Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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| a fool or simpleton; ninny. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
- Both lament the erosion of patriarchy and the emancipation of women.
- Patriarchy is an emotional economy as well as an unequal distribution of power.
- By a cruel irony, the war was an opportunity, a challenge to the patriarchy.
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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patriarchy
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A family or society in which authority is vested in males, through whom descent and inheritance are traced. (See also matriarchy and primogeniture.)
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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patriarchy
hypothetical social system in which the father or a male elder has absolute authority over the family group; by extension, one or more men (as in a council) exert absolute authority over the community as a whole. Building on the theories of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin, many 19th-century scholars sought to form a theory of unilinear cultural evolution. This hypothesis, now discredited, suggested that human social organization "evolved" through a series of stages: animalistic sexual promiscuity was followed by matriarchy, which was in turn followed by patriarchy.
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