A radical reinterpretation of Western civilization argues that male dominance has resulted from, and can be ended by, historical process, and identifies key developments.

By combining legal and genealogical methodologies, this book describes the origin, decline, resurgence and metamorphosis of patriarchy in the West. The book provides the reader with a unified tool for understanding what patriarchy is, its dynamics, and its main features. The reader will find a guide with which to navigate the dozens of definitions and theories of patriarchy, and will better understand why, despite the proclamations of formal Constitutions of the equality of the sexes, the gender gap in the West is still high. Approaching patriarchy both as a concept and as a social fact, the book shows how patriarchy lay at the Jewish-Greek-Roman roots of Western civilization; how for millennia it was perceived as a benevolent function for social and political life and how feminism reversed this benevolent narrative. By reconstructing how patriarchy has been theorized in several disciplines and historical times, the book reflects on what has been done and remains to be done to de-patriarchalize the West. It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and students in Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Constitutional Law, Cultural Studies, Religious Studies and Anthropology.

A coherent and focussed exploration into how Patriarchy constructed pre-capitalist and capitalist society, and its role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Since the second half of the 1980s social movements, which questioned the legitimacy of the hitherto seemingly stable systems of Kemalist Turkey and socialist Balkans, won ground. Political Islam struck Turkey; in the Balkan socialist countries the dams broke, and parliamentary democracies replaced monolithic socialist regimes. These processes have not been gender neutral. Therefore the central question is: after the abolition of patriarchy and the official installation of gender equality, are patriarchy and female discrimination returning in the region through the backdoor, although in a modernized version?

“Peace in patriarchy is war against women.” - Maria Mies “Men at the top.” As per the patriarchal society, patriarchy means when men are only supposed to rule. When only men at the top rule the society. “Father rules the house.” This is what followed from ancient times. When we say, “breaking the patriarchy” that doesn’t mean to give importance to only “matriarchy”. Every person should be given equal right and opportunity. We as a human, each and every gender deserves to be heard, deserves to get equal opportunity. Since ages violence against woman’s are rapidly increasing, their voices are been made silent. So, it’s time to break that chain and fly in the air of freedom. “She is not asking too much. She is merely asking her own right. She deserves to be heard. She is asking her own sky to fly.” When we all starts seeing man and woman with equal parameters. When we will not hesitate to give high positions to woman in any field. That’s when we’ll truly succeed as a whole. That’s when we will be breaking the patriarchy. “Breaking the patriarchy” is a free Anthology, consisting 30 contributing authors around the world who have dedicated their time, efforts, and their thoughts.

Patriarchy, particularly as embedded in the Old and New Testaments, and Roman legal precepts, has been a powerful organising concept with which social order has been understood, maintained, enforced, contested, adjudicated and dreamt about for over two millennia of western history. This brief book surveys three influential episodes in this history: seventeenth-century debates about absolutism and democracy, nineteenth-century reconstructions of human prehistory, and the broad mobilisations linked to twentieth-century women's movements. It then looks at the way feminist scholars have reconsidered and revised some earlier explanations built around patriarchy. The book concludes with an overview of current uses of the concept of patriarchy – from fundamentalist Christian activism, over foreign policy analyses of oppressive regimes, to scholarly debates about forms of effective governance. By treating patriarchy as a powerful tool to think with, rather than a factual description of social relations, the text makes a useful contribution to current social and political thought.

The book offers one of the first detailed studies of South Asian women, it provides new empirical data on the issues apparent in South Asian women's lives by 'giving voice' to a group of women who would otherwise remain silent. It is based upon an ethnographic study of a small South Asian community in an inner city. The book offers a new and compelling account of South Asian women, as well as focussing on the ways in which gender and 'race' interact in women’s lives. The book offers an important theoretical contribution to the area of feminist theory. The concept of patriarchy is contested and reworked and applied to the study of South Asian women and their cultural experiences. In this sense, practices such as arranged marriages, dowries, domestic labour and domestic finance are analyzed as different influences of patriarchy inside the household, as well as education and the labour market as influences of patriarchy outside the household.