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The question put forth in this book about patriarchy and the effect it has on our society needs to be asked until girls look at their mothers and say, “Mom, this sounds awful, did your mother live through this? I know you didn’t but I thought maybe Grandma might have had to endure this kind of treatment.”
In Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider remind us that we are not out of the woods when it comes to the unjust treatment of women and we are not even close. They describe why and how men have come to dominate women in a world where we all emerge from the womb longing to make connections with other people.
Carol Gilligan began to focus on important aspects of patriarchy in her book The Birth of Pleasure (2002) as she studied the experiences of adolescent girls who reported having to make a choice between their own voices and having a boyfriend. This informed her about the nature of connections we have with others. While everyone comes into the world seeking attachment, Gilligan found that girls were being forced to choose between whether they wanted to be in a relationship where connection with another person is the natural order of things, or whether they wanted to speak their own truth. If they chose the latter, a connection with a boyfriend became difficult. As Iris, interviewed in the book, put it, “If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking, no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud” (Gilligan & Snider, 2018, p. 18).
It is of interest to note that a similar phenomenon was observed in studies of boys. Judy Chu found that boys give up qualities inherent in connection at ages 4 and 5 suc
h as authenticity, directness, and attentiveness to become “one of the boys.” Niobe Way found that in spite of a shift towards being part of the group during pre-latency years, there was a resurgence of friendship for boys during adolescents (Gilligan & Snider, 2018).
The loss of important relationships appears in both sexes according