|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Summary: This article explains how society centres men’s power and privilege while limiting women’s opportunities, weakening their bodies, silencing their voices, and teaching them to endure inequality as tradition rather than injustice.
Patriarchy is a system of power that places men at the centre of society and organises authority, resources, opportunity, and even dignity around them, ensuring men benefit while women are expected to adjust, sacrifice, and survive. It is not simply about who leads, but about who is believed, who is prioritised, who eats first, who is protected, and who is taught to endure quietly.
What gives patriarchy its strength is not only the harm it causes, but how ordinary it feels. It hides in what we call normal. It is passed down as tradition, repeated as common sense, and defended with phrases like “this is how it has always been done.” Many women and girls did not grow up learning the word patriarchy; they grew up learning silence, obedience, and the discipline of making themselves smaller so others could remain comfortable.
These lessons begin early. In many schools, leadership is routinely handed to boys, while girls are often relegated to assistant roles, even when the girls are more capable, disciplined, and prepared. Boys are encouraged to see authority as their right, while girls are socialised to support it. Over time, this shapes confidence, ambition, and the courage to take up space.
As these beliefs settle, they begin to dictate how resources are shared. In many families, when money is scarce, the boy’s education is treated as essential, while the girl’s is considered negotiable. The boy must go to school. The girl can manage. The boy is framed as an investment. The girl is treated as temporary. Marriage is offered as reassurance, as though it could replace education or guarantee safety.
Patriarchy does not stop at opportunity. It enters the body. It sits at the dining table and decides who eats what and when. In many homes, men are served first and given the largest portions of meat or fish, while pregnant women and menstruating girls eat later and eat less. Medical knowledge shows that pregnant women and menstruating girls require significantly more iron than adult men, yet patriarchy overrides science, teaching that men deserve priority while women should endure depletion quietly. The consequences are physical, anaemia, fatigue, complicated pregnancies, weakened bodies carrying heavy expectations.
When opportunities are restricted and bodies are weakened, survival becomes a strategy. Women stretch limited resources, trade informally, hustle locally, and sometimes bend rules simply to keep households afloat. Society is quick to judge these women and slow to interrogate the system that denied them education, capital, inheritance, and security.
Patriarchy survives because it feels ordinary. Feminism interrupts this ordinariness. It gives language to what women have long felt in their bodies and their silences. To name patriarchy is to recognise how gender power is arranged and to refuse the lie that inequality is natural. And it must be broken, because as long as patriarchy remains unchallenged, women’s lives, health, opportunities, and voices will continue to be diminished while society pretends this is normal. Breaking it is not an option; it is necessary for fairness, for growth, and for every girl and woman to live fully in the world that belongs to all of us, not just half.
