The Creation of Patriarchy

Today, historical development has for the first time created the necessary conditions by which large groups of women—finally, all women—can emancipate themselves from subordination. Since women’s thought has been imprisoned in a confining and erroneous patriarchal framework, the transforming of the consciousness of women about ourselves and our thought is a precondition for change. (220-21)

As long as both men and women regard the subordination of half of the human race to the other as “natural,” it is impossible to envision a society in which differences do not connote either dominance or subordination. The feminist critique of the patriarchal edifice of knowledge is laying the groundwork for a correct analysis of reality, one which at the very least can distinguish the whole from a part. Women’s History, the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in women, is providing the body of experience against which new theory can be tested and the ground on which women of vision can stand. (229)

We now know that man is not the measure of that which is human, but men and women are. Men are not the center of the world, but men and women are. This insight will transform consciousness as decisively as did Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. We may play our separate parts on the stage, sometime exchanging them or deciding to keep them, as it works out. We may discover new talent among those who have always been living under the umbrella of another’s making. We may find that those who had previously taken upon themselves the burden of both action and definition may now have more freedom for playing and experiencing the pure joy of existence. We are no more under an obligation to describe what we will find than were the explorers sailing to the distant edge of the world, only to find that the world was round. (13-14)

The androcentric fallacy, which is built into all the mental constructs of Western civilization, cannot be rectified simple by “adding women.” What it demands for rectification is a radical restructuring of thought and analysis which once and for all accepts the fact that humanity consists in equal parts of men and women and that the experiences, thoughts, and insights of both sexes must be represented in every generalization that is made about human beings. (220)