Patriarchy

This image portrays my mom fixing corn muffins to eat with our soup for dinner (which she also fixed). As you may or may not be able to tell, she is wearing her scrubs, because she usually starts fixing dinner almost as soon as she gets home from work.

When looking for an image of patriarchy taking place in my social location, I at first was at a loss as to what I could find that would represent that concept. I always had thought of patriarchy as this hugely negative thing that only certain people took part in, those types of people who didn't believe in the value of women, etc. But I realized after reading the Johnson article that patriarchy is a system that we all participate in whether we realize it or not, and even simple everyday things can be examples of it in our lives. I feel like my image is one that could have been taken in many homes, it is "traditional" for the woman of the household to prepare dinner. As Johnson states in his article, "to live in a patriarchal culture is to learn what's expected of us as men and women." (86) My mother learned from her mother that it is her job to prepare dinner for the family, and more specifically, for the husband. This is the way it has always been in my house, even though my mother works a full-time job outside the home. With very few exceptions, my mother comes home from work, and immediately starts fixing dinner. She usually makes an effort to work the dinner preparations and final meal around my dad's news watching schedule, ideally having everything ready and on the table when the news is over. Even though my dad could fix dinner himself, or even help my mom, he rarely if ever does so. This ties into the idea that because my mom is who she is, a woman and a wife, she is expected to make dinner for her husband. Because the system around us typically operates this way, we do also because it's easier to do so than try and change things. By going along with the system that is put into place, we take the path of least resistance. (79) In some ways this makes sense seeing it lends itself to order and everyone knowing what they should be doing, but at the same time it leads to a feeling of unequal shares of work. This unequal work distribution favors the male in my household, my father, so it's my family own little version of the patriarchal system taking place in our home.