106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting (Part 1)

"Wait, whaaaat?" (I can hear you thinking this now, as you're reading the title for this episode.)

When I think of patriarchy, I usually think of a powerful guy in a suit. He's always White. He probably works in government or maybe high up in a corporation. He's part of The System, which is just The Way Things Are Done - and he's never going to listen to me. There's really not much I can do to impact this system.

And patriarchy isn't good for any of us. It's not difficult to see how it represses women and any non-straight, White, hetero-presenting male. But the research base is also pretty clear that it harms men as well, by denying them the opportunity to express any emotion other than anger, which is linked to all kinds of both mental and physical health problems.

But it turns out that a big part of perpetuating the patriarchal system is how women interact with men, as well as how we raise our children. And, suddenly, changing the patriarchal system becomes something that I can directly impact - and so can you.

Listener Brian Stout and I interview the preeminent scholar in this field, Dr. Carol Gilligan, who is co-author (with Naomi Snider) of the book Why does patriarchy persist?

In this episode we focus on the background information we need to understand what patriarchy is and how it impacts us, and in a future episode Brian and I return to discuss the implications of these ideas for the way we are raising our children.

If you'd like to subscribe to Brian's newsletter, where he discusses issues related to Building a World of Belonging, you can do that here.

Dr. Carol Gilligan's Books: 

Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy's Resurgence and Feminist Resistance 

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love

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Jen: 00:01:26

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. It's hard to know even where to begin on today's topic, which is patriarchy. Now, before you think to yourself, come on, Jen, aren't you overstepping your bounds a little bit here or maybe even am I listening to the right podcast? If you're seeing this topic as a bit of a non-sequitur with the kinds of issues that we normally discuss on the show related to parenting and child development, then I'd really encourage you to sit tight because this topic has everything to do with those things. I'm so honored that today we have an incredibly special guest to help us understand more about this topic and that's Dr. Carol Gilligan. I'm pretty sure there's a group of my listeners for whom Dr. Gilligan needs no introduction because they probably read and loved her work when they were in college, but for the rest of us, Dr. Gilligan received her Bachelor's Degree in English Literature from Swarthmore College, a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Her 1982 book...