Help me see it. Honestly.
How is this patriarchy maintained? How come women haven't been able to break it? What is it they lack to do it?
I think that in developed nations, patriarchy now continues to operate mostly through minute, scarcely-noticable, notions and assumptions. But these notions and assumptions are nevertheless numerous and collectively, they silently condition our thinking in ways that generally tend to work to the advantage of men. Let me give as an example the phrase I used in my first post: “Be a man!” This is an exhortation to adopt a particular kind of behavior, generally regarded as predominantly positive: Be strong, be tough, work through small pains. Its sheer existence as an exhortation indicates that the behavior suggested is regarded as on the whole positive (we never say “Be an ax-murderer!”

. But there is no equivalent for women. No one exhorts someone to “Be a woman!” When we put a magnifying glass on this particular asymmetry, we see that, in a tiny way, our language habits suggest to us several things: that there is a mode of masculinity
qua masculinity that is predominately regarded as a positive thing, but that there is not for femininity
qua femininity; indeed, one could go further and say there is no way at all for women to simply “be.” If a young girl hears her dad tell her brother “Be a man!” and never hears anyone tell her “Be a woman!” she may never consciously notice the discrepency, but in a subtle way, it will probably condition her thinking, and her brother’s.
Now, of course it’s true that the phrase “Be a man!” is not wholly beneficial to men. It’s a way of steering men into a cultural stereotype of masculinity that may not be entirely appropriate or welcome or healthy. It exhorts a cultivated insensitivity, to pain, but also to other things. But between a gender that one can “be” in even a mixed way, and a gender one can’t “be” in any particular way at all, I know which one serves a person better.
Now this is just one example. I frankly only picked it because it was close to hand. So don’t imagine I’m putting any special stock in this particular example. Perhaps this one exists only in English. But there are thousands of such, and collectively they condition our minds to conceive male success and thriving more easily than female success and thriving.
The net result of these micro-notions was well captured by that article someone linked to this forum a while back on being a white male as being like playing a video game on easy mode.* Men, I believe, continue to be advantaged by numerous small notions and assumptions deeply embedded in our cultural matrix. Women are swimming against a tide. We see the results of that in the wage gap and representation in top positions gap, etc.
What does feminism need to get past this remnant of patriarchy? Time, scrutiny of minute particulars and creativity. These come to one’s attention. One lays out how they operate. Then one devises clever mechanisms to defamiliarize people with these little constituent parts of the ideology. One needs creativity because it can’t always simply be a tit-for-tat corrective. I’m not sure this case, for example, that the most fruitful avenue would be to devise a workable version of “Be a woman!” (But since this has become a long post, I won't for now elaborate on why. In the mean time, Be a bee!)
*Now I had one criticism of that article, which was that if all white males are playing on easy mode, but playing against one another, then a lot of the playing doesn’t feel particularly easy to a lot of the men. But still, the main point was valid.