patriarchy,hypothetical social system in which the father or a male elder has absolute authority over thefamily group; by extension, one or more men (as in a council) exert absolute authority over thecommunity as a whole. Building on the theories of biologicalevolution developed byCharles Darwin, many 19th-century scholars sought to form a theory of unilinearcultural evolution. Thishypothesis, now discredited, suggested that human social organization “evolved” through a series of stages: animalistic sexual promiscuity was followed bymatriarchy, which was in turn followed bypatriarchy.

Theconsensus among modernanthropologists andsociologists is that while power is often preferentially bestowed on one sex or the other, patriarchy is not the cultural universal it was once thought to be. However, some scholars continue to use the term in the general sense for descriptive,analytical, andpedagogical purposes.