GERDA LERNER'S ANALYSIS OF PATRIARCHY

Gerda Lerner's 1986 history classic, The Creation of Patriarchy, traces the development of the patriarchy to the second millennium B.C.E. in the middle east, putting gender relations at the center of the story of civilization's history.  She argues that before this development, male dominance was not a feature of human society in general.  Women were key to the maintenance of human society and community, but with a few exceptions, social and legal power was wielded by men. Women could gain some status and privilege in patriarchy by limiting her child-bearing capacity to just one man, so that he could depend on her children being his children.

By rooting patriarchy -- a social organization where men rule over women -- in historical developments, rather than in nature, human nature or biology, she also opens the door for change.

 If patriarchy was created by culture, it can be overturned by a new culture. 

Part of her theory, carried through into another volume, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, is that women were not conscious that they were subordinate (and it might be otherwise) until this consciousness began slowly to emerge, starting with medieval Europe.

In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove on "Thinking Aloud," Lerner described her work on the subject of patriarchy:

"Other groups that were subordinated in history -- peasants, slaves, colonials, any kind of group, ethnic minorities -- all of those groups knew very quickly that they were subordinated, and they developed theories about their liberation, about their rights as human beings, about what kind of struggle to conduct in order to emancipate themselves. But women did not, and so that was the question that I really wanted to explore. And in order to understand it I had to understand really whether patriarchy was, as most of us have been taught, a natural, almost God-given condition, or whether it was a human invention coming out of a specific historic period. Well, in Creation of Patriarchy I think I show that it was indeed a human invention; it was created by human beings, it was created by men and women, at a certain given point in the historical development of the human race. It was probably appropriate as a solution for the problems of that time, which was the Bronze Age, but it's no longer appropriate, all right? And the reason we find it so hard, and we have found it so hard, to understand it and to combat it, is that it was institutionalized before Western civilization really, as we know it, was, so to speak, invented, and the process of creating patriarchy was really well completed by the time that the idea systems of Western civilization were formed."

https://www.thoughtco.com/patriarchal-society-feminism-definition-3528978

https://www.amazon.es/Creation-Patriarchy-Women-History/dp/0195051858