By Jenna Price
FEMINISM
Patriarchy Inc
Cordelia Fine
Atlantic, $34.99
I would very much like Cordelia Fine to become a newspaper columnist, writing entirely about the trouble with men. Believe me, this is not to replace me or the many other fine women who ink many, many words about the patriarchy. It’s in addition.
Not because she’s smarter and wittier than the rest of us (although yes, that too). It’s because she would absolutely skewer the endless ream of commenters. To sum them up, it’s #notallmen. It’s because women make different choices. Nah, there is no pay gap, it’s against the law.
To sum her up, they could not be more wrong.
As the genius Rebecca Solnit once wrote, Men Explain Things to Me. Now, publisher willing, I could send copies of her new book, Patriarchy Inc, to all those correspondents as a public service. Maybe I could get them to sit a test at the end.
In Patriarchy Inc, Fine, a professor at the University of Melbourne in historical and philosophical studies, explains things to me. And to men. Perhaps we could have a “Finebot” which she designs as a public good.
Her book is both an encyclopedia and a manual. Fine is meticulous in her research – across social and psychological sciences – to bring us a once-in-a-lifetime analysis of how we got here. At the outset, from the very first sentence of the introduction, Fine asks us what our vision of gender equality looks like. She replies: “Whatever it is, it needs to take a stand on divisions of labour. Work – who does what tasks in society, and what they get in return – is at the heart of social justice.”
Who does what and who gets what. As she points out, the divisions of labour are both the causes and the consequences of the predicament we find ourselves in, “the sex-based hierarchy of status and power over resources, aka patriarchy, that we see in the advanced economies of the Global North”. And that is the entire focus of the book.
It’s a brave feminist author who lets us into her life – into her bedroom – to explain how boundaries are set, how those divisions of labour come about. Fine not only explains, but also provides two top tips for making it happen.
Here’s how it works in the Fine household. Every adult female Fine is brought morning tea in bed. It’s like a family religion, a “natural right”. Every man who comes into the family, through birth or marriage, signs up to this project.
Cordelia Fine: every adult woman in her household is brought a cup of tea in bed.Credit: Peter Casamento
“The first is to draw boundaries around your group, to circumscribe who is eligible for those resources.” In the case of the Fines, it is always the adult women. Only the adult women.
And the second tip? Establish the community that’s eligible for the superior claims. Anyone else knocking at the door for the privileges? Absolutely no way. We can’t all manifest the Fine women privilege, although yes, please. But meanwhile, the way we are going about equality – a fairer society – is not working.
The hot-button DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) approach might profit from women’s labour, but it hasn’t worked out at work. Workplaces aren’t fairer than they were before DEI because, as Fine puts it, “that was never the goal”.
What was the goal? As Fine argues, it’s the goal of satisfying capitalism. For decades academics have documented the way in which the gendered division of labour is a result of what she describes as tussles “between the forces of capitalism, unions and guilds, patriarchal interests at home, the state, and feminist activism”.
Now some of what I’ve mentioned here might sound dry and dusty. It’s anything but. Within a few paragraphs, she’s also mentioned various conservative economists, blundering politicians and misogynist influencers, a few jokes and contemporary narratives.
Fine has all the research all the time, but she weaves it together with poignant personal anecdotes, including the revelation that the father of her first child worked part-time but was never allowed to tell anyone he was doing that.
She’s not just a scholar but someone with lived experience – even if she does get a cup of tea delivered to her bedside each and every day.
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