Internalized Patriarchy: Women as Its Custodians
This piece examines how patriarchy persists not through male coercion alone, but through women who have internalized sexist norms and pass them to others—mothers who enforce shame around menstruation and sexuality, aunts who blame female victims, and communities that subordinate women's ambitions to marriage prospects. The writer argues that these internalized beliefs, absorbed from childhood, have become so normalized that women mistake compulsion for choice.
Staff · 13 March 2020
