Welcome To The Biarchy…

As is their wont, A-level Sociology examiners occasionally like to ask questions about “feminist perspectives” and if you’re at all on the ball you’ll realise you probably need to discuss a range of approaches – usually, but not exclusively, radical, Marxist and liberal – depending on the complexity of the question and the length of your expected answer.

To cut a long story short, when discussing radical and Marxist perspectives, evaluation of the latter tends to focus around the idea that, since patriarchy predates capitalism, it is a much deeper, more-foundational, system of female oppression – one that will not, in simple terms, be resolved-away by a transition to communism.

To support your evaluation you’ll probably bring-in a range of classical radical feminists, such as Firestone (1970), Lerner (1986) and MacKinnon (1989) who have all argued, in their different ways, that male domination of women is historically rooted in patriarchal practices such as control over reproduction, sexuality and social organisation, that pre-dated capitalism by many thousands of years.

And you wouldn’t be wrong because the broad criticism holds true: while female emancipation from “capitalist” structures and strictures may be desirable, true emancipation cannot be achieved until patriarchy is, to coin a phrase, consigned to the dustbin of history.

And this kind of criticism will get you marks, along with all the other students saying much the same sort of thing.

But if you really want to stand out from the crowd, you need to critique the critique.

And there’s a couple of ways you can do this.

The first, fairly conventional, way is to acknowledge that while capitalism didn’t invent patriarchy it took it to new heights by reinventing women as unpaid domestic labourers with little or no pollical representation. The basic argument here is that capitalism and patriarchy are interlocking systems of oppression, whereby a (male) ruling class benefits in a multitude of ways from patriarchal norms and attitudes that consign women to a second-class status in contemporary capitalist societies.

More-recently, overt forms of female cultural exploitation have seen something of a revival in the form of the so-called Manosphere, a loose-knit conglomeration of online sites (webpages, blogs, podcasts…) dedicated to the propagation of misogynistic, anti-feminist, values.

A second, less-conventional, way is to introduce the concept of biarchy into the discussion.

Biarchival Evidence?

A biarchal model of gender relations challenges conventional patriarchal models by suggesting that some societies have been structured around a dual system of gender authority, one where both men and women hold power in ways that are complementary or balanced. In this respect, a biarchal society is one in which both genders share power and authority, frequently but not necessarily in distinct but equally-valued domains.

In simple terms, a biarchal system is one where gender roles are cooperative rather than hierarchical.

While this concept is not new, examples have tended to be from the relatively-recent past, such as some Native American tribes (the Iroquois in North Eastern America, for example), the Igbo in pre-colonial Nigeria and some Pacific Island societies such as Micronesia and, as with the Iroquois and Igbo, severely disrupted or completely overthrown by Western (patriarchal) colonisation.

More recent DNA-based evidence from the analysis of ancient bones however, has, Spinney notes, “made it possible to determine the sex of long-dead people, and to ask how they were related to each other…The picture emerging thanks to these new tools is that diversity in gender relations was very much the rule in prehistory”.

In other words, this new evidence has raised the interesting possibility that some ancient biarchal societies existed long before their patriarchal equivalents – and this, in turn, gives you the opportunity to raise some significant evaluative points:

Firstly, this evidence challenges the “universality of patriarchy” of argument. While patriarchy may pre-date capitalism, biarchy arguably predates patriarchy (or matriarchy, come to that).

Secondly, this idea lends support to intersectional analyses of gender relationships in the sense that a great deal of debate – feminist and otherwise – has focused on Western systems of gender inequality. By incorporating biarchal models into the debate you’re bringing non-Western societies into the debate.

Finally, in relation to general feminist theory the importance of biarchy is that it points towards the possibility of more-egalitarian gender relationships without having to confront the seeming inevitability of patriarchy.

References

Gerda Lerner: The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986.

Shulamith Firestone: The Dialectic of Sex,1970

Catharine MacKinnon: Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989.

Laura Spinney: Was Prehistory a Feminist Paradise?, 2025