Understanding patriarchy, past and present

This article explores the contributions and continuing relevance of Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy (1987) to current and international debates on gender and gender-based violence. I suggest that Lerner's conceptualisations of the reification of women's sexuality and reproduction in their subordination, and the complicity of women in their own oppression and the oppression of other women, are important in understanding the creation of patriarchy in Western society, through the use of gender-based violence. Further, these ideas have resonance in non-Western worlds, and in the present.