How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slaves still bore the land. (1.1.2)
This is the beginning of the first story, "Was," and the narrator takes no time to introduce the idea that being descended from the male side of the family and carrying the male side's name is superior to being descended from the female side. So we know right away that this is a patrilineal society.
Quote #2
[…] the gleam of electricity in the house where the better men than this one had been content with lamps or even candles. There was a tractor under the mule-shed which Zack Edmonds would not have allowed on the place, too […] But they were the old days, the old time, and better men than these (2.1.2.5)
Here are some additional thoughts by Lucas Beauchamp on how the older generations of men were better men. Modern conveniences like electricity, tractors and (gasp) automobiles were evidence that Roth was "soft."
Quote #3
Then, in adolescence, he knew what he had seen in his father's face that morning, what shadow, what stain, what mark—something which had happened between Lucas and his father, which nobody but they knew and would ever know if the telling depended on them—something which had happened because they were themselves, men, not stemming from any difference of race not because one blood strain ran in them both. Then, in his late teens, almost a man, he even knew what it had been. It was a woman, he thought. My father and a n*****, over a woman. My father and a n***** man over a n***** woman, because he simply declined to even realize that he had even refused to think a white woman. (2.3.1.65)
Roth is voicing the idea here that fighting over a woman is such an essential male quality that it can trump any racial or familial differences. Note that Roth only comes up with this idea when he starts to become a man himself.