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Leslie J's avatar

My grandmother was born in 1907 in North Dakota. She wanted to be a nurse but her father equated it with prostitution. She worked as a Red Cross volunteer for over 50 years... long after her father was gone 💔

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Wabi Sabi's avatar

Thanks for this Chloé, very thought-provoking. For sure the left tends to emphasise the role of manmade institutions (money, government, laws, capitalism) in creating and perpetuating inequality because those can be changed; while the right emphasises natural and biological factors and argues that we're stuck with them and have to work within them. I tend to think of humans as incredibly adaptable and malleable: it's incredible to me how much we're *not* stuck with, how radically our societies, customs and default assumptions have changed from place to place and time to time.

For all that, I don't think we can pin all the assumptions and behaviours of patriarchy on modern money-based hierarchical societies. Before money determined one's status, women would have made mating choices based on men's physical strength and practical skills, and men who didn't fit the bill would have been out of luck. Meanwhile, men would have sought out attractive women and protected them from threats at times when they were vulnerable (e.g. during pregnancy). Would Graeber's argument be that these traditional gender roles served us OK until money and hierarchy corrupted them from a mostly-benign complementarity into the oppressive system we now call 'patriarchy'?

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