Matriarchy

A matriarchy is a tradition in which community power lies with the women or mothers of a community. The word matriarchy derives from the Latin words matri meaning mother and archon meaning governor or ruler. Matriarchy is sometimes extended to refer to "government by women," although this is more technically termed "gynocracy."

Matriarchy is distinct from matrilineality, where children are identified in terms of their mother rather than their father, such as in the Jewish tradition. Extended families and tribal alliances form along female blood-lines in matrilineal societies.

Matriarchy is also distinct from matrifocality, which some anthropologists use to describe societies where maternal authority is prominent in domestic relations.

Matriarchy, matrilineality, and matrifocality

Anthropologist Donald Brown's list of "human universals" (i.e., features shared by all current human societies) includes men being the "dominant element" in public political affairs (Brown 1991, p. 137). This "human universal" of male pre-eminence holds true for historical as well as current human societies. True matriarchal societies were and are extremely rare. Wherever human beings are found, be they ancient or modern, there has been a marked preference for men to hold the reins of power—at least visibly.

In fact, women have been influential in societies both ancient and modern. Even if women's public responsibilities were muted or non-existent, their influence was felt keenly. Such expressions as "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world" recognizes the importance of child-rearing in molding the future of society. Expressions such as "Behind every great man there is a great woman," recognize the less visible but crucial role a woman may play.

It is women's behind-the-scenes influence that is theorized by some to have contributed to traditional Jewish society becoming matrilineal. Men holding the reins of power was a given. However, the influence of women was felt in ways that some analysts think culminated in introducing the system of matrilineality. In Proverbs, the "capable wife" is the bulwark of her husband's reputation (Proverbs 31:23, NIV). It is implicitly due to her that he is "respected at the city gate" and "takes his seat among the elders of the land." That is, it is due to her wise ways that he is publicly prominent. She husbands his wealth, increases it with her labors and supervisory abilities, and protects it with charitable giving. (Proverbs 31:13-22). It is she who earns the respect and accolades of their children. (Proverbs 31:28)

Indeed the mother's influence on children was one of the reasons why matrilineality is theorized to have arisen in the Jewish tradition: the children become what the mother teaches them to be. Susan Sorek offers a thesis that women's contributions in the area of loving kindness or charity—hesed—made them so important and influential in the salvation of the nation of Israel that the Rabbis adopted a matrilineal system.

Overt matriarchy is rare both in history and in current times. The Wemale culture of western Seram, which was studied by A.E. Jensen during the Frobenius Institute expedition of 1938, and who are often indicated as an example, are not thoroughly and consistently matriarchal. Karl Kerenyi noted this in the introduction to Eleusis : Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter 1967, p. xxxii). Feminist Joan Bamberger notes that the historical record contains no reliable evidence of any society in which women dominated (Bamberger 1974.) The Trobriand Islands were considered a matriarchy by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski; the dispute this view has engendered is discussed at that entry. Peter N. Stearns and other historians have speculated as to whether or not agricultural Japan was a matriarchy prior to contact with patriarchal China. (Stearns 2000, p. 51). On the other hand, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday favors redefining and reintroducing the word matriarchy, especially in reference to modern, matrilineal societies like the Minangkabau. This group lives in West Sumatra and numbers about four million; it is considered the largest and most stable matrilineal society in the modern world. Sanday argues that this society is a modern matriarchy defined not in polar opposition to patriarchy, but on unique terms.

The matrilineal Mosuo people of China, and the Minicoy islanders are considered to be the only living matriachal society today.

Societies wherein women hold a pre-eminent place in kinship structures are called "matrifocal" rather than matriarchal. Anthropologist R. L. Smith (2002) refers to "matrifocality" as the kinship structure of a social system where the mother assumes structural prominence. Most anthropologists distinguish matrifocality from matriarchy.

The traditional Nair community in Kerala, South India is matrifocal. (In today's modern world this system is rarely practised. The members of the Nair community now live in nuclear families). A Nair matrifocal family is called a Tarawad or Marumakkathayam family. A traditional Nair Tarwad consists of a mother and her children living together with their mother's surviving eldest brother or eldest surviving maternal uncle who is called Karanavan. In a Nair family, among all the women at home, the eldest mother would become the head of the family. However this does not imply that the decision making was in the woman's hand. The 'Karanavan' was responsible for making most decisions. The main significance of this system is that the heirs to the property were the women in the family and the men folk were only allowed to enjoy the benefits during their lifetime. The naming system of the Nair community had the prefix of their mother's 'family name' and they adopted the mother's surname.

Archaeological hypotheses

Whether matriarchal societies might have existed at some time in the distant past is controversial. The controversy began in reaction to the book by Johann Jakob Bachofen Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World in 1861. Several generations of ethnologists were inspired by his pseudo-evolutionary theory of archaic matriarchy. Following him and Jane Ellen Harrison, several generations of scholars, arguing usually from myths or oral traditions and neolithic female cult-figures, suggested that many ancient societies were matriarchal, or even that there existed a wide-ranging matriarchal society prior to the ancient cultures of which we are aware (see for example The White Goddess by Robert Graves).

More recent archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas, arguing for a widespread matriarchal culture in pre-Indo-European Old Europe of the Neolithic, have made missteps while attempting to overcome skepticism in what has been until recently an overwhelmingly masculine field.

Matriarchies in mythology

One area where written myths are available from an early period is the Aegean culture-zone, where the Minoan Great Goddess was worshipped in a society where women and men were apparently equals. Modern self-described "Goddess women" are too quick to assume that any culture that worships a Mother Goddess must be a matriarchy, but there are traces, under the insistently patriarchal Olympian mythology of classical Greece, of earlier matrilineal systems. See the entries for Alcimede or for Hyas for examples.

Another famous legendary matriarchy (and gynarchy) on the edges of the Greek cultural horizon was Amazon society, which took shape in the imaginations of classical Greeks, based on reports of Scythian female status and even female warriors. However, extreme caution is called for in determining to what extent, if any, such myths or oral traditions reflected reality. About Amazons, Michael Grant notes that these female warriors were said to live at the boundaries of the world to which Greeks had travelled, making them kin to marvellous beings or monsters supposed to dwell in distant lands, like the Blemmyes or Cynocephali.

Regardless of actual historical fact, many cultures have myths about a time when women were dominant. Bamberger (1974) examines several of these myths from South American cultures, and concludes that, by portraying the women from this period as evil, they often serve to keep modern-day women under control.

Historian Ronald Hutton has argued that there is no necessary correlation between the worship of female deities and relative levels of social or legal egalitarianism between the sexes. He has pointed out that within European history, in seventeenth century Spain there were many religious institutions staffed exclusively by women. A female quasi-deity was a conspicuous part of public religious veneration, and cult images of female supernatural beings were frequently encountered. Spain can be compared to the seventeenth century Netherlands, where the worship of female quasi-deities was emphatically rejected and female clergy did not exist. Yet, the social and legal status of women was much higher in the Netherlands than in Spain during this period. In the Netherlands, women were freer to move about unwatched, and could own businesses of their own as well as separate property. In Spain, their public roles, and their rights under both law and unwritten custom, were sharply circumscribed.

Origins of the belief

Belief in a matriarchy, and its replacement by "patriarchy" can be linked to the historical "inevitabilities" which the nineteenth century's concept of progress through cultural evolution introduced into anthropology. Friedrich Engels, among others, formed the curious and rather racist notion that some primitive peoples did not grasp the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. They therefore had no clear notion of paternity. According to this hypothesis, women produced children mysteriously, without necessary links to the man or men they had sex with. When men discovered paternity, according to the hypothesis, they acted to claim power to monopolize women and claim children as their own offspring. The move from primitive matriarchy to patriarchy was a step forward for human knowledge.

This belief system was the result of errors in early ethnography, which in return was the result of unsophisticated methods of field work. When strangers arrive and start asking where babies come from, the urge to respond imaginatively is hard to resist, as Margaret Mead might have discovered in Samoa. In fact, while prior to the discovery of egg cells and genetics there have been many different explanations of the mechanics of pregnancy and the relative contributions of either sex, no human group, however primitive, is unaware of the link between intercourse and pregnancy. The fact that each child has one unique father has come more recently, however; Greek and Roman writers thought that the seed of two men might both contribute to the character of the child. By the time these mistakes were corrected in anthropology, however, the idea that a matriarchy had once existed had been picked up on in comparative religion and archaeology, and was used as the basis of new hypotheses that were unrelated to the postulated ignorance of primitive people about paternity.

In the late nineteenth century, belief in primitive matriarchies was also allied with Max Müller's hypothesis that an ethnically distinct Aryan race had invaded and displaced or dominated earlier populations in prehistoric Europe. Their conquests, according to Müller, were responsible for the spread of the Indo-European languages; they would have also replaced an earlier language and culture in the invaded areas where Indo-European languages are now spoken. The Aryan invasion theory is no longer universally accepted in India. The corresponding hypothesis for Europe is also controversial; few scholars other than Marija Gimbutas have advocated the strongest form of the hypothesis, that of military conquest and forced cultural displacement, in recent decades.

Traces of matriarchy in modern languages

Some societies define their homelands as "mother" rather then "father". They define “Motherlands” instead of “Fatherlands,” such as can be found in the Polish use of "Motherland," and the Russian references to "Mother Russia." Nature, the world around us upon which we are utterly dependent for sustenance, is referred to as "Mother Nature." The expression "mother of all battles" and its derivatives is a matriarchal turn of phrase, seeing motherhood as the origin of proliferation.

Matriarchies in literature

The turn of the century mythology about a peaceful matriarchal civilisation being put to the torch by patriarchal, nomadic barbarian invaders has lived on as a powerful literary trope long after archaeologists and anthropologists concluded that it went far beyond what the evidence allowed.

More recent uses of the theme share essentially the same narrative, but root for the vanquished matriarchy. Goddess worship is one motif referred to by James Joyce in his novels such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In addition to Robert Graves, poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound made use of the theme.

Mary Renault's historical novels about Greek mythology and history such as The King Must Die combine motifs of political conflict between goddess and god worshippers with The Golden Bough's hypothesis about dying and reviving gods. The patriarchal conquest of matriarchy motif is found in literally dozens of fantasy novels, from Marion Zimmer Bradley's historical revisions of Arthurian romance and the Trojan War; as well as in works of pure fantasy such as Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne.

The Modern-day United States—a matrifocal society?

Women of the United States occupy fewer positions of power than do men, although they have been gaining ground over the last few decades. Certain cultural indicators show that American women do enjoy a significant amount of power. The kitchen, traditionally a center of female activity, is the major selling point in most home sales in North America. Since buying a home is the largest financial investment most people make in their lifetimes, this demonstrates the decision-making power of women. The need to cultivate the votes of "soccer moms" in order to swing presidential elections gave enormous power to women, at least on the level of perception. More significantly, the publication of such books as Fatherless America and the development of such organizations as the National Fatherhood Initiative to bolster the domestic position of the American male show the need to counteract a tendency toward an increasingly matrifocal society. The prevalence of "single parent-headed households" (and single parents are overwhelmingly female) shows that the United States of America might well be turning into a matrifocal society, where kinship structures are built around the mother, not the father.

A comparison of U.S. Census Bureau statistics between 1970 and the year 2000 shows that in 1970, 81% of households were family households—that is, blood relatives living in the same home. 40% of these were married couples with their children. In the year 2000, only 69% of households were family households and only 24% of these were married couples with their own children. (U.S. Census Bureau statistics, 2000) Between 1960 and 1998 divorce rates climbed in the United States, more than doubling. (Berger, 1998) For the first time in history, more children became separated from one of their parents by parental choice than by death. (Popenoe, 1996) There has also been a steep rise in children born outside of wedlock. In the United States now, 33% of children are born outside of marriage—1 out of every 3. Most of the children in these situations live with their mothers, not their fathers.

Yet research has shown that children of divorced parents or single parents are significantly at risk in many areas of life. They suffer more psychological and emotional problems, they are more likely to get into trouble through delinquency, dropping out of school, and to engage in abuse of sex and drugs. (Robert Flewelling et al.,1990) A National Health Interview Survey on Child Health reported lower grades, poorer health, unsatisfying personal relationships, and even increased accident-proneness and speech defects among children of divorce, the vast majority of whom live with their mothers. (Dawson, 1991)

There is also the so-called "plunge into poverty" that single mothers experience when they no longer share in the income of their husbands after a divorce. Only 8% of children living with their biological married parents experience poverty in their childhoods; 46% of children with single mothers live below the poverty line. (Shapiro, 1995) A single mother is often forced to move with her children to a poorer neighborhood where there are poorer schools, fewer recreational facilities, and there are less savory influences on the street and among peers.

Numerous social scientists have come to the conclusion that children are better off financially, emotionally, psychologically, academically, and in numerous other ways when they are in a two-biological-parent family as opposed to a home headed by a single parent (the overwhelming majority of which are mothers). A respected University of Chicago study (University of Chicago, 2002) concluded that “there’s hardly any social ill we deal with domestically that is not driven by the decline in marriage…Men and women do better in marriage, as do children.”

The most extensive study ever done, encompassing decades of data, was performed by Civitas, an independent think tank in England. The report concluded concluded “No amount of spending on extra benefits to single mothers would put their children on an equal footing with those of a married couple.” (Civitas, 2002)

If matriarchal or matrifocal societies had the seeds of success in them, we would be seeing such success take root in the United States. Instead, we are seeing its opposite. Over and over again, social scientists agree that the biological family of father, mother and their children is still today a child’s best guarantee for success.

The social decline in the United States associated with the breakdown of the traditional family may well offer an object lesson as to why matriarchal and matrifocal societies have not been historically prevalent. Such societies are not optimal for the successful rearing of the young—the future of any society.

The traditional family—the family of father, mother, and their biological children living together as a caring and mutually nurturing unit is not only the best guarantee of children's success in life; it is, according to Berger, the mechanism which gives rise to a civil, free, and prosperous society. Such a society evolves toward greater rights, freedom, equality and privileges for all its members and tends to last.

An interesting note is that while the structure of the traditional family is important, that is not the whole story. Studies have shown that children in high-conflict yet traditional marriages fare as poorly socially as children in single parent homes. Relationships within the structure are as important as the structure itself. When these relationships are ones of mutual love, respect, nurturing, and strength, children flourish.

The women's liberation movement in the United States has stood as an important correction to excesses of male power. Yet replacing one flawed power structure (patriarchy) with another flawed power structure (matriarchy or matrifocality) has not proven to be the solution to familial, social, and public problems. Rather, men and women working together as loving, lifelong committed partners and power-sharers provide the optimal setting for the nurturing of the next generation and serve as the fundamental unit upon which a viable society is built.

See also

• Patriarch
• Patriarchy
• Patriarchs (Bible)
• Matriarchs (Bible)
• The First Sex

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bamberger, Joan. (1974). '"The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society," in Women, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 263-280. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
• Berger, Brigitte. (1998). "The Social Roots of Prosperity and Liberty," Society 35 (March-April, 1998) p. 44
• Brown, Robert. (1991). Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
• Czaplicka, Marie Antoinette. (1914). Aboriginal Siberia, a study in social anthropology. Oxford. Clarendon press.
• Dawson, Deborah, "Family Structure and Children's Health and Well-Being: Data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey on Childre Health," Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 August 1991, pp. 573-84.)
• Eller, Cynthia (2001). The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future. ISBN 0807067938
• Flewelling,Robert et al. (1990). "Family Structure as a Predictor of Initial Substance Abuse and Sexual Intercourse in Early Adolescence," Journal of Marriage and the Family 52 (February 1990, pp. 17-81).
• Gimbutas, Marija (1991). "The Language of the Goddess".
• Goldberg, Steven (1993) Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, rev. ed. ISBN 0812692373
• Hutton, Ronald (1993). The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles ISBN 0631189467
• Lapatin, Kenneth (2002). Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History. ISBN 0306813289
• David Popenoe, "The Vanishing Father," The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 1996) pp. 12-13.
• Sanday, Peggy Reeves. (2004). Woman at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801489067
• Stearns, Peter N. (2000). Gender in World History. New York Routledge. ISBN 0415223105
• Smith R.T. (2002) Matrifocality, in International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (eds) Smelser & Baltes, vol 14, pp 9416.

• Shapiro, Joseph, "Honor Thy Children," U.S. News & World Report, February 27, 1995, p. 39.)

External links

• Matriarchy.Info: about ancient and todays matriarchal societies
• "The archaeology of the Goddess": a balanced skeptical assessment
• Cattle ownership makes it a man's world New Scientist (1. October 2003): A new study claims to demonstrate that early female-dominated societies lost their power to men when they started herding cattle.
• The Domain of Patriarchy: Robert Sheaffer's sceptical site discusses matriarchies, Goddess mythology, and claims of non-patriarchal societies.

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Comments

This is an unfinished work in progress. —Jennifer Tanabe 16:05, 23 Sep 2005 (CDT)