ABSTRACT
Two of the most serious human relationships are those of parent to child and individual to the state. Embedded in these relationships is the reproduction of gender inequality. Historically, patriarchy’s chief institution has been the family. Susan Moller Okin argued “[t]he family is the linchpin of gender, reproducing it from one generation to the next” (1989, 170). Kate Millet stressed how the family mediated between the individual and the social structure, and has acted “as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which rules its citizens through family heads” (1970, 25). Catherine MacKinnon has emphasized the distinctive abuses of women in the hierarchical family by male householders, including battering, marital rape, and grinding exploitation of unpaid domestic labor and describes the strong combination of social, legal and political institutions that enforce this pattern (2001, 553).
