This paper examines the concept of `patriarchy' as a tool for analysing gender inequality, while signalling the problems which arise from a common confusion between its use as short-hand description and as explanation. It first enters a substantive critique of a theory of `patriarchy', highlighting its reductionism and circularity. It then broadens to the form of abstract structuralist theorisation used, and its flattening and mechanistic effect on analysis. As an alternative to a dualist approach to `structures of' capitalism as `patriarchy', it argues that gendering needs to be understood as integral to all social relations at the start. To unravel the mediations of this intermeshing, theory, rather than being abstract, needs to be embedded in the substantive empirical analysis of social process which might be called feminist historical materialism. The discussion finally considers why it is that a `grand narrative' of `patriarchy' survives amid the fashion of post-structuralist fragmentation, pointing to theoretical continuities of self-enclosed theorisation in abstract structuralism and in post-modernist sociology, as one dimension of explanation.
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