Praise for patriarchy? Surely only a victim of false consciousness would utter such blasphemy. Any sane person with a liberal arts degree knows that patriarchy is a pernicious beast—still only partly subdued by the efforts of the women’s movement— that has ravaged the talents of women for thousands of years.

But can patriarchy be as bad as some would have us believe? Defined narrowly, patriarchy is “a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line.” This is not always the preferred arrangement in modern families. But the brief against patriarchy encompasses more than relationships inside the family.

Since everything to emerge from western civilization bears the stamp of patriarchy, the argument goes, western civilization is inherently suspect. If you think this sounds nutty, then clearly you, dear reader, have fallen prey to patriarchy’s wiles. For as theorists such as Andrea Nye—author of Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic—tell us, because of its roots in ancient patriarchal Greece, logic itself is suspect.

So is rigorous debate. Law professor Lani Guinier, for example, who had her fifteen minutes of fame when she was nominated as attorney general by former President Bill Clinton, took Socrates to task for developing a method of instruction that, two millennia later, supposedly still wounds the self-esteem of female law students. In Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change, Guinier argues that the often-combative Paper Chase-style Socratic method of teaching places far too much emphasis on combativeness, which is masculine. Guinier prefers inclusive, mentoring relationships to the orgies of Socratic rigor.

Patriarchy has for some time been the star of the women’s studies classroom. There, it appears as a hyphenate epithet, as in “hetero-patriarchy,” or in combinations such as feminist theorist bell hooks’ “heterosexist white supremacist patriarchal culture.” University presses churn out big-ticket titles such as Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, and Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy that document this menace.

One women’s studies professor told Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge in their book, Professing Feminism, “If there were no patriarchy, there would be no oppression. If there were no oppression, there would be no need for affirmative action. If there were no affirmative action, we wouldn’t be here acting like pigs trying to shoulder each other away from the trough!”

Patriarchy even serves as a convenient villain for a generation of young women who are some of the wealthiest and best situated on the planet. At the University of Oregon at Eugene, for example, students recently organized a conference called “Against Patriarchy.” Conference participants engaged questions such as “How do we identify male privilege?” and “How does male domination connect to other oppressions, like racism, heterosexism, ableism, classism and capitalism, government and speciesism?”

Patriarchy—read: western civilization—doesn’t deserve this treatment. In fact, it could be argued that it’s the best thing that ever happened to women. To understand how womankind has benefited from the last two thousand years of patriarchy, one must examine the status of women at the dawn of the present era.

Athens, whose name is synonymous with high cultural and philosophical achievement, did not allow women to be citizens or own property. Roman husbands were free to engage in any kind of sexual adventure, but a wife who committed adultery could be put to death—the doctrine of patria potestas guaranteed it. A Roman father acted as priest, judge, legislator, and, indeed, high executioner in his own household, with nary a concern for the rights of his wife and children. If this were all patriarchy had to offer, feminists would be right to regard it as the epitome of evil.

Truth be told, however, the patriarchal institution that feminist scholars most love to hate—the Catholic Church—began to make the earliest inroads into this system. First, there was the revolutionary idea that all people—including women—were precious and important beings. That was so attractive to downtrodden—truly downtrodden—women that they flocked to that now maligned institution—so much so that a pagan emperor once forbade missionaries to set foot in any pagan house where women resided—there was too much danger of conversion.

Second, women in the ancient world rarely had a say in choosing their spouses. But the medieval Church insisted that the woman’s consent was of equal importance with the groom’s. No, this didn’t mean that there were no politically arranged marriages between royal infants or that fathers immediately ceased forcing their daughters into miserable marriages. But it did mean that there was now a new ideal, a new right of women that, over time, became a reality instead of an abstraction. Another change: Fidelity, long demanded of women, was now required from men.

Chivalry and honor codes are outgrowths of patriarchal societies that bound men to protect king and country—and women and children in the process. Knights didn’t merely fight. They committed themselves to elaborate codes of behavior that included respect for women and a certain mannerly decorum. Such ideals still appeal, as evidenced by a trend in popular culture toward chivalrous and manly heroes in movies such as Kate & Leopold and in the public’s praise of tough ’n’ tender males such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
 
Some of patriarchy’s supposedly oppressive strictures—particularly those surrounding questions of sex and marriage—seem more appealing than onerous compared to our modern alternatives. Who wouldn’t prefer courtly love, which sprang up in an obviously patriarchal medieval Europe, to the crass hooking-up culture of contemporary times? Then, troubadours and trouvères praised the virtues of women and, as historian Jacques Barzun has argued, helped establish “in theory the rights and privileges that women deserve and that many have enjoyed in reality, beginning with respect of their person and admiration of their qualities.” Today, women’s qualities are “admired” in venues such as Temptation Island and Maxim; perusing Playboy, not penning poetry, is the more acceptable male medium for marveling at women’s charms.

The evolution of legal rights for women was slow. The ancients weren’t keen on granting women property rights. Why should they have been? Women were regarded as property. By the still-patriarchal nineteenth century, this had changed. Single women enjoyed the legal status of femme sole, giving them the right to own property in their own names and to make contracts. Married women fared differently. “Coverture,” the norm by the nineteenth century, wherein women lost all independent legal status upon marriage, wasn’t something any modern wife would permit. However, it was, at the very least, a small step for womankind because, unlike the ancient Roman, the husband now had a legal obligation to protect his wife. As Sir William Blackstone described it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the wife was under her husband’s “wing, protection, and cover.” By the 1830s, legal reforms in the United States extended the right to own property to married women as well, effectively abolishing coverture. While progress was slow, it was steady.

Despite their strictures (of which, admittedly, there were many), patriarchal societies didn’t entirely stifle women’s ambitions; many maidenly and even matronly malcontents made their mark. Eleanor of Acquitaine (1122-1204) is but the best known of a cohort of medieval women who scorned convention. In 1147, she and her phalanx of female attendants went on the Second Crusade to Palestine with her husband, Louis VII. Rumored to have warmed her bed with men other than the dour Louis on her adventures, she returned home and promptly divorced him, resuming rule of her hereditary lands, the valuable region of Acquitaine. After frenzied wooing from the most eligible bachelors on earth, Eleanor chose Henry Plantagenet, heir to the English throne, as her next conquest.

Her marriage to Henry was stormy, and eventually Eleanor, fed up with his royal philandering, established her own glittering court in Poitiers, where she promoted courtly love and patronized important poets of the day. The marriage produced two kings of England, Richard the Lionhearted and the less reputable John. Eleanor helped both to intrigue against Henry. When Richard was held captive in Palestine, Eleanor was a key player in English politics. She lived into her eighties, always an important figure on the world’s stage.

Women also transgressed the literary boundaries of patriarchal societies. Left widowed and with three children to support, Christine de Pisan (1363-1430) had the gumption to put her knowledge of Italian and Latin to work in the French court, producing poems, such as “Epistle to the God of Love” (1399), where she criticized male behavior by channeling Cupid, and prose works such as The Book of the City of Ladies, where she rallied Reason, Rectitude, and Justice to defend her sex against a host of charges.

Feminist theorists’ attacks on patriarchy might be more palatable if their recommended replacement made any sense at all. But it does not. The most active theorists wrestling with this demon offer something far less robust: spurious theories of ancient matriarchies, for one. These matriarchal utopias, though popular in women’s history courses, have no basis in historical fact, as Cynthia Eller has shown in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory . Other theorists become mired in semantics. A few years ago on a women’s studies academic listserv, for example, a heated debate erupted over the usefulness of the term “patriarchy,” with alternatives such as “gender binaries,” “phallocentrism,” and “phallic drift” offered as replacements.
 
Granted, patriarchy has taken some puzzling turns, particularly today. Participants in the contemporary American subculture of “Christian Patriarchy,” for example, argue that “biblical patriarchy has provided for the greatest measure of liberation for women.” Fans of Christian patriarchy extol “Jesus Christ the Bridegroom” as a “model of monogamy” for the modern man. The editor of Patriarch magazine (motto: “Equipping men to be godly leaders in family, church, and society”) sees his mission as calling men “back to their manly duties” in the home, especially their duties as fathers. Still, questions of ecumenical etiquette aside, who could object to a movement that encourages men to become more attentive fathers?

At the other end of the spiritual spectrum are the “pioneers of feminist spirituality,” as Barbara Walker describes them in her book, Restoring the Goddess . Walker and her ilk are less than pleased with patriarchy’s past triumphs, particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition’s reference to God as male. Citing the work of nameless “feminist scholars,” Walker argues that they “have shown that our traditional religious organizations have been dedicated to denial or demonization of the Goddess, all the way from biblical times to the present.”

In many ways patriarchal societies have made good on the promises of those medieval swains who honored their ladies. It is patriarchal societies, after all, that have produced triumphs of logic, science, art, and literature; and, for the most part, it was a patriarchal clique that developed the liberal political philosophies that led to notions of democracy, individual rights—and women’s liberation. Therein lies the rub: Patriarchy was the dominant social arrangement for most of the history of western civilization, a civilization that has produced the expressions of human freedom and individual rights that radical feminists now want to reject.