Feminists have sought to identify the mechanisms that support patriarchal structures.
Different feminisms look at different areas of patriarchal ideologies.
Feminist anthropologists and sociologists have challenged the analysis of social structures based on men as head as families. Feminist economists have looked at the way in which economics has not accounted for invisible and unpaid work by women. Feminist literary critics have rewritten the patriarchal canon of male authors by rediscovering and republishing forgotten women writers, giving a new criterion for assessing the importance of popular literary genres. Some feminist theorists have used socialist analysis of class structure and psychoanalytic theories of gender construction as methodological tools to help uncover invisible patriarchal structures. Many feminists contend that the central mechanism of patriarchy is the way in which male domination is disguised as a 'natural' phenomenon.