"michael a. lebowitz" wrote: > > > Still, let's get back to your original question--- the > absence of women in the leadership of societies attempting to build > socialism. Was/is there something systemic that thwarts the emergence > of women as leaders in these?
Actually, Yoshie's discussion of patriarchy (and its disappearance) is not getting away from the original question at all. (Unless history isn't relevant to politics.) We live in a generically male-supremacist society, but that male supremacy does NOT take the form of patriarchy. As Yoshie points out, the point of the rule over women under patriarchal institutions is that the patriarch rules over a productive (not merely consuming) household of men and women. (There was a valuable issue of Radical History Review about 6 years ago on the condition of women in Mexico, and central to the analyses was the shift from patriarchal to sexist modes of domination over women as economic and demographic conditions changed. That analysis would not have been possible if the writers had merely identified male dominance with patriarchy rather than recognizing that modes of domination change.) The concepts that get tied to Patriarchy simply get in the way of an adequate analysis of how male supremacy operates in present conditions, and thus of how it can be fought. Carrol
