1. This is a fascinating discussion and I thank you much for the thoughtful critique.
I'm in agreement about the type of shared labor organization of yore that might emerge when post-industrial conditions become a thing.
It doesn't follow from that that they must revert to a condition in which the husband is the wife's lord and master, is pretended to be more intelligent and moral than she, and will have sole control of their cash income and life decisions.
My best guess on why that type of patriarchy was so commonplace in the past,
(a) has to do with the same reason that elective monarchies so often end up turning into hereditary monarchies. If a civil war erupts every time a king dies and half the country is left in ruin, it becomes very logical to observant people that having a means of passing down rights of succession that doesn't involve endless debate, intrigue, and bloodshed, might prove to be a safer and more expedient method. Even if this means the son of the king is a complete idiot or is morally depraved. Of course there were notable exceptions to this rule (like perhaps the Celtic Druidic societies where elective kingship held on for a long time), but I digress. Now on the level of the individual household, anyone who has experienced unresolvable arguments between husband and wife knows how "hellish" that situation can be, and potentially devastating to the whole household and family. Thus the expediency issue comes into play again; if one party de jure has the final say, then crippling stalemates can be avoided and everyone can move on with the next round of business. There's likely other factors involved here, but that would go way off on another tangent.
(b) what I like to call "hyper-patriarchy" is something I see as being the legacy of the Ages of Aries, which began around 2300 BCE, give or take a century or two. During that age things like Fire, Burnt Offerings, Blood Sacrifices, Horse-aided Warfare, Warfare in general, Metal-smithing, ect. were the main motifs. Warlike nomadic pastoralist tribes ended up conquering, assimilating and bludgeoning the snot out of most other peoples. Under this new social order we started to see the role/position of women denigrated and in some cases women being treated like chattel slaves. This became as far cry from the earlier Age of Taurus societies, where men were officially in charge (probably for the reasons stated in the above point) but women were generally had a lot more rights and were seen as being just as valuable as men. Aries social arrangements carried over into the next Age, Pisces, though with some modifications. How things will shape up in today's "New Age," Aquarius is anyone's best guess, though this age does seem to involve traits like idiosyncrasy and the tolerance of differentiation, which seems like something that doesn't play well for extreme conformism and people being boxed into rigid roles and expectations.
2. Defining "feminism" is something that might take a 30,000+ word dissertation to fully flesh out. As there have been different versions/waves of it, each of them asserting very different ideas. So we're talking then about feminism in the plural form.
My husband preferred to define feminism as "the radical notion that women are people."
Hah, I like to call that the "Motte and Bailey" re-definition of terms for the sake of momentary convenience. It's the same gimmick the believers and proponents of various ideologies use to make their favored ideology sound more palatable to the average person. Just like how some Socialists might utter, "Y'know, Socialism is simply the idea that workers are people too!!" (When in fact, we know it's much more than that!!!) Instead, I like to judge ideologies by what the well-known activists and public intellectuals who self-identify as the label-in-question have to say, and what their goals and aims of being involving in ___ism happen to be. So back to the idea of feminism in the plural form. One might ask how the feminism of Annie Bessant differs from the feminism of Andrea Dworkin. And how either of those feminisms differ from the feminism of Camille Paglia. Or the feminism of Anita Saarkesian. You get the general idea here.
It so happens that I was always too weak to think of doing most traditional "men's work", but smart enough to be very good at intellectual labor. It was feminism that gave me the freedom to attend college, be hired for a job requiring education, and write (under my own name yet), which women in more patriarchal centuries rarely or never had. Oh, yes, and the freedom to vote and own property. That sort of feminism, I am vehemently unwilling to lose, and see no reason why the decline of industry means that I should.
3. I would argue that it was mostly the industrial revolution and its myriad labor-saving technologies, conveniences, and massive expansion of bureaucratic/managerial office work, that did away with most excuses for excluding women from non-brawny jobs. That, and Corporate America's push to depress wages across the board (as I talked about in some comments above) by flooding the workplace with a ton of additional labor that hadn't been there before (Big Business must have learned from WWII that women could do all sorts of jobs in a satisfactory manner). Sure, the early waves of feminism helped speed the process along, but I think most of the credit here goes to cheap fossil fuels and its technologies. If none of that happened, most women would still be working on their home farmsteads.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-07-18 06:12 pm (UTC)I'm in agreement about the type of shared labor organization of yore that might emerge when post-industrial conditions become a thing.
My best guess on why that type of patriarchy was so commonplace in the past,
(a) has to do with the same reason that elective monarchies so often end up turning into hereditary monarchies. If a civil war erupts every time a king dies and half the country is left in ruin, it becomes very logical to observant people that having a means of passing down rights of succession that doesn't involve endless debate, intrigue, and bloodshed, might prove to be a safer and more expedient method. Even if this means the son of the king is a complete idiot or is morally depraved. Of course there were notable exceptions to this rule (like perhaps the Celtic Druidic societies where elective kingship held on for a long time), but I digress. Now on the level of the individual household, anyone who has experienced unresolvable arguments between husband and wife knows how "hellish" that situation can be, and potentially devastating to the whole household and family. Thus the expediency issue comes into play again; if one party de jure has the final say, then crippling stalemates can be avoided and everyone can move on with the next round of business. There's likely other factors involved here, but that would go way off on another tangent.
(b) what I like to call "hyper-patriarchy" is something I see as being the legacy of the Ages of Aries, which began around 2300 BCE, give or take a century or two. During that age things like Fire, Burnt Offerings, Blood Sacrifices, Horse-aided Warfare, Warfare in general, Metal-smithing, ect. were the main motifs. Warlike nomadic pastoralist tribes ended up conquering, assimilating and bludgeoning the snot out of most other peoples. Under this new social order we started to see the role/position of women denigrated and in some cases women being treated like chattel slaves. This became as far cry from the earlier Age of Taurus societies, where men were officially in charge (probably for the reasons stated in the above point) but women were generally had a lot more rights and were seen as being just as valuable as men. Aries social arrangements carried over into the next Age, Pisces, though with some modifications. How things will shape up in today's "New Age," Aquarius is anyone's best guess, though this age does seem to involve traits like idiosyncrasy and the tolerance of differentiation, which seems like something that doesn't play well for extreme conformism and people being boxed into rigid roles and expectations.
2. Defining "feminism" is something that might take a 30,000+ word dissertation to fully flesh out. As there have been different versions/waves of it, each of them asserting very different ideas. So we're talking then about feminism in the plural form.
Hah, I like to call that the "Motte and Bailey" re-definition of terms for the sake of momentary convenience. It's the same gimmick the believers and proponents of various ideologies use to make their favored ideology sound more palatable to the average person. Just like how some Socialists might utter, "Y'know, Socialism is simply the idea that workers are people too!!" (When in fact, we know it's much more than that!!!) Instead, I like to judge ideologies by what the well-known activists and public intellectuals who self-identify as the label-in-question have to say, and what their goals and aims of being involving in ___ism happen to be. So back to the idea of feminism in the plural form. One might ask how the feminism of Annie Bessant differs from the feminism of Andrea Dworkin. And how either of those feminisms differ from the feminism of Camille Paglia. Or the feminism of Anita Saarkesian. You get the general idea here.
3. I would argue that it was mostly the industrial revolution and its myriad labor-saving technologies, conveniences, and massive expansion of bureaucratic/managerial office work, that did away with most excuses for excluding women from non-brawny jobs. That, and Corporate America's push to depress wages across the board (as I talked about in some comments above) by flooding the workplace with a ton of additional labor that hadn't been there before (Big Business must have learned from WWII that women could do all sorts of jobs in a satisfactory manner). Sure, the early waves of feminism helped speed the process along, but I think most of the credit here goes to cheap fossil fuels and its technologies. If none of that happened, most women would still be working on their home farmsteads.