This quote is taken from The Will to Change, one of bell hooks’s key texts that explores the effects of patriarchy on society, relationships, families, and the men who feel they have to act in patriarchal ways. It discusses why it’s important to abandon patriarchal versions of masculinity, what men can do to change, and how the people around them can help.
The idea that hooks presents here is complex, but it’s an important one in feminist theory. It’s an important part of understanding how feminism could be helpful for both men and women.
Now, I’m not going to act like hooks is the first ever person to come up with an idea like this one. In fact, in The Will to Change, she draws on the work of plenty of other feminist and theorists in general who make similar arguments! She’s not a wizard who invented an entirely new concept; it’s more that she’s good at synthesising lots of different arguments and making other people understand her.
This book helped a lot of people understand the role of women in patriarchy, though. Before this period, a lot of the most well-known feminist writing worked under the assumption that men were the ones doing patriarchy and women were just the victims of it.
In this book, hooks challenges us to really think about this. She wants us to consider how gender dynamics actually work in the real world and realise that things aren’t as simple as that. Men aren’t the only ones responsible for ensuring that patriarchy survives every new generation.
She points to many really interesting ideas to help support this.
One of her main areas of study to prove this families headed by a single mother. She asks an interesting question: if men were really the only ones upholding patriarchy, then wouldn’t men raised by single mothers be extremely feminist? And while some are, there are plenty who are the exact opposite. I think this quote by her helps to support her ideas:
Contrary to popular myths, single mothers are often the most brutal when it comes to coercing their sons to conform to patriarchal standards.
I think it’s interesting that she uses the word ‘coercing’, here. It reinforces the idea that patriarchy isn’t something that young boys will willingly abide by because it’s often brutal to them and leaves them lacking love and affection.
You might be wondering why single mothers would do that. Well, hooks goes on to explain that, too. Drawing on the work of Olga Silverstein, she points out:
Homophobia underlies the fear that allowing boys to feel will turn them gay; this fear is often most intense in single-parent homes. As a consequence mothers in these families may be overly harsh and profoundly emotionally withholding with their sons, believing that this treatment will help the boys to be more masculine.
In other words, single mothers raising boys often feel insecure. Many worry that because their sons don’t have a consistent father figure in the home, they will become, as Olga Silverstein describes ‘a sissy’. This drives them to reinforce patriarchy even harder than many families do when the father is present.
Even the fear that their sons won’t be masculine enough is a sign that many women are invested in the patriarchy. If we put aside the homophobic fear that queerness is created by ‘bad parenting’, what they’re worried about is that their feminine influence will ‘ruin’ their sons. On the one hand, it’s fair for you to not want your child to be teased or have a poor quality of life. But on the other, they’re showing that they think there’s something wrong with not being what hooks calls a ‘patriarchal male’.
But fear isn’t the only thing hooks argues makes mothers enforce patriarchal values in their sons:
many female-headed households endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater passion than two-parent households. Because they do not have an experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles, women in such households are far more likely to idealize the patriarchal male role and patriarchal men than are women who live with patriarchal men every day.
There’s a bit of a ‘grass is greener’ situation going on here. The idea is that it’s easy to see only the positives of having a ‘patriarchal man’ in the house when you’re only seeing it from afar. They don’t experience the damaging effects that having such a man around has on them. And as women, they don’t experience the horrible internal effects it has on the men themselves. So they put it up on a pedestal more.
She also goes briefly into religion and explains why religion itself might lead women to believe in patriarchy:
Both our parents believed in patriarchy; they had been taught patriarchal thinking through religion.
She explains all the patriarchal things that both men and women are taught at church: that God created men to ruel and that women were created as an afterthought to serve as a helper and companion to man. That women were expected to be modest and obey. They were supposed to be subservient while men were powerful.
I personally think she could have gone into this more, though.
First of all, since this part of the text is more anecdotal and told from her point of view, she focuses on the Abrahamic version of religious teachings – the idea of Adam and Eve. In reality, non-Abrahamic religions also teach the same kinds of religious values.
In Hinduism, for example, the three major Gods (the Trimurti) all have wives as partners. But the Trimurti’s roles make up the circle of life (creation, preservation and destruction), while their wives fulfil important but secondary roles like education, marriage and wealth. They’re also often discussed as the wives of the Trimurti, while their husbands are more likely to be spoken about just as themselves. Clearly, other, non-Abrahamic religions have their own justifications for patriarchy.
But also, she doesn’t go into the fact that women tend to be more religious than men. Men tend to take up leadership positions in religious communities more often. This is often because women aren’t allowed to be in those same positions of power. But even when they are, it’s hardly a 50/50 leadership split. And women are much more likely to be attending religious services regularly and engaging in their communities.
They tend to believe more fervently, which means that the patriarchy can seep through from their religion more often than it does with men.
Despite that, though, hooks makes some really compelling arguments in the main quote, and in The Will to Change overall. Her argument that women can be the ones upholding patriarchy is a exceptionally useful for you in your English Literature studies to help you build up your AO5 alternative interpretations.
How to use this in your English Literature studies
As all A-level English Literature students probably know, you have to do AO5: alternative interpretations.
Often, students assume that means you have to find a critic who speaks explicitly about the text you’re studying, but that’s not true. There are plenty of set texts in each exam board that just don’t have the same level of critical writing out there because they’re newer than Shakespeare or Milton. And even when there is some stuff out there, it can often be paywalled by ridiculously expensive academic journals that are a pain to get hold of. And I promise you: your exam board doesn’t expect you to go out there and pay £50 for one 10-page article.
Plus, it can be really difficult to remember quotes for every single one of the 5-6 books you have to study for your exam – especially when your exam is closed book! It’s a lot to try to remember and recall in the exams on top of the quotes from the actual texts.
So, instead, this quote is something you can use on multiple set texts, which should help to make your revision more streamlined and efficient.
Also, when you use AO5 that isn’t specifically about your set text, it can be really helpful in making you actually use the AO5 instead of just dumping it in like it’s your own opnion. That’s the thing that will separate low-level AO5 from high-level AO5 and help you get closer to the top grades you deserve!
Using this quotation in particular helps you to make your understanding of feminist theory much more nuanced. It means that you can consider which female characters in the texts you study are doing more to uphold patriarchy and which are challenging. It also helps to challenge the notion that a text is feminist just by virtue of having a female protagonist or strong female characters.
It’s something I think about often with Christina Rossetti’s poetry, for example. In my school, we’re comparing the work of Rossetti to The Duchess of Malfi, and I think much of Rossetti’s work actually proves hooks right in this quote. She might not be a single mother – she didn’t get married or have kids at all. But her views on the world and the place of women often help to uphold patriarchy even as she tries to protect women from men. Just like hooks’s parents, Rossetti’s views on the place of women are heavily informed by her religion, as well as the time in which she lived. In many ways, I’d argue that The Duchess of Malfi fits the definition of a feminist text much better than the poems OCR makes us study for Rossetti!
Using bell hooks to make this argument, I’ve introduced something much more profound and useful that would help me to secure top marks in the comparison section of the exam.
You can so the same! Use the analysis questions below to help you consider your own set texts and bring nuance to your arguments:
Analysis questions
Use the comments below to answer a few of these questions. It should help you to improve both your AO1 and your AO5 for the exam. There might even be a few that help witht he other assessment objectives, too!
- What does it look like to support patriarchy? What would a writer need to do to show that a character is supporting patriarchy?
- In your texts, are there any female characters who do and say things that reinforce patriarchy?
- Could you use any of the events or characters in your texts to disagree with bell hooks here?
- What does it mean to ‘benefit’ from patriarchy? Does that show up in your texts?
- Do the men and women in your texts support partriarchy equally? Or does one gender support it more than the other?
- Rank the texts you’re studying by which ones support hooks’s assertion the most and which support it the least. Why did you put them in that order?
- Do you know any other critics or theories that are more accurate for your texts than this quote by hooks?
You might want to add your own questions to this! Teachers, please feel free to comment with your own thoughts, too! Let’s make this a useful resource for everyone!
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