I think bell hooks is right that the crushing social/political/economic injustice that is particularly virulent in our present evil age is “neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” By that I mean the kind of patriarchy that is bent by all those modifiers. Not all patriarchal systems are created equal. There are patriarchies that are benign, for all practical purposes. And so, if all members of a household live hand to mouth and no man, woman, or child has the luxury of sitting out the struggle to survive, it doesn’t matter much, when more or less all is said and done, if compliance with a tradition crowns a male “the head of the household.” On the other hand, other instances of patriarchy are more endemically and thus subtly embedded in the schema of a world. They escape notice except in their most insipidly blatant demographics. Further, those patriarchies are compatible with the ascent of women to their honorable positions of power. Such patriarchies may change demographic shape, e.g., as larger and larger numbers of women are plugged into their executive chairs, but very little changes to its already cold heart and soul, very little changes in the day to day lives of the most oppressed who live in the shadows cast by corporate office buildings, say, the BIPOC poor. Thus removing corporate or academic or ecclesiastical “glass ceilings” is to be applauded, but, really, do we want our daughters to plug themselves into those systems of power, do we really want to tell them, “One day you, too, can rise to greatness, to wealth and influence, you, too, can one day stand on your own two feet, want for nothing, and from within the halls of power change the world!”?