Aspiring patriarchs would seem to have little to cheer about in recent decades. Equal pay statutes have destroyed the “family wage” regime that once rewarded the breadwinning father as “head of household.” The real hourly wages of blue collar men are lower today than they were in 1973. Title IX rules have forcibly turned much of the male dominated athletic world over to the women. Aggressive little boys are tamed by Ritalin. School textbooks fervently promote the feminist worldview, celebrating female steelworkers and male daycare workers. The same ideology dominates the vast majority of American colleges and universities; turgid women’s studies programs are ubiquitous. The military places the quest for androgyny above the goal of victory. Prestige professions such as medical doctor and lawyer are rapidly being feminized. Marriage rates and marital birthrates are low. Child support orders turn many remaining fathers into the indentured servants of their ex-wives. Church liturgies sound like Ms. magazine articles. Language police crush the generic “he.”

Like all other interest groups or hobbyists in America, patriarchs did have their own journal. Issuing from tiny Willis, Virginia, Patriarch magazine sought “nothing less than a return to patriarchy, a society led by strong, godly men. . . . Each man should aim to be the founder of a dynasty for God.” [1] However, its editor suspended publication in 2004; circulation was probably never more than a few thousand; and in terms of graphics, it was clearly the product of a simple home business. Today’s would-be patriarch now has nowhere to turn for advice and inspiration.

And yet, to hear the feminists tell it, patriarchs remain wily and clever foes; their power undiminished. Feminist historian Judith Bennett marvels at patriarchy “in all its immense variety.” [2] The Marxist Heidi Hartmann finds patriarchy to be “a strikingly resilient form of social organization.” [3] Philosopher Gerda Lerner sees patriarchy as “remarkably adaptive and resilient.” [4]

When one strategy for the suppression of women fails, it seems, the patriarchs simply craft another. For example, after women won the vote and equal property rights in the early twentieth century, the patriarchs invented Freudianism which marked as “neurotic” and “perverted” those women who were not heterosexually active. As feminist theorist Sylvia Walby concludes: “for every victory won by women there has been a patriarchal blacklash in another area. Patriarchy is a dynamic system. . . . If women do win . . . , then patriarchal forces will regroup and regain control over them in other ways.” [5] Might this be true?

Feminists have long obsessed over the origin of patriarchy and its key institution, the family. Early on, they found little in the then understood human record that was encouraging. During the late nineteenth century, most anthropologists saw the patriarchal family as the pinnacle of human civilization. In Ancient Law (1861), Sir Henry Maine said that societies with women in power were low on the evolutionary scale, a situation suited only for savages. In contrast, patriarchal rule in families and states was the culmination of human progress. John Lubbock, in The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870), also celebrated male rule as the foundation of civilized living. Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) devised an evolutionary sequence from a savage state dominated by women, through a barbaric phase with some matrilineal qualities, to civilization resting on patriarchal monogamy.