ABSTRACT
If everything was done in proper logical order, this should have been written before the ‘crisis tendencies’ paper, perhaps even before the essay on Freud. I had been impatient to get on with it, not bog down in argument about definitions. The difficulty I found in trying to stick together fragments of argument about the dynamics of families, the formation of masculinity, and the politics of change in sexual power structure, showed that the job of conceptual clarification still needed to be done. A paper by Beechey (1979) had admirably shown the confusion of tongues in the literature on patriarchy.
So this essay is intended as an exercise in clarification. It offers a view of the foundations of a theory of patriarchy: its origins, scope, and form, the nature of its categories, the kind of knowledge it embodies and its relationship to history. So as not to disappear in a haze of abstractions, I have tried to work with two illustrative problems in mind: the relationship between patriarchy and capitalist class structure, and the formation and working of hegemonic masculinity. The paper was written in March 1980.
