Sorry, of course you're not evasive. We have a communication and inferential distance problem, I'd say.
Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this.
Hehehehehehe!... has it never occured to you that - the "workplace" as such being an industrial-age institution - the domination in it that you so dislike (and quite rightly!) might be the institutional descendant of earlier family-like, harshly hierarchical structures? Imagine the power that a master held over an apprentice in a medieval guild, or the domestic slaves of Ancient Greece.
patriarchy
Isn't this something else?
Our definitions of patriarchy seem to be world apart. It feels to me as if the examples you cautiously list - "the father holds greater formal power"-with-caveats, or "child custody" - are, frankly, local and minor matters compared to the really systemic things!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy#Psychoanalytic_theories
Although the term patriarchy is loosely used to stand for 'male domination', as has been pointed out above, it more crucially means - as others have stated here: "The rule of The Father". So patriarchy does not refer to a simple binary pattern of male power over women, but power exerted more complexly by age as well as gender, and by older men over women, children, and younger men. Some of these younger men may inherit and therefore have a stake in patriarchy's continuing conventions. Others may rebel.... The patriarchal triangular relationship of a father, a mother and an inheriting eldest son frequently form the dynamic and emotional narratives of popular culture and are enacted performatively in rituals of courtship and marriage.[45] They provide conceptual models for organising power relations in spheres that have nothing to do with the family, for example, politics and business.
That's the big, scary shit to me. (Before anyone thinks about it, my father is just fine, lol! But... you've read e.g. Kafka, right?)
Some related feminist blah-blah, please take a look:
Also:
The parents have a responsibility to help their children fit in socially in their community (help them find a mate, an economic niche, make sure to maintain good relations with neighbours and relatives).
Replace "The parents" with "The Great All-Benevolent Church", or "The state social services", and you'd be alarmed to say the least. Of course well-intentioned help and guidance are very nice... but who sets the guidelines for it, and how is the information about children's extrapolated volition communicated in your society? In today's families - humans being humans and all power corrupting most of them - we obviously see parents' convenience and unexamined prejudgices advertised as "for the children's own good". Would there be less of that in your farmer society, or more?
P.S.: how "allowed" should, say, experiments with polyamory be? Socially, economically, legally?
The thing about family-like hierarchical structures is that they fail badly when applied to groups larger than families.
Related to: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity, Does My Vote Matter?
And voting adds legitimacy to it.
Thank you.
#annoyedbymotivatedcognition