Breaking Down Patriarchy

Amy is joined by Lē Isaac Weaver and Melanie Springer Mock of Christian Feminism Today to discuss the state of gender relations in evangelical communities, Biblical Feminism, purity culture, and the dangerous politization of religious beliefs.

Lē Isaac Weaver (they/them) is a creative and technical professional who assists artists, businesses, and nonprofits to create beauty and change with technology. Much of their work involves various aspects of spirituality and religion. Weaver is the author of numerous articles and reviews on Christian Feminism Today as well as the blog, Where She Is. They contributed the chapter 'Genderful' to the book Women Experiencing Faith. Weaver is a recipient of the Brian Eckstein Faithful Servant Award from the Q Christian Network.

Melanie Springer Mock is an award-winning professor and author, a mother, a runner. an image-bearer of our creator. Melanie is a professor of English at George Fox University, Newberg, Ore. In 2009, she won the GFU Undergraduate Faculty of the Year award, and in 2015, she received the GFU Undergraduate Researcher of the Year award. She is the author or co-author of five books, including most recently Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else (Herald Press, 2018). Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Nation, Christian Feminism Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Mennonite World Review, among other places. She has finished 50 marathons, a dozen or more triathlons, and countless training runs. She lives in Dundee, Ore., with her husband and two teen sons.

On today's episode I'm joined by Emily Bell McCormick for an interview about the impacts of period poverty and the battle for economic justice unfolding in state legislatures right now.

For those interested in getting involved with the fight against period poverty, or any of Emily’s other incredible work, please visit The Policy Project.

Emily Bell McCormick (she/her) is founder of The Policy Project— a U.S. non-profit organization made up of individuals and like-minded organizations that help educate around and move forward healthy, long-term policy at a local and national level. Emily is also the editor of Utah’s NBC affiliate KSL Studio 5 "Smarter" series--informing viewers about issues, government, policies and politics of the time and helping to empower viewers to find their place in it all. Emily is an experienced communication strategy consultant with a history of working in a myriad of industries including government, policy, NGOs, tech and fashion. Emily has a master’s degree in communication from The Ohio State University and a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism from Brigham Young University.

Visit the Episode Page here.

Amy is joined by advocate Mariya Taher to learn more about Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting and discuss firsthand accounts from those affected.

Mariya Taher has worked in gender-based violence for over a decade in the areas of teaching, research, policy, program development, and direct service.

In 2015, she cofounded Sahiyo, an award-winning, transnational organization with the mission to empower Asian and other communities to end FGC. The Manhattan Young Democrats honored her as a 2017 Engendering Progress honoree and in 2018, Mariya received the Human Rights Storytellers Award from the Muslim American Leadership Alliance. In 2020, she was recognized as one of the six inaugural grant recipients for the Crave Foundation for Women. Since 2015, she has collaborated with the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association to pass legislation to protect girls from FGC. After starting a Change.org petition and gathering over 400,000 signatures, Massachusetts became the 39th state in the U.S. to do so.

Mariya is also an extensive writer in fiction and nonfiction and has contributed articles and stories to NPR’s Code Switch, HuffPost, The Fair Observer, Brown Girl Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, The Express Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, and more.

She graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, where she received the Graduate School of Arts & Social Sciences Dean’s Merit Scholarship and the Lesley University Graduate Student Leadership Award. She also holds a Master in Social Work from San Francisco State University and a B.A. from UC Santa Barbara in Religious Studies.

Learn more at sahiyo.org

**This episode is also viewable as a video on www.breakingdownpatriarchy.com under the "episodes" heading, and on YouTube on the Breaking Down Patriarchy channel.

Welcome to BDP! I’m AMA, and today we are doing a very special episode, summarizing all the works we read this year and sharing thoughts and lessons learned as well as answering some FAQ’s. And my guest today is fan-favorite, Erik Allebest! Welcome back to BDP, Erik!

Another cool thing is that for the first time, we’re recording video as well as audio. So if you want to see us as well as hear us, you can watch this video on our website or on YouTube.

I want to start this episode at the very beginning - the very first words I spoke on the podcast were from Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy, where she says “Men and women live on stage. Now that I know more about gender, I would rephrase that to say “all human beings live on a stage.” She describes how all of us are up there performing, doing our best to read the scripts we’re supposed to be reading, some have big parts, some small... but in this play, the writer of the scripts, the directors, the people who built the set and produced the whole thing are all men. So even if I, as a woman, get assigned a bigger role, that might placate me because I get more power in the play, but as long as the role has been given to me by directors who are all men (and who choose to keep women out), the power balance hasn’t changed at all.

The rest of The Creation of Patriarchy, and the entire podcast, has been a study to try to figure out how it got to be this way, and I want to start with something that we haven’t been able to do yet: an actual historical timeline!

• Timeline:

Highlight Catal Hayuk

From a recent BBC article that I read just today:

“An examination of male and female skeletons show that both sexes ate the same diet, performed the same work, and spent the same amount of time outdoors. In life, they inhabited the same physical space; in death they were given the same kind of burials. There is no evidence for either a patriarchal or matriarchal system. In Catalhöyük a woman’s biology was not her fate.

People have long accepted that political power is man-made rather than god-given. But it’s been different for female inequality. History, religion, science, everything in fact, has seemed to condemn feminism for being against the natural order. Thanks to Catalhöyük, we can say with confidence that there is nothing natural about patriarchy or matriarchy. Society can take many forms and shapes. Sex is genetic, but gender is cultural.”

This highlights a debate between sociologists: is patriarchy “natural” and “inevitable” or is it NOT natural, and we could have just as easily have gone in a different direction?

The fact that all societies all over the world, for all time have been at least in some degree patriarchal seems to be an argument that there is a natural element to it. But if there were thousands and thousands of years of non-patriarchy, then it shows that it’s not natural, not inevitable.

(Quiz: When did early humans leave Africa? 2 million years ago.

When did the first humans arrive in Australia? 60,000 years ago

Arrive in the Americas? 30,000 years ago

So... long time.

But does it even matter if it’s “natural”? Lots of terrible things happen all throughout human societies, so they are thus “natural” too. Just because people everywhere have murdered and tortured and enslaved other people, does that mean we say “oh well! I guess we lean into violence because it’s natural.”?

My argument would be no. So let’s dive into the books:

The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler, 1987 - Malia Morris

Evidence of multiple matrifocal, matrilocal societies. Symbols of goddesses, priestesses, evidence of egalitarianism and peace. These were Partnership cultures. They all existed prior to written records, so archaeologists and cultural anthropologists are making informed guesses about what the evidence means. Which is why it’s so important to have women archaeologists and cultural anthropologists!!

Then came the Dominator cultures. War, death, reflected in their mythology: the powerful goddesses lost their status and became wives or consorts of male gods.

And the Partnership vs. Dominator model is a really useful tool of analysis to apply to power dynamics between humans, even today.

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The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner. 1986 (Part 1) - Sherrie Crawford

• The metaphor of the stage

• Men have always written down “history,” and claimed universality for that history. But it has until that last nanosecond of history, totally excluded women’s lives.

• In addition to writing his...

Amy is joined by guest Malia Morris to discuss Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit. Topics include the intersection of sex and racism, calling in v. calling out, bossiness, mansplaining, and seeing humanity in others.

Setareh Greenwood (she/they) is a queer Iranian-American from the California Bay Area. She is currently a first-year student at Mount Holyoke College considering majoring in sociology with a minor in music. Setareh is interested in studying queer theory, social psychology, and literature. She also enjoys painting, Shakespeare, and writing mediocre poetry.