Whole sections of The Mere Wife were inspired by this thing. There’s a collective matriarch POV from the women who give the patriarchy power. This is why.
The idea that the hierarchical power you know, even if you’re not on top. is better than having the chaos of newborn power yourself, is something that underscores all of this. Knowing how to serve the patriarchy to get treats isn’t a lack of knowledge. It’s hard won. Though 😖.
A thousand years of mythology have taught women that it’s better and safer to have your husband in charge than to be in charge yourself, and so believers push for male power and female subjugatikn. Who wrote those myths, though?
It’s a certain kind of looking away from reality, to imagine that systems that keep women subjugated are actually the best version for women. But the version we’re seeing here is women who believe wives are the Wizard, running the show, while their men are in the line of fire.
It’s all entwined with humble = good woman, and powerful & aggressive = good man, and you can see these tropes throughout ballad and heroic folklore, the idea that behind every strong man there is a good woman who keeps him good, for no credit.
And we all know that not getting credit is part of Saint-qualification as well, so if you happen to live in a gender wherein virgin, good wife, and whore are the tropes, well, it’s not a hard choice for many women. Being “good” is sold as something that will keep you safe.
And being “good” means you stand by your man, even if he’s not actually your husband, but your candidate. Your job is to fix his failings behind closed doors, and support him passionately in public.
Women have been instrumental in keeping the patriarchy where it is, because there is no role in the index for women as equals. There’s no trope for that. There’s no mythic tradition. There’s no folkloric path to safety from equality.
It’s pretty intense that the only trope for women that comes close to equality with men is “good wife,” and that it contains within it inherent narrative subjugation. It requires a living husband. Unhusbanded, the categorization begins again.
So for these women to view the president as a flawed and somewhat endearing husband, one capable of having his mind changed behind closed doors by women, but angry and strong enough in public to keep power for a troupe of persuasive “good wives”? That makes sense.
They’re wrong, of course. It’s not like women aren’t murdered by their husbands more than by any other category of person. Safety isn’t in subjugation. But this is a many centuried Stockholmification, the one that says the man you support will know he must protect you.
It depends as well on centuries of monster mythology, by which I mean, the myth of the Monster Other, which a Good Man is meant to protect his Devoted Wife from. All these myth structures depend on nurtured racism, on transforming immigrants into invaders, on fertilizing fear.
It’s necessary to nurture myths of pillage, particularly pillage by rather than OF the poor, to categorize anyone not white as a potential unified invading army bent on stealing the precious - by which I mean, the women, who’ve been, in these stories, turned into golden objects.
When you have no power as a person, i.e. you are a women who has embraced patriarchy as your brand, the notion of being the precious, whether you are a golden hoard or a pearl, makes you feel safe. You seek that objectification. Valuable objects are safer than women.
These messages brought to you by several years of digging deep into Beowulf, and into the language of heroics, of Good Wife (Wealtheow) and Bad unWife (Grendel’s Mother), and of what we talk about when we talk about safety and about monsterhood.
I like to think with my thumbs. Typos etc are because I typed this thread on the fly. Sometimes I use twitter to explain the messed up structures of the social universe to myself as much as to anyone else.
