It would be really useful to get rid of patriarchy right about
… NOW. Yesterday would be even better. International
Women’s Day would have been perfect. Billions of girls and
women, countless boys and men, plus the odd ocean and
forest would all be doing cartwheels.
adversarial, and their pathological desire to dominate and
exploit. Indeed, the strategy of divide and conquer was
historically used in many different ways by empires seeking
to expand their territories.
Gloria Steinem broached this subject of division most
Clearly the best way to accelerate the dismantling of
eloquently: “I want to talk about an imbalance that has
patriarchy is via a totally united, sharply focused women’s
led to division, hierarchy and alienation from nature. It has
movement of unprecedented proportions. So where is it?
led to governance by ranking rather than linking. It has led
We all need it – desperately. What’s preventing universal,
to worshipping various gods who look suspiciously like
unconditional support between women? What’s hindering a the ruling class. I'm talking about the division of human
massive eruption of global female collaboration?
beings into the cults of masculinity and femininity, into false
divisions that conceal both our shared humanity and our
What would be amazing would be if we could wildly
individual uniqueness. We are trained in this division very
increase the number of men and women willing to install
young, usually in our own families, and it normalizes later
a new app – let’s call it the Unity App – into their mental
divisions into leader-and-led, subject-and-object, rich-andoperating system. This Unity App will kick in every time a
poor, even conqueror-and-conquered.”
person is about to make a decision, and it will simply pose
one question, “Will this bring women together or keep
What this means is that, if we were to pick two women (or
them apart?”
men) at random from around the globe, it’s quite possible
The Unity App
Apart = Problem. Together = Solution.
Here are some of the ways in which I feel ‘divide and
conquer’ pushes women apart. Perhaps the most obvious,
deliberate and dangerous is the tactic of the bully and the
abuser, gradually isolating an individual woman from her
sources of support. Most damaging in the hands of male
perpetrators of domestic violence, but also an alienating
tactic used by girls and women against each other. How
can heightened awareness, plus knowledge of preventive
strategies, enable women to help their peers avoid this
trap?
A hugely divisive consequence of patriarchal systems
emanates from their obsession with being competitive and
Graeme Bowman
there may exist, between them, numerous artificial wedges
pressuring them to distrust, dislike and dismiss each other;
such wedges relating to race, ethnicity, class, religion,
nationality, values, seniority, age, physical appearance or
level of education… not to mention those gender-based
wedges that artificially splinter, within each one of us, the
naturally occurring range of masculine and feminine traits.
Then there’s social exclusion. If girls and women within a
certain culture are kept out of school, kept indoors, kept
away from their peers for whatever reason, opportunities for
collaboration and mutual support are diminished. Where
such women have internet access, can we now expect to
see empowerment by stealth, bypassing traditional male
structures of control? The extraordinary work being done
by World Pulse is an outstanding example of giving voice to