Erased: Connecting race, gender, and the cruelty inherent in American patriarchy…
If you are looking for a different perspective on our nation’s founding and the connections among the various issues that divide us today, pick up Anna Malaika Tubbs’ book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us.
The book describes the role patriarchy has played in our nation’s history. The word itself is derived from a Greek word meaning “rule of the father” and describes a fairly universal male-oriented social system that has dominated human history. The often glowing histories of past empires governed under male-dominant rule distort the realities of living within their societies and sometimes overlook their limitations:
“Patriarchy does not refer to any man or collection of men, but to a kind of society in which men and women participate … A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.”
- American sociologist Allan Johnson
In fact, other forms of social organization have existed in the past and prospered. Our nation, from its inception, was organized by and for men, and the historical records indicate that this was a deliberate decision. Believing that the limitations and denials of rights of women and slaves were choices made by men “of their times”, and therefore, absolving them of their consequences is historically inaccurate. They knew what they were doing based on documents preserved from their deliberations.
According to Tubbs’ book, the oppression of women implicit in the term is a blueprint for the dehumanization of minorities, gays, the poor, and the disabled, all of whom are rendered powerless under the control of what in America has become white, wealthy males. For white women, especially, the patriarchal implications of our founding documents, in which women, who at the time meant mostly white married women, needn’t worry about running the nation because their role was to maintain the home and raise the children. While voting rights were never specifically addressed in the Constitution, the right to vote was left to states and was generally reserved for white men with property in most states, with some exceptions:
While most states initially restricted voting to property-owning or tax-paying white men, some states, like New Jersey, allowed free Black men and women of both races to vote provided they met the property or tax requirements. While states soon began expanding voting rights to more citizens, this process unfolded unevenly because it was left up to each state. New Jersey actually revoked the vote from Black men and women in 1807 and North Carolina didn’t remove a property qualification until 1856. Similarly, Wyoming granted women the right to vote in 1869, long before all women achieved it nationally. This variability continues today, which is why felons can vote in some states but not in others.
The founders were writing and governing for a hypernormative society in which women, like slaves, were considered the property of their fathers and their husbands, and where the concept of “outsider” was the broad basis for dehumanization and segregation that are still evident in society today.
Tubbs relates the story of an enslaved couple, William and Ellen Craft, who escaped to the North before the Civil War, disguised as a white man attended to by his black slave. Ellen was a light-skinned daughter of a black slave and her white master:
During their escape, they traveled on first class trains, stayed in the best hotels, and Ellen dined one evening with a steamboat captain. Ellen dyed her hair and bought appropriate clothes to pass as a young man, traveling in a jacket and trousers. William used his earnings as a cabinet-maker to buy clothes for Ellen to appear as a free white man. William cut her hair to add to her manly appearance. Ellen also practiced the correct gestures and behavior. She wore her right arm in a sling to hide the fact that she could not write. They traveled to nearby Macon for a train to Savannah. Although the Crafts had several close calls, they successfully avoided detection. On December 21, they boarded a steamshipfor Philadelphia, in the free state of Pennsylvania, where they arrived early on the morning of Christmas Day.— — Wikipedia
Their story is a stark example of the false stratification including race, gender, and status that was the basis of the patriarchal society envisioned by Madison, Washington, Jefferson, et.al. The Crafts confounded all definitions of power dynamics that were perceived at the time. The politics today, reviving historic perceptions of race and gender, are attempts to repossess rights won in centuries-long battles in the courts and in Congress to overcome the lingering effects of the originalists’ American patriarchy.
Under the current administration, there’s been an added layer to the chaos of reclaiming male dominance within the so-called bro culture that lies at the core of MAGA politics. The dehumanization that once seemed so natural to the founders has been intensified by the demonization of victims in nearly all of their policy changes. The shift toward autocracy we are experiencing as the prevailing political climate is a product of patriarchy- inserting a strong leader representing the dominant class, taking back undeserved power that was supposed to be shared democratically.
Ms. Tubbs ends her book with a prescription for overcoming our homemade version of patriarchy with what some might consider a controversial suggestion:
In order to defeat American patriarchy we must believe in our ability to imagine, create, and test alternative possibilities; we must listen to our intuition, seek knowledge, and reject attempts to limit us from learning; we must unify, collaborate, and celebrate our differences…
I often say that the way we achieve a new nation is through trusting, listening to, and electing Black women. I do not say this because I believe Black women should be in charge of everything, or because I think Black women want to be. I say it because in our current American patriarchy, Black women have historically been cast as the furthest from being able to achieve the status of humanness. Through this expulsion from what it means to be a person in the United States-an experience that requires the denial of other people’s humanity, an ignoring of other people’s needs, a delusion that allows one to be blind to our interconnectedness-most Black women have successfully rejected that definition, to the benefit of everyone. We Black women know that the opposite of American patriarchy is not necessarily a nation where women have power over men, it is simply a nation where power over others is no longer the goal…
— Erased, by Anna Malika Tubbs, p. 329
Preserving the patriarchy requires a nation willing to sacrifice its future for short-term relief from the inevitable. Empires based upon the principle have come and gone because the wisdom and resourcefulness of humankind aren’t entrusted by gender or race, economic status, or physical capacity. Attempts at creating a society based on gender alone, or on manufactured cultural norms, limit our capacity to survive as a nation and as a species.
Originally published at https://www.dailykos.com on July 6, 2025.
