Actually, historically, that is exactly what it meant. And no, men really never have put themselves last as a demographic. Katie Jlgn just published a piece that speaks to that. Men largely expected to be the “king” of their castle well into the 1970s — and some men still believe that today.
Actually, according to a study by a group of Swedish economists on sea disasters spanning three centuries, it was women and children who had the lowest survival rates out of all demographics.
I’m not saying there are no pressures of downsides to being “the breadwinner” when a man was the sole support for an entire family, but that was something that really only took place from the 1950s-1970s.
For the first time in history, the family was envisioned as being made up of a “breadwinner” man, his “homemaker” wife, and their children — the nuclear family. Grandparents and aunts and uncles now lived somewhere else, and working married women were either pitied or looked down upon. Child labor, once a common way for a family to supplement its income, was now illegal.
In the years before the 50s, wives often helped their husbands run the farm, or the corner store, and children often worked to supplement the family’s income. This new model was a blip in human history.
I'm a social scientist so I speak and write about the definition of the term from that perspective -typically giving explanation for why it means a bit more than they may think. But I can't always do an entire re-education piece in every single comment I make. If someone (a man - because it's only ever a man) doesn't want to believe that I know what I'm talking about because their understanding of that term is reductive, there's only so much I can do about that. It's not like under those circumstances giving a long social science explanation is going to matter - at least it rarely does in my experience when someone is already hellbent on being condescending and demeaning — something that happens rather a lot.
It's not me defining patriarchy in this way - it's the accepted and widespread social science way. The dictionary is hardly a good source of nuanced academic description. The authority gap is the actual problem.
Edit: I’ve written something like 50 stories on the topic of what patriarchy means from a social science perspective, so it’s not as though I’m expecting everyone to just take my word for it with no substantiation. But rather than asking, “On what do you base that?” or “What do you mean by that?” I generally get attacks meant to indicate that I can’t possibly know more than the man who is challenging me (because in a zero-sum construct, someone who ought to be “beneath” you in the hierarchy can’t possibly know more than you do). 🙄 At least Ciaran didn’t do that…
