Power Relationships: Walby on Patriarchy
Power Relationships and Social Stratification
Power relationships describe the ways in which some groups in society are able to exercise power over others — shaping their choices, constraining their opportunities and limiting their participation in social, economic and political life. Sociologists identify a range of factors that produce unequal power relationships: social class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, age, disability, religion and beliefs. These factors intersect and overlap, so a woman from an ethnic minority background may experience forms of disadvantage related simultaneously to gender, ethnicity and, in some contexts, class.
Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990) identified six structures through which patriarchy operates: paid work, household production, culture, sexuality, male violence, and the state. These structures restrict women’s power and maintain male domination across society.
Walby’s Six Structures of Patriarchy
Sylvia Walby (1990) argued that patriarchy is not simply a matter of individual men dominating individual women, but a structural system operating through multiple institutions simultaneously. She identified six patriarchal structures:
- Paid work: Although formal equality legislation exists in the UK (the Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act), women continue to be disadvantaged in the labour market. Women are more likely to work part-time, to be concentrated in lower-paid “feminised” occupations, and to face the glass ceiling in reaching senior roles.
- Household production: Men benefit from women’s unpaid domestic labour in the home. Even when women have paid employment outside the home, research (including Oakley’s critique of the symmetrical family) shows they continue to carry the greater burden of housework and childcare — a pattern described as the double shift.
- Patriarchal culture: Cultural norms and media representations continue to impose different standards on men’s and women’s behaviour. Double standards operate in sexual behaviour, appearance and public conduct. Women who challenge cultural norms face ridicule or social stigma.
- Sexuality: Women have greater freedom to express their sexuality than in earlier generations, but Walby argues they do so subject to double standards. Men with multiple sexual partners may be admired by peers; women with equivalent behaviour are frequently judged negatively. These attitudes control women’s behaviour and reinforce patriarchal norms.
- Male violence: The use or threat of violence by men against women is a powerful mechanism of patriarchal control. Heidensohn’s work on female conformity notes that fear of male violence constrains women’s behaviour in public spaces. Domestic violence, sexual harassment and the threat of assault restrict women’s freedom and reinforce patriarchal authority.
- The state: While the state is less explicitly patriarchal than in earlier centuries, Walby argues it continues to do relatively little to protect women from patriarchal power. Women are under-represented in elected and appointed positions of power. Laws on equal pay are weakly enforced. State policies have sometimes reinforced traditional gender roles through benefits and tax systems.
Walby also argued that the form of patriarchy in Western society has changed historically. In earlier periods, private patriarchy operated through the direct control of individual women by their fathers or husbands within the family home. Women were largely confined to the private sphere — the domestic domain — and had minimal access to public life, the labour market or legal rights.
In contemporary Western society, Walby argued that public patriarchy has become more dominant. Women have formal access to public life — education, employment, politics — but are collectively disadvantaged within those spheres. They are segregated into lower-paid, lower-status positions and face systematic barriers (the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap, under-representation in leadership) that collectively maintain male dominance even without the direct personal control of private patriarchy.
Other Dimensions of Unequal Power Relationships
Beyond gender, power relationships in the UK are also shaped by social class: Marx’s analysis of the bourgeoisie’s power over the proletariat, and Weber’s concept of social closure, both explain how economic and status power relationships maintain class inequality. Race and ethnicity: institutional racism can operate through power structures in policing, employment and the education system to disadvantage ethnic minority groups regardless of their individual characteristics. Sexuality: LGBTQ+ individuals have faced legal persecution and continue in some contexts to experience discrimination, limiting their power and participation. Age: both the young and the elderly can be marginalised from power — ageism limits older workers’ labour market participation and can affect political representation.
Disability: social models of disability argue that disabled people’s limited power and participation in society is not a consequence of their impairment itself but of the social barriers — inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, lack of support — that society erects. Religion and beliefs: religious minorities can face discrimination and marginalisation. Islamophobia, for example, is documented in employment discrimination studies in the UK. Religious identity can also be a source of community power and solidarity.
Functionalists tend to see unequal power relationships as reflecting the differential functional importance of social roles. Those who perform the most socially important roles exercise the most authority, and this is seen as socially necessary rather than oppressive. Gender role differences, from this perspective, reflect functional specialisation (expressive and instrumental roles in the family, following Parsons) rather than patriarchal oppression.
Marxists argue that power relationships in capitalist society fundamentally reflect economic class relationships. The bourgeoisie exercise power over the proletariat through ownership of the means of production, the legal system, the state and ruling class ideology. Other forms of inequality — racism, sexism — can be seen as ultimately rooted in or serving the needs of capitalism by dividing the working class and depressing wages.
Feminist sociologists, following Walby, argue that patriarchy is an independent system of power that operates across class, ethnic and other boundaries. Patriarchal power relationships cannot be reduced to class conflict — they predate capitalism and persist even in formally equal societies. Walby’s six structures show how patriarchy is reproduced not by any single institution but by a complex of interconnected structures operating simultaneously.
Walby distinguished between private patriarchy (direct personal control of women by husbands or fathers in the family home) and public patriarchy (collective disadvantage of women in the public sphere despite formal access — gender pay gap, glass ceiling, under-representation in leadership). She argued Western society has shifted from the former to the latter.