It is hard to see up and out of a deep ravine. It’s hard, in fact, to see any system from the inside, even on flat terrain. How many serfs got up and out of their own space to see feudalism for what it was? It is hard, but it is possible. Guts, leadership, imagination and the nous to surge through the cracks opened up by disruptive, often only incidentally related, forces makes change possible. We know because we’ve already got some way down the road, but mostly in the rich, white world.

There’s the vote, that precious dividend of feminism’s first wave. But note, the first wave was spent by the early 20th century in the West and is still working its way through the rest of the world.

There is a series of fundamental, profoundly important human rights-based law reforms that are the dividend of feminism’s second wave, legally liberating us from chattel status in many places. But again note, this remains a distant prospect for hundreds of millions of women around the globe, where the second wave is still nascent. Women in 127 countries have no legal recourse against r-pe in marriage, for example, according to UN Women, which estimates that 603 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not a crime.

As to the next wave, many stand on the shore looking out to sea for it. There’s the odd swell here and there, and sometimes an impressive breaker, but mostly a lot of nebulous, inchoate disquiet among brave individual women and girls paddling about, often isolated and under siege, doing what they can.

Often, simply surviving is a triumph. This is hard for affluent, educated women on upward career paths to remember since they mostly live in enclaves with those of like mind and experience, unconscious of how tiny a minority they are among the 3.5 billion women on the planet.

Every so often a veritable wave machine comes along like a Hillary Clinton, who inflected the mighty US State Department into feminist fellow traveller status. Or a Christine LaGarde emerges, her ascension over Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the International Monetary Fund suggesting that at least sometimes, transaction costs will be incurred for male bastardry. These things are great. They are necessary. They must be built on.

But they represent arithmetic momentum compared to the geometrically building tsunami of male power that remains the dominant force in the world today.

A third of a century ago, Adrienne Rich presented the hard task of seeking to stand outside our own situation and gain strategic rather than tactical insight into it. She described the need to try and grasp the system as whole, not just its constituent parts, not just the parts impinging on us as individuals. She took anthropologist Kathleen Gough’s eight characteristics of male power in archaic and contemporary society from Gough’s 1975 essay, The Origin of the Family. Rich used Gough’s categories (in italics) and elaborated on them.

“In this next wave we will have to learn to fight together like guerrillas, not like mugs slaughtered standing on open plains.”

Characteristics of male power include the power of men …

1. to deny women [their own] s-xuality — [by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation; chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adultery; punishment, including death, for lesbian s-xuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures against masturbation; denial of maternal and post-menopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudo-lesbian images in the media and literature; closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to lesbian existence]

2. or to force it [male s-xuality] upon them — [by means of r-pe (including marital r-pe) and wife beating; father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialisation of women to feel that male s-xual “drive” amounts to a right; idealisation of heteros-xual romance in art, literature, the media, advertising, etc.; child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; the harem; psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and v-ginal orgasm; p-rnographic depictions of women responding pleasurably to s-xual violence and humiliation (a subliminal message being that sadistic heteros-xuality is more “normal” than sensuality between women)]

3. to command or exploit their labour to control their produce — [by means of the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid productions; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception, sterilisation, and childbirth; pimping; female infanticide, which robs mothers of daughters and contributes to generalised devaluation of women]

4. to control or rob them of their children — [by means of father right and “legal kidnapping”; enforced sterilisation; systematised infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts; the malpractice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as the “token torturer” in genital mutilation or in binding the daughter’s feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage]

5. to confine them physically and prevent their movement — [by means of r-pe as terrorism, keeping women off the streets; purdah; foot binding; atrophying of women’s athletic capabilities; high heels and “feminine” dress codes in fashion; the veil; s-xual harassment on the streets; horizontal segregation of women in employment; prescriptions for “full-time” mothering at home; enforced economic dependence of wives]

6. to use them as objects in male transactions — [use of women as “gifts”; bride price; pimping; arranged marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals — e.g., wife-hostess, cocktail waitress required to dress for male s-xual titillation, call girls, “bunnies”, geisha, kisaeng pr-stitutes, secretaries]

7. to cramp their creativeness — [witch persecutions as campaigns against midwives and female healers, and as pogroms against independent, “unassimilated” women; definition of male pursuits as more valuable than female within any culture, so that cultural values become the embodiment of male subjectivity; restriction of female self-fulfilment to marriage and motherhood; s-xual exploitation of women by male artists and teachers; the social and economic disruption of women’s creative aspirations; erasure of female tradition]

8. to withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments — [by means of non-education of females; the “Great Silence” regarding women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture; s-x-role tracking that deflects women from science, technology, and other “masculine” pursuits; male social/professional bonding which excludes women; discrimination against women in the professions]

The more things change, the more they stay the same, one might say reading this list in 2013. It might as easily have been written today as 33 years ago.

If you read it, instinctively recoiled and rejected it, take this challenge: draw up a list of practices by women regulating, oppressing, destroying men and see how long it is. I doubt there is even a single entry comparable to anything in this list.

The confusing thing about the tactical view, the view from the gully, is that one can only see bits and pieces, not the whole; one can’t get a proportional sense of how the undeniable achievements of the second wave net out against the remorseless storming thrust of continuing male power. Without a strategic appreciation of the situation, how can we even know whether in net terms we are moving forward or backward, let alone work out what to do next?

The Iceni leader Boudicca’s speech rallying followers to rise up against the Romans in the first century was recorded by Tacitus thus:

“We British are used to women commanders in war but I am not fighting for my kingdom or my wealth (but for) my lost freedom, my battered body and my violated daughters …”

Boudicca — brave, stirring, inspiring — is one of our best-loved heroes, but we must learn from her fate and apply the lesson if we are not to be doomed to keep winning signal battles while continuing to get smashed over time in the war overall. As Robin Cross and Rosalind Miles point out in Warrior Women: 3000 Years of Courage and Heroism, Boudicca was a charismatic commander but had no battle plan. She met Suetonius on an open plain. Cross and Miles write:

“Suetonius, a veteran of mountain warfare, fought with a forest at his back, forcing the Celts to charge headlong up a slope to meet Roman javelins When they had exhausted themselves, the Romans counterattacked, driving them back onto their wagons where their families waited, and all were killed. In the bloody melee of defeated warriors, women, children, pack animals and baggage, Tacitus estimated the British dead at 80,000 compared with four-hundred Romans.”

We have to have a strategy to win the war, not just tactics leading to the odd battle won here or there, no matter how good those wins might be. We have to respond to Adrienne Rich’s challenge to see the system we are in as a whole, not just its constituent parts. We have to identify and welcome the men who show solidarity with the cause and get them, too, to see the bigger picture.

And that cause is a world where line by line, clause by clause, the depredations on the Gough/Rich list, big and small, are struck out forever. In this next wave we will have to learn to fight together like guerrillas, not like mugs slaughtered standing on open plains. Let us escape the maze of false dichotomies, let’s not be our own well-meaning enemies. Let us instead get smart, get strategic and get going.

*This is an edited extract from “Standing up to P: Stop splashing about and make some waves” in Griffith REVIEW: WOMEN & POWER, out now