Since raising children requires work, and since this work is extorted from women, it can be argued that men are afraid women will try to escape motherhood, or excessive motherhood, by limiting the number of children they bear. de Lesseps and I demonstrated in the case of the prohibition on abortion and conception (1970). Some of these forms of violence can be shown to be related to the appropriation of women’s labour power – as C. It certainly does not account for other dimensions of this subordination, in particular those oppressions which are just as material as economic exploitation, such as the general violence from men to women and the violence associated with sexual relations between them.
The domestic mode of production, therefore, does not give a total account of even the economic dimensions of women’s subordination. in so far as it really concerns the same thing) – does not in itself constitute an explanation.
I do not deny that certain elements of patriarchy today resemble elements of the ‘patriarchy’ of six thousand years ago or that of two hundred years ago what I deny is that this continuation – in so far as it is a continuation (i.e. An institution which exists today cannot be explained by the simple fact that it existed in the past, even if this past is recent. I do not believe in the theory of ‘survivals’ – and here I am in agreement with other sociologists and anthropologists. What I study is not an ahistoric entity which has wandered down through the centuries, but something peculiar to contemporary industrial societies.
When I hear it said, as I often do, that ‘patriarchy has changed since the origins of agriculture’, or ‘from the eighteenth century to the present’, I know that people are not talking about ‘my’ patriarchy. It carries this meaning for me too, but with this qualification: I add the words ‘here and now’. For many it is synonymous with ‘the subordination of women’. I have, however, since entering the field, restricted the meaning I attach to the term patriarchy.
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