taiye Selasi
#32. Boys need healthy self-esteem. They need love. And a wise and loving feminist politics can provide the only foundation to save the lives of male children. Patriarchy will not heal them. If that were so they would all be well.
Bell Hooks
#33. I think what's happening in the world - there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded beast, and the patriarchy is wounded.
Jane Fonda
#34. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.
Bell Hooks
#35. Women are rising. And I think that's all the violence and war - it could be the last gasp of the patriarchy, actually.
Jane Fonda
#36. Patriarchy is not God's dream for humanity.
Sarah Bessey
#37. To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
Bell Hooks
#38. Some people are surprised that the Republicans are waging a war on women, or that they voted against equal pay for women. I'm not surprised at all. In some ways, it may be a good thing. They're defending the patriarchy, which is a wounded beast! And wounded beasts are always dangerous.
Jane Fonda
#39. He came to see, and I did too, that patriarchy wounds men also, that men have their own journeys to make in order to heal and differentiate themselves from it.
Sue Monk Kidd
#40. Recognition of the harm that patriarchy has caused to people and the planet does not mean that men are wrong and women are right; rather it is a call for new organizational forms and for relishing gender differences within a context of equality.
Elizabeth Lesser
#41. Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.
Sue Monk Kidd
#42. To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.
Malebo Sephodi
#43. There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism - it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.
Terry Tempest Williams
#44. Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.
Bell Hooks
#45. Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.
Timothy Morton
#46. Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.
Isabel Allende
#47. Peace in patriarchy is war against women.
Maria Mies
#48. They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it.
Michael Moorcock
#49. Overturning patriarchy does not mean replacing men's dominance with women's dominance. That would merely maintain the patriarchal pattern of dominance. We need to transform the pattern itself.
Petra Kelly
#50. The enemy of feminism isn't men. It's patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality.
Justine Musk
#51. But whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.
Maggie Nelson
#52. In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.
Alanis Morissette
#53. The God who hates trees is the founding father of patriarchy.
John Lamb Lash
#54. I wish she'd said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can't hide from it, not even here.
Raquel Cepeda
#55. At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert ... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages.
Heather Hart
#56. What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.
Bell Hooks
#57. At the center of the way black male selfhood is constructed in white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the image of the brute - untamed, uncivilized, unthinking, and unfeeling.
Bell Hooks
#58. If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way
Eve Ensler
#59. As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.
Allan G. Johnson
#62. It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.
Gloria Steinem
#63. When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
#64. Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.
Kate Millett
#65. If every planet in the Patriarchy refused to be ruled, we all would be free.
Joan Slonczewski
#66. Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralising.
Christina Hoff Sommers
#67. The fundamental imbalance that is behind all of the other social diseases is patriarchy.
Ani DiFranco
#68. The curse that was laid upon Eve
her desire would be for her husband, and her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied
even shows us how patriarchy, subordination, and pain are part of the Fall. They were never God's original intent; they are a consequence of sin.
Sarah Bessey
#69. Reproductive freedom is a real danger for the patriarchy, because it means that women are empowered.
Jane Fonda
#70. So I remember both medicine, because I frequently sick, particularly with asthma for which there was no proper treatment then, and in religion I had a strong sense of there being a patriarchy.
Thomas Keneally
#71. Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.
Kate Middleton
#72. This strong female presence was remarkable in the aggressive patriarchy of Mecca and may explain why women were among the first to respond to the message of the Qur'an.
Karen Armstrong
#73. But benevolent patriarchy is still patriarchy.
Sue Monk Kidd
#74. Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women's working harder.
Bell Hooks
#75. The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women's shame.
Laurie Penny
#76. The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.
Nawal El Saadawi
#77. There needs to be more women scholars, and that is not something new, we need to return to the glorified past and get more women scholars involved to overcome the Fetahs of patriarchy.
Mark Durie
#78. We're witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It's already happening. And I think that the good news is that it's coming just in time.
Leonard Shlain
#79. How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself ... ?
Dalma Heyn
#80. Rap comes from the humble beginnings of rebelling against the status quo. Now, rappers have become the status quo themselves. You can't rebel against the Queen and then become the Queen yourself. I attribute much of the blame to testosterone-male dominance and patriarchy.
Chuck D
#81. Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.
Charlotte Bunch
#82. And the answer is, of course, "Ugh, patriarchy.
Emily Nagoski
#83. That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#84. You are not going to destroy this imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it,
Bell Hooks
#85. Olympus is still a patriarchy. Zeus heads his royal household as jealously as Jehovah rules his harem of dull, harp-playing angels. Both are templates for order on earth, don't you think?
Cliff James
#86. But I do have conversations about the Patriarchy and I am having them with gay men. At eighteen, I am discovering what generations of women have long known. The natural ally of the straight woman is the gay man because they are others losers too.
Caitlin Moran
#87. If you're in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination - even though you understand it intersectionally - you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that's what is needed to change the situation.
Bell Hooks
#88. What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.
Camille Paglia
#89. that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge.
Virginia Woolf
#90. A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.
Kate Millett
#91. I knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.
Michael Eric Dyson
#92. Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself ... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.
Gloria Steinem
#93. Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying.
Gloria Steinem
#94. After much diligent research, aided by other women, I gradually came to understand that beneath the familiar Goddesses of the patriarchy, there is a much more ancient Goddess.
Carol P. Christ
#95. Especially on television, it's not so much a patriarchy; it always seems that there's a smart, strong woman calling the shots, and her doofus husband. In the sitcom world, it's almost a cliche that the women have the common sense, going back to 'The Honeymooners.'
Jake Weber
#96. Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off.
Eve Ensler
#97. Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance.
Ani DiFranco
#98. One of the key things about the entitlement and power of patriarchy, but also within feminism, is not that it's wilful nastiness. But you can't ask for permission. You can negotiate and you can bring people on board and you can build a base but you can't expect for it to be given.
Rachel Holmes
#99. If patriarchy had a specific beginning in history, it can also have an end
Maria Mies
#100. Sexual abuse of children now presents society with the ultimate crisis of patriarchy, when children refuse to protect their fathers by keeping secrets.
Beatrix Campbell
