Elle Beau ❇︎
2 min readJul 6, 2022

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If you read further in the same definition, it says this, about how the onset of hierarchies and social stratification of other sorts are also a part of patriarchy, not just men having primacy and power over women.

"The historian Gerda Lerner has tipped Engels's line of causation on its head: women, she argues, were the first property, exchanged for their procreative power by men with other men through marriage, prostitution, and slavery. Thus patriarchy preceded other forms of hierarchy and domination such as kin networks and social classes (emphasis mine), and women became primarily defined by their relation to men. Like Engels, Lerner links patriarchy with economic and political change, but she also stresses the importance of nonmaterial issues such as the creation of symbols and meaning through religion and philosophy."

When I am speaking about patriarchy, this is what I'm talking about - the beginning of private ownership, hierarchy, social stratification, and other economic and political changes that took place at the same time that men were gaining social and sexual power over women. When I say that patriarchy came about for the first time around 6-9 thousand years ago, this is what I am referring to. These sweeping changes in social and political structures that took place at that time.

This has nothing to do with "indigenous peoples" in the modern world. It's about shifts that took place amongst nearly all peoples at a particular point in human history.

This is something that I've said to you dozens of times already, but I hope that you can hear it now that I've invoked Engels. 😉

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Elle Beau ❇︎
Elle Beau ❇︎

Written by Elle Beau ❇︎

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint. I do not feel ashamed. I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between.

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