The concept of Patriarchy itself is not a contribution of feminist theories. Many social scientists in the nineteenth century wrote about it as a more civilized or complex form of organization compared to the primitive matriarchies. Engels referred to it as the earliest system of domination establishing that Patriarchy is “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” In this sense, it is sai...

I felt I could not let the diatribe1 posing as a scientific article by Professor Malcolm Potts and his wife, Dr Martha Campbell, go without comment. When one reads an article that contains gross inaccuracy, even in part, the credibility of the rest and of the journal running it is thrown into question. The couple has an understandable modern problem with St Augustine but that is no excuse for t...

this study aims at using a deductive reasoning to extract several hypotheses from patriarchy, subordination, alienation and perceived relative deprivation theories to establish an empirical association between patriarchy as an independent variable and perceived relative deprivation and alienation of women as a dependent variable. specifically, the study attempts to answer the question: does pat...

This article argues that feminist analyses of patriarchy should be expanded to address the evolutionary basis of male motivation to control female sexuality. Evidence from other primates of male sexual coercion and female resistance to it indicates that the sexual conflicts of interest that underlie patriarchy predate the emergence of the human species. Humans, however, exhibit more extensive m...

ANNE WITZ, Professions and patriarchy, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. x, 233, £10.99 (paperback 0-415-07044-9). Witz's book, based on her doctoral thesis, is primarily concerned to develop feminist and sociological theories of occupational development. But she does this through an analysis of the relationship between gender and the professionalization of medicine, midwifery, nursing ...

An explosion of new data sources describing historical family composition is opening unprecedented opportunities for discovery and analysis. The new data will allow comparative multilevel analysis of spatial patterns and will support studies of the transformation of living arrangements over the past 200 years. Using measurement methods that assess family choices at the individual level and anal...

BACKGROUND Theories of fertility collapse in the post-socialist era imply a decline in the moral primacy of traditional social institutions. Yet gender inequality actually increased in many countries, and there is a scarcity of empirical evidence for the role played by traditional social institutions in reproductive decision-making. OBJECTIVE We investigate whether patriarchal institutions sust...

I want to draw attention to a central —and remediable— cause of social and material inequalities in health which, despite this status, is an )elephant in the room*: an issue that almost all are aware of but which is never addressed directly by those involved with health inequality and public policy. While it is commonplace to discuss the impact of gender inequality on women and girls and while ...

Ironically and interestingly, HIV/AIDS statistics in many countries of the developing world with Zimbabwe being no exemption continues to show a gender skewed state of infection with women more than men increasingly and apparently being more infected. This is worrying considering the fact that it is men who are apparently more promiscuous than women. This gives rise to the phenomenon of feminiz...