106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting (Part 1)

"Wait, whaaaat?" (I can hear you thinking this now, as you're reading the title for this episode.) When I think of patriarchy, I usually think of a powerful guy in a suit. He's always White. He probably works in government or maybe high up in a corporation. He's part of The System, which is just The Way Things Are Done - and he's never going to listen to me. There's really not much I can do to impact this system. And patriarchy isn't good for any of us. It's not difficult to see how it represses women and any non-straight, White, hetero-presenting male. But the research base is also pretty clear that it harms men as well, by denying them the opportunity to express any emotion other than anger, which is linked to all kinds of both mental and physical health problems. But it turns out that a big part of perpetuating the patriarchal system is how women interact with men, as well as how we raise our children. And, suddenly, changing the patriarchal system becomes something that I can directly impact - and so can you. Listener Brian Stout and I interview the preeminent scholar in this field, Dr. Carol Gilligan, who is co-author (with Naomi Snider) of the book Why does patriarchy persist? In this episode we focus on the background information we need to understand what patriarchy is and how it impacts us, and in a future episode Brian and I return to discuss the implications of these ideas for the way we are raising our children. If you'd like to subscribe to Brian's newsletter, where he discusses issues related to Building a World of Belonging, you can do that here. Dr. Carol Gilligan's Books: 

Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy's Resurgence and Feminist Resistance 

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love

[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen: 00:01:26 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. It's hard to know even where to begin on today's topic, which is patriarchy. Now, before you think to yourself, come on, Jen, aren't you overstepping your bounds a little bit here or maybe even am I listening to the right podcast? If you're seeing this topic as a bit of a non-sequitur with the kinds of issues that we normally discuss on the show related to parenting and child development, then I'd really encourage you to sit tight because this topic has everything to do with those things. I'm so honored that today we have an incredibly special guest to help us understand more about this topic and that's Dr. Carol Gilligan. I'm pretty sure there's a group of my listeners for whom Dr. Gilligan needs no introduction because they probably read and loved her work when they were in college, but for the rest of us, Dr. Gilligan received her Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from Swarthmore College, a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Her 1982 book In a Different Voice is widely regarded as a landmark and following her research on women and girls development, she began to study young boys and their parents as well as the relationship between men and women. Dr. Gilligan taught at Harvard for more than 30 years and is now on the faculty at New York University where she co-teaches a seminar on resisting injustice. That was the impetus for her most recent book. This was coauthored with one of her students Naomi Snider, and it's called, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Welcome Dr. Gilligan. Dr. Gilligan: 00:02:47 Oh, thank you, Jen. My pleasure. Jen: 00:02:49 And joining me today is the listener who's brainchild this episode was Brian Stout. Brian holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Amherst College and a Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins and he has a background in foreign policy, conflict prevention and international development. Brian's been exploring his role in dismantling patriarchal systems for some time now. So today we're going to explore what patriarchy is and why it matters to us as parents and then Brian and I are going to be back very soon in a second episode to think through, okay, now we know more about this. What do we as parents do about it? Welcome Brian. Brian: 00:03:24 Thank you. I'm honored to be here. Jen: 00:03:26 All right, so maybe we should start at the beginning. Dr. Gilligan I'm a reasonably well educated and widely read person and I'm really not sure I could have accurately defined what patriarchy is until I'd read some of your books and so I knew it was about men and I knew it was not really a good thing, but can you enlighten us a bit more and just give us a working definition, please? Dr. Gilligan: 00:03:46 Well, you know, it's interesting because I myself, I mean I think I would have said what you said until I was doing research with girls actually and following girls from when they were beginning elementary school, six, seven years old, really through to 17 to the end of high school. And as they reached adolescence, I saw girls resisting something that was in a sense forcing them to make a choice, which the more articulate or the shrewder girls among them saw was a very problematic choice, which was do you want to have a voice? Meaning do you want to keep on being able to say what you feel and think and know or do you want to have relationships, in which case, you have to basically learn what other people want you to say rather than saying what you feel and think. And I thought this was--you could see it it was not visible, it was untangible but very palpable. Dr. Gilligan: 00:04:49 And I had to think what is the force? And then I realized it's a force that takes human capacities. Things we all share as humans, boys, girls across the gender spectrum and divides them into either masculine or feminine. So if I said to you, what is the mind? You'd probably say masculine or what is reason that's masculine? Or what about emotion? Well, that's feminine. What about the self? That's masculine. What about relationships? That's feminine. But this makes no sense from a human perspective. So basically there was a tension between human development, which is what I study and something that was in the world that was dividing human capacities into either masculine or feminine and then privileging the masculine. And I thought, that's patriarchy and patriarchy that's when I got interested in because otherwise people sort of, their eyes glaze over and they think, Oh, it's some anthropological term about ancient tribes or it's about hating men. Dr. Gilligan: 00:06:04 Actually, once I had seen this with girls, I thought, well wait a minute, aren't boys up against a similar force that says to a boy if you act or says, that's not how boys should be because boys don't cry. And you know, boys are kind of, they don't show kind of tender feelings. That's kind of girly or maybe gay. And so it's when children are suddenly up against a force that tastes their human capacities and divides them into either masculine or feminine and privileges the masculine ones. And that's patriarchy. So whenever you encounter that splitting reason versus emotion, the mind versus the body, the self versus relationships that privileges reason and mind and self over, you know, that's patriarchy. So that's how it came into my work. And I saw children resisting it and I said, is the healthy body resists infection? The healthy psyche resist patriarchy. Dr. Gilligan: 00:07:09 I mean that's a sort of simple way of putting it. And I saw children resisting it and as graduate student at Harvard who worked, did the study with me where we followed little boys from pre-kindergarten to kindergarten and into first grade. She did that as her dissertation. Her name is Judy Chu and she's now written this beautiful book called When Boys Become “Boys”, meaning how boys are often said to be, but it's not really how boys are. And you could see these four-year-olds as they turned five and then six beginning to shield themselves and not show those qualities that would lead them to be seen as girly or gay. And you know, meaning their sensitivity and their emotional and intelligence really. So if you hear of a man described as emotionally clueless, I mean the question has to be what happened to this person? Because none of us start this way. Jen: 00:08:08 Yeah. It seems as though these qualities, these masculine qualities are really privileged in a way, right? And it ends up elevating some men over other men. So it ends up elevating masculine men over gay men or any person not identifying as cisgendered male and even men of non-dominant cultures as well as of course all women. Dr. Gilligan: 00:08:28 That's exactly right. It elevates some men over other men and all men over women. Right. So that's why usually it's women who start to speak up against this, but it's not a woman versus man problem. It's a culture versus human problem. Jen: 00:08:46 Yeah. I think I remember Toni Morrison saying something about that. She said, “The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy.” It's not that we're saying, you know, men bad, men are evil, men need to stop doing these things. It's the idea of patriarchy, the system that we're working within that's not working for us. Dr. Gilligan: 00:09:02 Well, yeah, I totally agree with Toni Morrison. I would say exactly the same thing. And it's the force that pushes men toward violence and that demands from women's silence. So in a certain sense, y