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4 The construction of patriarchy: love, obligation and obedience D espite the rise of Romanticism occasionally being mistaken for its invention, the concept of love has existed in most, if not all, cultures throughout history. Yet, what particular people meant by love and how they expressed love is culturally and historically specific.1 As Michel Foucault noted, ‘every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested has a history’.2 While cultural historians, such as Irving Singer and Niklas Luhman, have attempted to describe how the meaning of love
6 The ambiguities of patriarchy: the marital economy F rom the perspective of Scottish law-makers, marriage in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was primarily understood as an economic arrangement; an interpretation that reflected the priority of the marital economy in the everyday lives of the Scottish elites. Marriages were built around the marriage contract into the nineteenth century, and unions still failed at this stage, despite disavowal of mercenary motives and the exchange of romantic outpourings. e marital economy, which encompassed not only the
6 Economic expansion and the erosion of patriarchy D uring the eighteenth century, Anglo-American law and jurisprudence changed as legal personnel became more professionalised, common law courts adopted more systematic and rationalised court procedures and women participated in the expansion of the commercial economy. The increasing formalism of Anglo-American law has led some scholars to conclude that these changes marginalised everyone but elite men from the legal process. As the power of the centralised imperial state grew, the courts increasingly excluded
I N THIS CHAPTER , I use the terms ‘sexism’ and ‘patriarchy’ to develop issues raised in Chapter 1 . In line with my earlier discussion, I will sometimes use the term ‘gender’ to discuss the experiences of ‘women’ and ‘men’ at the same time as recognising both that these are socially created categories rather than the inevitable outcome of biology, and that the categories can have very different meanings for different groups within the same society. In this context, readers should again note that the ideas discussed in this chapter were initially developed
8 Individualisation and two varieties of patriarchy and fatherhood Introduction The previous chapters illustrated that comparative social policy studies focused primarily on national variations in welfare state development outcomes. The development of ‘models’ or ‘typologies’ was illustrated to be a core feature of comparative social policy research, otherwise referred to in the literature as ‘welfare regime theory’ or the ‘welfare modelling business’ (Abrahamson, 1999). Welfare regime theory was popularised by the publication of the Three Worlds of Welfare
5 The negotiation of patriarchy: intimacy, friendship and duty I ntimacy within modern society is increasingly understood to be a mechanism for reducing inequalities of power within romantic relationships. As eodore Zeldin argues, modern intimacy is about two individuals being able to interest and stimulate each other, enabling them to grow as people, with recognition that they may not be able to fully meet the needs of each other.1 Anthony Giddens suggests that the democratisation of intimacy is well underway in modern society, with the principle of autonomy
11 Plague, patriarchy and ‘girl power’ Jane Humphries Introduction The inspiration for this chapter comes from an earlier contribution, written with Jill Rubery in 1984, which surveyed theories of social reproduction and its relationship to the economy. We argued that the family, notwithstanding its extensive responsibilities for reproducing, training and socialising future workers, had not been established as an interesting, central and dynamic variable for economic analysis (Humphries and Rubery, 1984). Instead, across the whole spectrum of theoretical
10 From women’s radical nationalism to the restoration of patriarchy (1959–62) The final stages of the war from late 1959 until early 1962 saw the most overt and radical phase of women’s nationalist activism and evident signs of the failure of the emancipation agenda to make any significant or durable impact on Muslim women. However, this apparent sign of female radicalisation proved to be illusory since at a more hidden, but potent level, it was paralleled during the final years of the war by two developments that in the long term were to carry enormous
property of man in primitive patriarchalism and the gradual shift towards milder domination (86–87) 2 Legal monogamy in Greek and Roman antiquity and religious consecration of marriage in Judaism (87) 3 Continuing patriarchy, the cultural-spiritual deepening of monogamy and the suppression of sex in Christianity (87–88) 4 Further spiritualization of marriage and the first recognition of the spiritual equality of woman in Puritanism (88–89) 5 Autonomy and equality of woman are recognized theoretically but practically given up in the
, patriarchy and inequality. But humanitarian actors should be held to high standards, because they derive their power from their claims to uphold higher values. The Charity Commission report into SCUK starts by saying that ‘[w]e trust in the selfless motive behind charity, a motive that encourages us to think about the needs and interests of others and not just ourselves’ ( Charity Commission, 2020 ). But this assertion – these good intentions – cannot be allowed to stand in for critical