How Patriarchy and Gender Roles Fuel Violence in Communities

Violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Much of it is structured, normalized, and reproduced through systems that have been in place for centuries. One of the most powerful of those systems is patriarchy – a social arrangement in which men hold primary authority across domestic, economic, and institutional life, while women and other marginalized genders are systematically subordinated. Feminist scholarship has long traced the direct link between patriarchal structures and gender-based violence, showing how deeply the two are intertwined. Understanding that connection is essential to understanding why such violence persists – and what it takes to challenge it.

What patriarchy actually means 🔗

Patriarchy is not simply about individual men behaving badly. It is, as feminist scholars define it, a system of relationships, beliefs, and values embedded in political, social, and economic systems that structure gender inequality between men and women. Within this system, traits associated with femininity are devalued, while those associated with masculinity are privileged and rewarded. These hierarchies operate in both private life – inside homes and families – and in public institutions like law, government, and the workplace.

Patriarchy also doesn’t look the same everywhere or at all times. It is a dynamic and flexible set of social relations that shifts and adapts across cultures and historical periods. What remains consistent, however, is its core function: positioning men’s interests as the standard and organizing social life accordingly.

Patriarchy as a source of gendered violence 🔗

The connection between patriarchy and violence is not incidental – violence is one of the mechanisms through which patriarchal order is maintained. Patriarchal violence is defined as any kind of violence that creates or maintains men’s power and dominance, or avenges the loss of their power. It is ideologically driven, serving to uphold a hierarchy in which men’s interests are prioritized over those of women and girls.

Critically, this violence does not require every man to act. It is not essential for all men to commit violence against women for violence to control women – the threat of violence alone is enough to alter the everyday behavior and actions of women. This is how patriarchal violence functions systemically rather than just individually. A woman who avoids walking alone at night, who censors what she says to a male boss, or who stays in a dangerous relationship because she has no financial options – each of these behaviors reflects a lived response to a broader structure of male dominance.

From home to institution 🔗

Patriarchy’s influence on violence operates across multiple levels of society simultaneously. In the domestic sphere, gender roles assign women the position of caregiver and emotional labor provider, while men occupy the role of breadwinner and authority figure. When these roles are threatened or transgressed, violence often follows as a reassertion of control. Research shows that men who endorse traditional male role norms and perceive greater threat from subordination to women hold more favorable attitudes toward wife abuse, viewing violence as a functional and justifiable way of controlling women.

At the institutional level, patriarchal norms are embedded in legal, religious, educational, and political systems. As Kate Millett observed, the military, the police, political offices, and science fields are populated almost exclusively by men, and because men hold all these positions of power, they dominate the relationship between the sexes. When institutions are structured around male dominance, they tend to minimize, dismiss, or fail to adequately respond to violence against women – from underfunded domestic violence services to legal systems that historically treated women as the property of their husbands.

The interplay of class, gender, and power 🔗

Gender does not operate independently of class. The two systems intersect in ways that can intensify vulnerability to violence, particularly within family and work settings. The patriarchal hierarchy is exacerbated by the capitalist sociopolitical structure, meaning that economic inequality amplifies gendered power imbalances. A woman who is economically dependent on a partner has fewer options to leave a violent situation. A woman in a low-wage job with no savings, no credit, and no access to housing is far more constrained than one with financial independence.

This is not to say that domestic violence only happens in lower-income households – it crosses all class boundaries. However, class shapes the resources available to survive and escape it. Women with financial independence, legal literacy, and access to support networks are better positioned to leave dangerous situations. Those without these resources face compounding layers of constraint.

Violence in the workplace 🔗

The workplace is another arena where gender and class converge to produce dynamics of control and harm. Women in low-paid, precarious work – domestic labor, hospitality, agricultural work – face heightened exposure to harassment and exploitation with limited institutional recourse. The power differential between an employer and a vulnerable employee mirrors and reinforces the gendered hierarchies of the home. Feminist geographers have shown that patriarchal notions are visible in the constitution of the nation-state and embedded in the operation of capitalist systems within globalization, meaning the workplace is not a neutral space but one shaped by the same patriarchal logics that structure the family.

Women who do gain greater economic power are not always safer. Some research points to a backlash effect – where men who feel their dominance is threatened respond with increased aggression. Existing social inequalities, when challenged, may result in the re-assertion of dominance using male physicality – a remaining form of gender inequality. This helps explain why violence against women does not simply decrease as women gain more social status, but can sometimes intensify in moments of transition.

Feminist theories on patriarchy 🔗

Three feminist theorists have been especially influential in explaining how patriarchy subjugates women and frames them as resources controlled by men: Gerda Lerner, Heidi Hartmann, and Kate Millett. Their frameworks are distinct but complementary, together offering a comprehensive account of how patriarchal violence becomes institutionalized.

Gerda Lerner: patriarchy is historical, not natural 🔗

One of the most foundational arguments in feminist theory is Gerda Lerner’s insistence that patriarchy is not a biological given but a historical construction. In her landmark 1986 work The Creation of Patriarchy, Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not natural or biological, but the product of a historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. She traces the process by which men gradually took control of women’s reproductive labor, property, and social roles – a shift that took place over approximately 2,500 years.

For Lerner, the formation of private property and class society occurred after the appropriation of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities. She argues that men learned to subjugate other groups by first practicing dominance over women, and that this was expressed through slavery, beginning with the enslavement of women from conquered groups. Women became, in this sense, the first class of people treated as property. The implications for violence are profound: when women’s value is defined as reproductive and domestic, violence against them is rendered socially acceptable because their full humanity is not recognized.

Crucially, Lerner also contends that because patriarchy has a beginning in history, it can be ended through historical process. It is not destiny; it is a structure that was built, and can therefore be dismantled.

Heidi Hartmann: patriarchy, capitalism, and the division of labor 🔗

Heidi Hartmann, a feminist economist, extended the analysis of patriarchy by arguing that it cannot be fully understood without also examining its relationship to capitalism. In her influential 1979 essay “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” Hartmann argued that both Marxist method and feminist analysis are necessary to understand the position of women in capitalist societies – but that feminism has consistently been subordinated within that relationship.

Hartmann’s key contribution was analyzing the sexual division of labor: the arrangement by which women’s unpaid domestic work – cooking, childcare, cleaning, emotional labor – is treated as women’s “natural” role, while men perform paid labor and accumulate economic independence. This division is not coincidental; it is structurally enforced by patriarchal institutions. Hartmann defined male power over women and analyzed the interrelationship between patriarchy and capitalism as distinctive but entwined systems of structural relations.

The violence connection here is direct. When women are economically dependent on men – because their labor is unpaid, invisible, and undervalued – they are far more vulnerable to abuse and far less able to leave it. Economic dependence is not a side effect of patriarchy; it is a feature of it, one that keeps women bound to domestic roles and to the men who control household resources.

Kate Millett: sex is political 🔗

Kate Millett’s 1970 book Sexual Politics is widely regarded as one of the founding texts of radical feminism and one of the sharpest analyses of how patriarchy operates as a political system. Millett’s central thesis is deceptively simple: sex is political. The relationship between men and women is not a private matter governed by nature or personal feeling – it is a power relationship, structured and enforced through ideology, sociology, economics, law, and culture.

Millett defines patriarchy as “the birthright priority whereby males rule females,” a system so deeply entrenched that it runs through all other political, social, and economic forms. She was among the first to argue that patriarchy is not merely enforced by law or physical force, but by socialization – by training women to be passive and men to be dominant from childhood onwards. Biographer Gayle Graham Yates noted that Millett articulated a theory of patriarchy and conceptualized the gender and sexual oppression of women in terms that demanded a sex role revolution with radical changes of personal and family lifestyles.

One of Millett’s most important observations concerns the role of the family as an instrument of patriarchal governance. She argued that the family acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state, ruling its citizens through its family heads, so that even in societies where women are granted legal citizenship, they tend to be ruled through the family and have little formal relation to the state. This analysis helps explain how domestic violence is so often treated as a private matter rather than a political one – which is precisely the ideological framing that allows it to continue.

Millett also emphasized that patriarchy depends heavily on violence, particularly sexual violence. Force is diffuse and generalized in most contemporary patriarchies, and before assault a woman is almost universally defenseless both by her physical and emotional training. Rape and the threat of rape, for Millett, are not aberrations but instruments of political control – tools that enforce women’s subordination on a societal scale.

Why this analysis still matters 🔗

The frameworks developed by Lerner, Hartmann, and Millett are not historical artifacts. They describe dynamics that remain visible in contemporary data. In the non-Western world, including populous Southeast Asia, women continue to be subjected to violence in many forms, including domestic violence, rape, harmful traditional and customary practices, honor killing, and trafficking. Even in societies with formal legal protections for women, gender-based violence remains pervasive, fueled by the same patriarchal norms these theorists identified decades ago.

What feminist theory makes clear is that gender-based violence is not the product of individual pathology – it is the product of social structure. Individual perpetrators act within a system that normalizes, enables, and often excuses their behavior. Addressing that violence meaningfully requires more than punishing individuals after the fact. It requires examining and dismantling the patriarchal structures – in families, workplaces, legal systems, and cultural norms – that make such violence possible in the first place.

The UN’s recognition of violence against women as a form of gender-based discrimination reflects this systemic understanding: that violence rooted in patriarchy is not incidental but structural, and that eliminating it demands structural responses.

What do you think? If patriarchy is a historical construction rather than a natural state – as Gerda Lerner argues – what specific institutional changes would be most effective in dismantling the structures that enable gender-based violence? And given Hartmann’s analysis of economic dependence as a mechanism of patriarchal control, how should societies redesign labor and caregiving systems to reduce women’s vulnerability to violence?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/patriarchy
2. https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4984&context=buffalolawreview
3. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/context/gc_etds/article/3220/viewcontent/schmuhl_diss_rev.pdf
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077801208331246
5. https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/millett-kate/theory.htm
6. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-creation-of-patriarchy-9780195051858
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Patriarchy
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981687900800102
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Politics
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Millett
11. https://breakingdownpatriarchy.com/episodes-35-36-sexual-politics-by-kate-millett/
12. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10332384/
13. https://www.un.org/en/observances/ending-violence-against-women-day