Criticism
In Key Issues in Women's Work (2nd ed., 2004), sociologist Catherine Hakim compares four competing theories of male dominance, including Goldberg's theory of patriarchy as well as her own preference theory, and notes the strengths and weaknesses of patriarchy theory. For example women's dislike of female bosses is consistent with Goldberg's theory". Goldberg's "is the only theory that can explain some of the more inconvenient facts about women as well as men". "No other theory has been offered which can explain women's rejection of females in authority". She comments that Goldberg's theory "contrasts interestingly with the mind-games that Western intellectuals like to play", but concludes that Goldberg's thesis has yet to be fully proven. In her book's final chapter, after reviewing the empirical evidence, she notes that none of the four competing theories fully explains women's subordination, but that preference theory rules out the salience of sex and gender, given the evidence for female heterogeneity.
Anthropologist Eleanor Leacock takes a more political view of Goldberg's work. In a response to Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy, she characterizes Goldberg's theories as simplistic and irresponsible: "To consign the grim brutalities of abused power we see everywhere about us to what amounts to masculine 'original sin' not only denies the historical and ethnographic record... but seriously disarms all of us, as humanity, in the urgency of our need to understand and redirect our social life if we would insure ourselves a future."
Biological anthropologist Frank B. Livingstone criticizes Goldberg's understanding of causation in evolution, characterizing the evolutionary model presented in The Inevitability of Patriarchy as "absolutely backward". According to Livingstone, social behavior drives evolution rather than the other way around: "Contrary to Goldberg, I do not believe that a genetic or physiological change will occur first and then cause social or behavioral change. In fact, just the opposite, the behavior or way of life of a population determines the fitness values of the genotypes, and this changes the genetic characteristics of the population."
Read more about this topic: The Inevitability Of Patriarchy
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)