Patriarchy

The second sentence is a correction and it is the reason the entry exists. Patriarchy is a specific historical form combining male and filial endo-idealism, with a hierarchy and a paternal elder occupying the endo-ideal position in each family, and it is not a synonym for male endo-idealism generally. The distinction has practical consequences. Male endo-idealism survives the disappearance of the paternal elder, which is exactly what Marsh says fraternity accomplished, distributing patriarchy into a fraternity of endo-ideals who still claim the right to control the lives of others while bearing no responsibility for governance or participation. Using the older word for the newer arrangement therefore describes a structure that has already been replaced and misses that the replacement removed the accountability without removing the authority. The filial half of the definition matters as much as the male half. Marsh's account of origins runs through immortality rather than through dominance. Since life emanates from the mother, filial societies developing the idea of a temporally extended self left men in an existential dead end, and once filiality was perceived as the key to immortality the arrangement had to be reconstructed around paternity. Hereditary property ownership is the result of a filial self, and inheritance has no basis unless people are considered extensions of the lives and selves of their ancestors. Her observation about the cost is worth keeping. The master is the slave to those whom they enslave, and men under male endo-idealism became far more vulnerable and dependent.

Patriarchy is one of the central terms of feminist theory, with Gerda Lerner tracing its historical creation, Sylvia Walby analysing it as six interlocking structures and Kate Millett establishing it as a political relation rather than a natural order. Anthropologists use it more narrowly for societies with formal male authority through the paternal line, closer to Marsh's definition, and some have argued the broad usage obscures more than it reveals. Marsh sits with the narrow definition and supplies a replacement for the broad one in male endo-idealism, which is a terminological argument that much of feminist theory would resist, since patriarchy has done the work of naming the general system for 50 years.