In early patriarchy, women's ancient community tasks were turned into slave labor. Women produced the surplus products on which men based their secular power and control. In the next stage of economic development these slave tasks became the industrial occupations of the workers, while the ruling men (and their "wives") were exempt from labor. The ruling men reserved for themselves the "manly" occupations of war, hunting, sport, and priestly observances—while "workers" kept the world going. Women's forced labor, and later working-class labor, freed elite males to become lawyers, judges, doctors, artists, priests, and warriors—specialized, privileged occupations that all others are barred from. And whole bodies of law, religious doctrine, and custom are then assembled to forcibly maintain these men in these positions of power. Patriarchal law, often called "the Will of God," is in fact a wholly secular cynical legal system designed purposely to maintain male power through institutional control of female energy. Under patriarchal legal, religious, and economic-social systems, some men dominate others. But all men benefit from their organized domination of the community of women.
Which is no longer a community. Patriarchy breaks up the female collective by forcibly capturing and imprisoning each woman's female energy within the patrilocal family. Within this isolation cell, each woman's creative energy becomes servant energy, directed and owned by men. In the Hindu Code of Manu—typical of all patriarchal family law—the woman must never be free, from birth to death, of subjugation to a male relative. She passes from the guardianship of her father, to that of her husband, and finally to her oldest son. They control her education, her property, the total disposal of her mind and body, in life and in death. The ignobility of this male obsession with control is equalled only by its effectiveness. Under the Code of Manu, the Hindu woman becomes a nonperson. The breaking up of the powerful ancient women's collectives was the only way by which men could have broken women's strength and independence—but still keep a vaguely living body around to do the dirty work in bed and bathroom. What better way to turn the Great Goddess into a sex-serf than by isolating each individual woman, keeping her under total control within the male-dominated and defined family household—where she is never allowed freedom of movement, of thought, of desire—where her body, her mind, her labor, and her children are seen as property, wealth belonging to the man. Where the only thing she can do with her sex-serfdom is pass it on conscientiously to her daughters.
