ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the shifting approaches to patriarchy and reflects on its contemporary relevance for feminist theory. In the early 1970s feminists brought issues of inequality between men and women dramatically to centre stage. They did this by creating a vision of patriarchy not as a residual family form but as a social system broadly equivalent to capitalism, and by converting 'gender' from a grammatical term to one which described sexual relations, arguing that they were similar to and possibly more basic than class relations. The emerging positions of radical and socialist feminism defined themselves in relation to their approaches to patriarchy. The French sociologist Christine Delphy took over some Marxist concepts to suggest that patriarchy was based on a domestic mode of production in which husbands as a class exploited their wives through controlling their labour. Socialist feminists identified problems with 'patriarchy' almost from the beginning.
