I appreciated Hannah-Beth Jackson’s moving remembrance of Gloria Steinem. Jackson captured both Steinem’s extraordinary personal presence and her historic role in teaching generations of women to recognize inequality not as a private failing but as a system that could be challenged.
One phrase, however, gave me pause. Jackson described patriarchy as a system that “has controlled women’s lives since the beginning of time.”
Indeed, one of feminism’s great intellectual achievements was teaching us precisely the opposite: Gender arrangements that appear natural, universal, and inevitable are historically created social arrangements. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner called her landmark study “The Creation of Patriarchy” for good reason. Patriarchy has taken different forms in different societies and periods. It was created, institutionalized, reproduced — and repeatedly transformed.
Treating patriarchy as eternal makes it look like a fact of nature rather than a historical arrangement — exactly the trap Steinem spent her life helping us see through.
Patriarchy did not arrive with the beginning of time. Human beings made it.
And what human beings have made, human beings can remake.
