Equality Within Patriarchy Ain't Possible + LIVE with Lorissa Rinehart Today
LIVE @ 2pm CST with Lorissa Rineheart of Female Body Politic
“It’s not always enough to ‘lean in’. Because that shit doesn’t work all the time.…the onious shouldn’t always be on the woman alone to fix things, fix herself. Instead, it needs to be acknowledged that something bigger is broken. Society at large.”
~ Michelle Obama.
Join us today at 2pm CST here on Substack for our next deep dive with of The Female Body Politic. We will be talking a lot more about this concept with her understanding of women’s movements in history.
As for the title…it is not click bait. Here’s why.
I find I am often not the popular voice in the crowd.
I just don’t see things like most people.
I usually see through the veil quickly.
I am usually on the fringe, alone in my view points.
I usually am a whistleblower.
For example, as I scrolled through Threads last night watching thousands and millions of people stand up for this country…I noticed 3 things:
Most of the people protesting that I saw on camera were white. This led me to this next thought…
Where were all of these millions of people when it came to civil rights and woman’s rights protests in the past 100-150 years? Is our level of comfort as a society is that we can allow racism and sexism…but when it comes to fascism…that is where we draw the line?
Perhaps the most gut wrenching was seeing several protests sing “This is My land, this is our land…” and my heart going staight to “but its NOT our land…we, our ancestors brutally STOLE IT. That is our legacy…and this song is proof of the colonialism propogranda that we are fighting!”
A brave Native soul refelcted my internal struggle with this sentiment:
This is really beautiful in some ways. But as a Native person, this song just hurts. It echos our erasure. It confirms just how many are still not awak.
Nothing will change until we lead again. Nothing.
@kellylynnedang on Threads
And I know I might not be popular with what I have to say about “Equality” fights…read on to decide for yourself.
WINTER 2012
My Christian faith in God, in the salvation Jesus provided had crumbled the weekend of Labor Day 2012.
The final straw that broke the camels back was reading
The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.
It showed me that my body via my womb had been controlled by the State, Relgions and man for some 6000…but never by me. I never had had 10000% body autonomy.
Side Note: This Wednesday’s video release will be a deeper dive into my own conversion (since I was “not save” growing up) at 19 to deconversion at 35 (working title “From Hell to Holy to Holy Hell) and how I led myself out of that Holy Hell via Lerner’s work.
YET THE BIGGEST THING THAT STRUCK ME AND STILL STRIKES ME?
Without a clear undestanding of how we got into the System of Patriarchy — and what that System even entails — people are missing this fact:
We cannot make equality happen within the System of Patriarchy.
“It should be noted that when we speak of relative improvements in the status of women in a given society, this frequently means only that we are seeing improvements in the degree in which their situation affords them opportunities to exert some leverage within the system of patriarchy….Reforms and legal changes, while ameliorating the condition of women and an essential part of the process of emancipating them, will not basically change patriarchy. Such reforms need to be integrated wihtin a vast cultural revolution in order to transform patriarchy and thus abolish it.”
~ Gerda Lerner in “The Creation of Patriarchy” published 1986
Bold emphasis mine
Equality within the system of patriarchy will never be equality.
BECAUSE it is still within the System of Patriarchy.
The system is set up to uphold a “paternalistic dominance", patriarchal family where the male is the head of the household and the womb is his to control.
“(paternalistic dominance.) The term describes the relationship of a dominant group, considered superior, to a subordinate group, considered inferior, in which the dominance is mitigated by mutual obligations and reciprocal rights. The dominated exchange submission (sexual service) for protection, unpaid labor for maintenance. In the patriarchal family, responsiblities and obligations are not equally distributed among those protected: the male children’s subordination to the father’s dominance is temporary;….The subordination of female children and wives is lifelong….the relationship frequently continues in fact and law, even when the male partner has defaulted on his obligation.”
Gerda Lerner in “The Creation of Patrarichy.”
This “paternalistic dominance” may be less noticable in our modern culture…but the long arms of this ideology are still entwined within our social structure at large.
As we learned in episode 1 “Patriarchy’s Origin Story” — the System of Patriarchy is deeply reliant on the patriarchal family to structure itself. After learning to control the womb and then institionalize the womb as a commodity into law, the patriarchal family structure came second out of the 10 ideologies that built the System of Patriarchy.
From there, for 6000 years, laws and cutlural norms have overtly and covertly codified this structure in a million LITTLE and big ways.
➤ Biblical laws & early Christian doctrine:
Women, in particular their wombs, were considered the property of their fathers or husbands (Exodus 20, Numbers 30, Ephesians 5). The marriage was a “business contract” to gaurantee the man exclusive rights to the woman’s womb. Women’s value was determined by virginity, obedience, and ability to bear children — cementing the idea that Gerda Lerner repeatedly shares: woman’s worth/class is tied to her sexual relationship to a man…while a man’s worth/class is tied to his means of production.
➤ Coverture laws (medieval Europe through 20th-century America):
Upon marriage, a woman legally ceased to exist as a separate entity. She could not own property, enter contracts, or keep her wages. If she did any paid labor, that wage was her husbands by law. Her identity was absorbed into her husband’s — and thus the practice of taking the male’s surname. These laws were the reason women couldn’t vote or get credit cards in their own names until the mid-20th centurty. In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 in America, when women FINALLY could have a business loan without a male co-signer. While these laws might have been replaced by new laws, their legacy are still quietly playing out in our Cultural DNA that I talk about all the time in our Season 1 “Foundations to Deconstsructing Patriarchy, History & Myth”.
➤ U.S. tax code and Social Security benefits:
To this day, marriage bonuses and spousal benefits reward patriarchal families and penalize non-patriarchal families. While there is often a bonus for marriages where one earns more than the other, there are still slight penalities for couples who earn relatively the same. Source here
➤ Divorce law and custody biases:
Historically, divorced women were denied custody, any property or legal status. In fact, it wasn’t until 1969 they could even initiate divorce. Eventually women were awareded custody and child support as long as they remained sexually and socially respectable. Even now, divorce mothers are more likely to fall into poverty — due to unpaid caregiving for months or years; difficulty securing work after taking time off for kids/families; ongoing wage gaps and reduced promotion chances; reduced retirement contributions and many more. Please note: all of these are also culmunative effects on women’s lifetime income possibilities — something I only recently became aware of in my late 40s reading ’s work with “Own Your Ambition.”
➤ Workplace discrimination against single/divorced women:
Unmarried women are often seen as “less stable” or “less committed” in corporate hiring. Mothers, especially single ones, are penalized with lower pay and fewer promotions—what’s called the “motherhood penalty”—while fathers often benefit from the “fatherhood bonus.” Important to note: while the motherhood penalty studies working mothers, it unfortunately doesn’t go as far as studying those mothers that have left paid work to be stay-at-home moms and what it is trying to return to paid work — a topic near and dear to my heart since this is where I land.
➤ Public assistance systems (e.g., 20th-century U.S. welfare):
Aid programs were historically designed to reward women who conformed to patriarchal family roles—e.g., being married, staying home, or proving they weren’t “sexually immoral.” Single mothers had to prove “worthiness” to get help, reinforcing shame and dependence.
Trying to force equality within the System of Patriarchy is simply giving women more handcuffs without keys.
Equality IS NOT liberation within Patriarchy. Instead, it’s a sleight of hand, a magician’s trick: distract us with shiny progress while the cage stays locked and the warden hides the key behind his back.
Equality is like repainting the walls of a prison and calling it a home — making the system harder to recognize while we’re still locked inside it.
Equality within a system that reads “women=men”
will NEVER be equal.
Society has always punished women for stepping outside the patriarchal family structure becuase it NEEDED women to comply in order to survive. Whether it’s through doctrine, law, or social norms, women are disciplined into compliance. Praised when they conform, penalized when they don’t.
mentions this in her latest book “Women. Money. Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality.” where she shows how single/divorced women over the course of their lives will still pay more in “penalities” on their wages than married women.“Yes single women…may take home bigger paychecks. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into being weathier. Across America today, dozens of laws today provide explicit legal or financial benefits to married couples….Marrital priveleges prevade almost every part of daily life — from when we obtain an insurance policy to when we rent a home….(In a 2013 research project conducted by Onely.org) crunched the numbers for an article in The Atlantic….the authors concluded that over a lifetime the lower earning fictional woman would pay what is in effect a penalty of $484,368 for being single, while the higher earning unmarried female would pay $1,022,096. And those figures were based on conservative figures.”
Josie Cox
Women. Money. Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality; chapter 7
Trying to gain women’s rights from an “equality” stand point is starting from the top down, instead of from the roots up.
This is why women’s movements have failed time and again.
Why women lose ground, lose their history and forget to pass on to the next generation of women the to-do list.Because aiming for equality within a system NEVER meant for us, within in a system that is built on this false narriative that “women are 2nd sex”…it can never make us equal.
SO WHAT THEN?
To be honest, I don’t know exactly. I don’t have all the answers, and will not pretend I do.
Yet, I know it has something to do with the transformational education on this channel and YouTube is a start.
And with stories. Because stories is where it all started and starts.
The road map I am preaching is this:
Become aware of how patriarchy’s ideologies weaseled its way into all our stories, myths, history, laws, courts and social norms — and thus individual and collective psyches — until we couldn’t and often still cannot untagle this tangled web.
Once we identify these ideologies, expose them. Weed them out of our own inner psyche. When enough of us are doing this individually, we will start to change collectively.
Doing the above allows us to have a wider angle lens of both the past and thus the present.
With that wider angle lens we rewrite the past, our stories and our present with a NEW SYSTEM in mind. Stories that take all that we know from science, religion, psychology and somatics; combine it with the empathy of heart centered inclusivity; and structure it with matrifocal/matrilenial (I talked about this at the beginning with Daniel Bilog here) that will bring more equality and partnership.
So while yes, women have gained some financial and legal ground, all things are still not equal.
They never can be as long as the equation always means “equal to men”.
We need a different system that doesn’t need an equation between us.
That’s the only way true equality will ever happen.
After reading this…what are your true and unadulterated thoughts on equality within patriarchy?
Your voice matters: Please take less than 30 seconds to share your “Deconstructing Patriarchy” needs …please don’t leave me hanging!
LIVE TODAY Monday, 6/16 at 2pm CST with Lorissa Rinehart of “The Female Body Politic”
Listen in to last week’s live with Daniel Bilog "Why Men’s Work is Vital for a Feminist Future”.
LIVE next Monday 6/23 at 2pm CST with Bonnie Marcus of “Own Your Ambition”
Season 2 later this Fall. Working title: “Descent, Resurrection, and the Sacred Feminine: Inanna, Jesus, and the Rewrite of Power.” We will dive into what historians miss when they don’t understand “The Creation of Patriarchy”'; what religion stole and stripped from Feminine based worship; why modern day religions don’t work for most people and so much more!
Know of anyone that needs this educational medicine? S
end ‘em this page: Start Here!
Excellent work!!!
Thanks for the shout out and for all the important work you do.
I look forward to our live session on 6/23.