Matriarchy

Matriarchy—from the Greek roots metr-, mother, and -arch, rule, beginning, origin, or source—describes a society in which mothers rule. In a true matriarchy, the mothers in a society would hold political power over all members of that society (men included), control the economic welfare of the society, and be held in highest esteem socially. In a matriarchate, descent would be determined through the female line (matrilineality), the mother would be the head of the household, and children would belong to the maternal clan. A society where women (regardless of whether they have given birth and become mothers) rule would be called a gynocracy, from the Greek for woman, gyne. The two terms, however, are often used interchangeably in both academic and non-academic discussion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

While anthropologists of the nineteenth century, such as the Swiss jurist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), found the idea of a prehistoric matriarchal order useful in their descriptions of societal structure evolving from female-centered to male-centered, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this view has excited feminist writers and thinkers more than it has anthropologists. In his Mutterrecht (Mother Right), Bachofen argues that social structure originated in hetaerism, or sexual communism, before moving to a matriarchy. Bachofen's matriarchate saw the beginning of social regulation, the birth of agriculture, and the worship of a mother goddess. Controlling agriculture and its surplus goods, women were in possession of economic power. A patriarchal rebellion followed the matriarchate and led to the devaluation of women's social status and their political and economic power.

At the same time as Bachofen put forth his theories of Mother Right, Henry Sumner Maine (1822–1888) published a work supporting the opposite theory: that patriarchy was "the primeval condition of human race" (Maine 1861). Thus began the unending—because of scant evidence on both sides—battle between the matriarchists and patriarchists.

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) furthered the idea of male domination following a matriarchate in his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Engels explains the success of the male rebellion due to male control of moveable wealth in a society: domesticated animals. So long as inheritance continued through the female line, however, men still needed to overthrow Mother Right. Engels smoothly and easily paves the way for rebellion by way of a legal decree, without explanation: offspring of male members of a family should remain members of that family rather than that of the mother. The end of matrilineality leads to the dissolution of the matriarchate.

Bachofen's theory of an early era of matriarchy stems in part from the obvious powerful reproductive role of the female—the female as the arch, the origin of all other beings—but was mainly inspired by myths of powerful and influential women and the worship of female goddesses, for example the ancient Greek myth of the Amazons and Indian worship of a great mother goddess.

The Amazons were a mythical group of warrior women (perhaps with a factual basis) who forbade men from their society, using them only for reproduction. They are depicted on vases and friezes as both strong and beautiful. The Greeks tell several tales of these warrior women, often portraying them as an unnatural version of woman, or the "other." Indeed, Bachofen himself considered the Amazons an extremist group bound to failure because they lived outside an acknowledged social system. Despite, or because of, their otherness, the Amazons elicited strong desires in the Greeks. There are tales of Greek kings equally falling in love with Amazons (Theseus for Hippolyte, or Melanippe, or Antiope; Achilles for Pentheselea at the moment in which he kills her) and declaring war on them. The Pantheon, that grand edifice of Athenian thought and religion, depicts the battle with the Amazons on its Doric frieze, along with those against the Giants and the Centaurs, and the sack of Troy. The Amazons, then, figured in the Greek Athenian imagination among other mythic barbaric or foreign groups to be conquered.

Bachofen's reading of myth for history would be well served by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's (1926) idea of myth as social charter: Myth is the cultural history of societies that use their myths to replicate or reorder their social experience. Such use of a myth of matriarchy can be found in South American societies, particularly in the extreme southeast tip of the continent, and in the tropical rainforests of northwest Amazon and central Brazil (Bamberger 1974, p. 268). Myths of the rule of women in these places are used to reaffirm the patriarchal order. The stories are told to show that women did not know how to wield power when they held it, or that they tricked men and were found out in their tricks. Women's powerful biological role is subverted by her immorality in these tales. Instead of promising a bright future (because of a powerful past) for women, the tales of the Mother Right in South America remind of a dark past replete with failures.

Neither these tales of a rule of women full of chaos and trickery, nor Bachofen's matriarch who looks more like a morally upstanding Victorian woman, resemble today's liberal woman. Nevertheless, myths of matriarchy have inspired feminist writers who have found in them inspiration for a new social order in which women hold important political, social, and economic roles. Elizabeth Gould Davis's The First Sex (1971) calls for a (re)turn from Judeo-Christian reverence for the male Jesus to the old religion of the Great Goddess. Despite the lack of sound proof in Davis's claim for a matriarchal golden age, her book sparked the feminist spirituality movement. Spiritual feminism is a refuge from and counterbalance to Judeo-Christian monotheism. Spiritual feminists worship an earth-centered, immanent, and immediate Goddess. This popular movement has given birth to the bestselling book and cottage industry of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), while it has also brought about a scholarly reappraisal of ancient goddess worship.

Whereas goddess worship is a relatively new movement in North America and Europe, South Indian society has never known a period without goddess worship. The main divinity in Indian worship has always been the Mother Goddess; in this sense, South Indian society can be called matriarchal. They view the principle element, the originator of all, to be the Mother. Foreign invasion by Aryans, Scythians, and Muslims brought foreign devaluation of the female in Indian high society, hence Brahmin women's seclusion from society. Less affected by foreign invasion, South Indian village religion focuses on the Earth Mother, with several groups claiming descent from divine mothers. Tribes and castes of South India are still matrilineal and exhibit matriarchal elements. Women among these lower castes have far more social freedom and contribute to the economy of the group.

MATRIARCHY, MATRILINEALITY, MATRIFOCALITY

Although contemporary anthropologists argue that there are societies in which women have achieved a high level of power and social recognition, they are hard pressed to find societies in the early twenty-first century that are truly matriarchal, where women have publicly recognized authority surpassing that of men. Nevertheless, within male-dominated society some societal and family structures can be called matrilineal and/or matrifocal. In a matrilineal society, connection to the larger kin group is grounded in the mother. Family name, property, and status is secured by and from the mother. A matrilineal society is not necessarily a matriarchal one. Family name, property, and status may pass from mother to daughter within a patriarchal society where the father, or men in general, hold political and economic rule over women. One example of a group with some matrilineal traits is traditional Judaism; a boy or a girl is considered Jewish only if born to a Jewish mother. Isolated Tamil groups in South India retain traces of matrilineality: A young woman does not lose her secure economic and social position upon marriage. The young women of these matrilineal groups in South India were the first in India to take up higher education and show the highest rate of female literacy in India.

Matrifocality is an attribute of a kinship system or society in which the mother is structurally, culturally, and affectively central. In a matrifocal kinship group, the mother will have some degree of control over the group's economy and decision-making process. As Nancy Tanner puts it, "the structural component of matrifocality relates to economic and political power within the kin group" (Tanner 1974, 131-132). The mother of such a group need not be the genealogical mother, and may rather be the senior woman of a kinship group. The mother's cultural centrality in a matrifocal group derives from her value. The emotional link of the group to the mother defines her affective centrality. The centrality of women in matrifocal kin groups does not signify an absence of men in the group, but rather their shifting status as opposed to the strong, static place of the woman. A kin or social group that is matrifocal (and sometimes matrilineal) will often show an attitude of compromise and adaptation to divided responsibility as opposed to a patrilineal situation, which tends to foster centralized power and authoritarian rule. Some matrifocal kin groups can be found in Indonesia, Africa, and among Black Americans.

see also Patriarchy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachofen, Johann Jakob. 1967. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings, trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Series.

Bamberger, Joan. 1974. "The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society." In Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Davis, Elizabeth Gould. 1971. The First Sex. New York: Putnam.

Ehrenfels, Omar Rolf Leopold Werner. 1941. Mother Right in India. London: Oxford University Press.

Eller, Cynthia. 1991. "Relativizing the Patriarchy: the Sacred History of the Feminist Spirituality Movement." History of Religions 30(3): 279-295.

Eller, Cynthia. 2000. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Engels, Friedrich, 1902 Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. E. Untermann. Chicago: C. H. Kerr.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. 1992. In the Wake of the Goddess: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. New York: Free Press.

Maine, Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: J. Murray.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1926. Myth in Primitive Psychology. New York: Norton.

Reiter, Rayna R., ed. 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Tanner, Nancy. 1974. "Matrifocality in Indonesia and African and Among Black Americans." In Women, Culture, and Society, ed. by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

                                       Daniella Reinhard