Abstract
Goldberg reviews literature, gathering evidence from expert witnesses (both primary and secondary sources) to demonstrate that each of three distinct patterns of recognised human social behaviour (institutions) has been observed in every known society. [3] He proposes that these three universal institutions, attested as they are across independent cultures, suggest a simple psychophysiological cause, since physiology remains constant, as do the institutions, even across variable cultures—a universal phenomenon suggests a universal explanation. [4]
The institutions Goldberg examines and claims to be universal among all known societies are patriarchy (men dominating higher hierarchical positions), male attainment (activities which provide higher status are related to male physiology) and male dominance (cultural expectation of male leadership and control). [3] The hypothetical psychophysiological phenomenon he proposes to explain them, he denotes by the expression differentiation of dominance tendency. [4] [5] He explains this refers to dominance behaviour being more easily elicited from men on average than from women on average. In other words, he theorises a biologically mediated difference in preferences.
Goldberg next provides expert witnesses from several disciplines regarding correlations between behaviour and the hormone testosterone, which are known to be causative in several cases, including dominance preference. He concludes with the hypothesis that testosterone is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the development of the institutions he examined. [6] In other words, without testosterone, the institutions would not develop—it must be part (but not all) of an explanation for their universality.
Finally, Goldberg proposes that if patriarchy is indeed biologically based, it will prove to be inevitable; unless a society is willing to intervene biologically on the male physiology.
Criticism
In Key Issues in Women's Work (2nd ed., 2004), sociologist Catherine Hakim compares four competing theories of male dominance, including Goldberg's theory of patriarchy as well as her own preference theory, and notes the strengths and weaknesses of patriarchy theory. [9] For example, women's dislike of female bosses is consistent with Goldberg's theory. [10] Goldberg's "is the only theory that can explain some of the more inconvenient facts about women as well as men". [11] "No other theory has been offered which can explain women's rejection of females in authority". [10] She comments that Goldberg's theory "contrasts interestingly with the mind-games that Western intellectuals like to play", [12] but concludes that Goldberg's thesis has yet to be fully proven. [13] In her book's final chapter, after reviewing the empirical evidence, she notes that none of the four competing theories fully explains women's subordination, but that preference theory rules out the salience of sex and gender, given the evidence for female heterogeneity.
The Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock takes a more political view of Goldberg's work. In a response to Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy, she characterizes Goldberg's theories as simplistic and irresponsible: "To consign the grim brutalities of abused power we see everywhere about us to what amounts to masculine 'original sin' not only denies the historical and ethnographic record... but seriously disarms all of us, as humanity, in the urgency of our need to understand and redirect our social life if we would insure ourselves a future." [14]
Biological anthropologist Frank B. Livingstone criticizes Goldberg's understanding of causation in evolution, characterizing the evolutionary model presented in The Inevitability of Patriarchy as "absolutely backward". According to Livingstone, social behavior drives evolution rather than the other way around: "Contrary to Goldberg, I do not believe that a genetic or physiological change will occur first and then cause social or behavioral change. In fact, just the opposite, the behavior or way of life of a population determines the fitness values of the genotypes, and this changes the genetic characteristics of the population." [15]
Selection of criticism 1973–1993
- Eleanor Maccoby, "Sex in the social order", Science 182 (November, 1973): 469ff. [Review of The Inevitability of Patriarchy]
- Eleanor Leacock. 'The Inevitability of Patriarchy'. American Anthropologist new series 76 (1974): 363-365.
- Frank B Livingstone. 'The Inevitability of Patriarchy'. American Anthropologist new series 76 (1974): 365-367.
- Steven Goldberg. 'Response to Leacock and Livingstone'. American Anthropologist new series 77 (1975): 69-73.
- Eleanor Leacock. 'On Goldberg's Response'. American Anthropologist new series 77 (1975): 73-75.
- Frank B Livingstone. 'Reply to Goldberg'. American Anthropologist new series 77 (1975): 75-77.
- Joan Huber. 'The Inevitability of Patriarchy'. The American Journal of Sociology 81 (1974): 567-568.
- Steven Goldberg. 'Comment on Huber's Review of the Inevitability of Patriarchy'. The American Journal of Sociology82 (1976): 687-690.
- Joan Huber. 'Huber's Reply to Goldberg'. The American Journal of Sociology82 (1976): 690-691.
- The September/October issue of Society vol. 23, no. 6 (1986) was devoted to discussion of The Inevitability of Patriarchy. It contained two essays by Goldberg and seven by critics.
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation.
Matriarchy is a social system in which females hold the primary power positions in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. While those definitions apply in general English, definitions specific to the disciplines of anthropology and feminism differ in some respects. Most anthropologists hold that there are no known anthropological societies that are unambiguously matriarchal, but some authors believe exceptions may exist currently or may have existed in the past.
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800's. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression. Socialist feminism is a two-pronged theory that broadens Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Socialist feminists reject radical feminism's main claim that patriarchy is the only, or primary, source of oppression of women. Rather, Socialist feminists assert that women are oppressed due to their financial dependence on males. Women are subjects to male domination within capitalism due to an uneven balance in wealth. They see economic dependence as the driving force of women's subjugation to men. Further, Socialist feminists see women's liberation as a necessary part of larger quest for social, economic, and political justice. Socialist feminists attempted to integrate the fight for women's liberation with the struggle against other oppressive systems based on race, class, sexual orientation, or economic status.
Cultural feminism, the view that there is a "female nature" or "female essence", attempts to revalue and redefine attributes ascribed to femaleness. It is also used to describe theories that commend innate differences between women and men. Cultural feminism diverged from radical feminism, when some radical feminists rejected the previous feminist and patriarchal notion that feminine traits are undesirable and returned to an essentialist view of gender differences in which they regard female traits as superior.
Sex differences in crime are differences between men and women as the perpetrators or victims of crime. Such studies may belong to fields such as criminology, sociobiology, or feminist studies. Despite the difficulty of interpreting them, crime statistics may provide a way to investigate such a relationship from a gender differences perspective. An observable difference in crime rates between men and women might be due to social and cultural factors, crimes going unreported, or to biological factors. Taking the nature of the crime itself into consideration may also be a factor.
Critical criminology is a theoretical perspective in criminology which focuses on challenging traditional understandings and uncovering false beliefs about crime and criminal justice, often but not exclusively by taking a conflict perspective, such as Marxism, feminism, political economy theory or critical theory. Critical criminology frequently takes a perspective of examining the genesis of crime and nature of 'justice' within the social structure of a class and status inequalities. Law and punishment of crime are viewed as connected to a system of social inequality and as the means of producing and perpetuating this inequality. Critical criminology also seeks to delve into the foundations of criminological research to unearth any biases.
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) is a book by the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. Written over a few months when Firestone was 25, it has been described as a classic of feminist thought.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Steven Goldberg is a native of New York City and chaired the Department of Sociology at the City College of New York (CCNY) from 1988 until his retirement in 2008. He is most widely known for his theory of patriarchy, which attempts to explain male domination through biological causes.
Eleanor Burke Leacock was an anthropologist and social theorist who made major contributions to the study of egalitarian societies, the evolution of the status of women in society, marxism, and the feminist movement.
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future is a 2000 book by Cynthia Eller that seeks to deconstruct the theory of a prehistoric matriarchy. This hypothesis, she says, developed in 19th century scholarship and was taken up by 1970s second-wave feminism following Marija Gimbutas. Eller, a professor of religious studies at Claremont Graduate University, argues in the book that this theory is mistaken and its continued defence is harmful to the feminist agenda.
Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage.
Feminism is one theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, even though many feminist movements and ideologies differ on exactly which claims and strategies are vital and justifiable to achieve equality.
The social construction of gender is a theory in feminism and sociology about the manifestation of cultural origins, mechanisms, and corollaries of gender perception and expression in the context of interpersonal and group social interaction. Specifically, the social construction of gender stipulates that gender roles are an achieved "status" in a social environment, which implicitly and explicitly categorize people and therefore motivate social behaviors.
The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology. While little is known for certain, debates since Hobbes and Rousseau have returned again and again to the philosophical, moral and evolutionary questions posed.
The Evolution of Human Sexuality is a 1979 book about human sexuality by the anthropologist Donald Symons, in which the author discusses topics such as human sexual anatomy, ovulation, orgasm, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape, attempting to show how evolutionary concepts can be applied to humans. Symons argues that the female orgasm is not an adaptive trait and that women have the capacity for it only because orgasm is adaptive for men, and that differences between the sexual behavior of male and female homosexuals help to show underlying differences between male and female sexuality. In his view, homosexual men tend to be sexually promiscuous because of the tendency of men in general to desire sex with a large number of partners, a tendency that in heterosexual men is usually restrained by women's typical lack of interest in promiscuous sex. Symons also argues that rape can be explained in evolutionary terms and feminist claims that it is not sexually motivated are incorrect.
"The Matter of Seggri" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It was first published in 1994 in the third issue of Crank!, a science fiction – fantasy anthology, and has since been printed in number of other publications. In 2002, it was published in Le Guin's collection of short stories The Birthday of the World: and Other Stories. "The Matter of Seggri" won the James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1994 for exploring "gender-bending" and has been nominated for other honors including the Nebula Award.
In feminist theory, heteropatriarchy is a socio-political system where (primarily) cisgender males and heterosexuals have authority over cisgender females and over other sexual orientations and gender identities. It is a term that emphasizes that discrimination exerted both upon women and LGBTQ people has the same sexist social principle.
The Creation of Patriarchy is a nonfiction book written by Gerda Lerner in 1986 as an explanation for the origins of misogyny in ancient Mesopotamia and the following Western societies. She traces the "images, metaphors, [and] myths" that lead to patriarchal concepts' existence in Western society. She believes that the creation of patriarchy in the ancient Near East was a 2500-year period from nearly 3100 BC to 600 BC rather than a single event.
The evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory is a conceptual framework which seeks to explain trends in violent and criminal behavior from an evolutionary and biological perspective. It was first proposed by the sociologist Lee Ellis in 2005 in his paper "A Theory Explaining Biological Correlates of Criminality" published in the European Journal of Criminology. Since then, it has expanded into an interdisciplinary field that intersects biology, psychology, and sociology. The theory rests on two propositions. The first is that in human mating behavior, females prefer males that appear to be more competent providers of resources, and so males exhibit increased competitive behavior than females to obtain access to those resources. The second is that biological mechanisms lead to differential development in the male brain which then mediates the increased competitive behaviors that cause criminality. Though it was originally intended to explain high rates of criminality in young men, it has since been used as a framework to explain gang behavior, terrorism, and the rise of the criminal justice system.
