Matriarchy – The Original Human Social Order?

Richard Bolstad 2024

The word “matriarchy” still conjures up images of a female version of male “patriarchy”, and anthropologists have sometimes claimed that no true matriarchies are known to have existed since there is no evidence of societies where women forcefully dominated men. The field of Modern Matriarchal Studies challenges the presupposition that matriarchies are a mirror image of patriarchies, and suggests instead that the original and more stable type of society in human evolution is based on female lineage, on motherhood, and on the values of social nurturance implied by that term.

Modern Matriarchal Studies is thus part of a movement rediscovering the egalitarian long history of our species, also represented by Graeber and Wengrow’s 2021 book “The Dawn of Everything”. Graeber and Wengrow say about the Iroquois confederacy (2019: 219) “Matriarchy might refer to an equivalent situation, in which the role of mothers in the household similarly becomes a model for, and economic basis of, female authority in other aspects of life (which doesn’t necessarily imply dominance in a violent or exclusionary sense), where women as a result hold a preponderance of overall day-to-day power. Looked at this way, matriarchies are real enough. Kandiaronk himself arguably lived in one. In his day, Iroquoian-speaking groups such as the Wendat lived in towns that were made up of longhouses of five or six families. Each longhouse was run by a council of women – the men who lived there did not have a parallel council of their own – whose members controlled all the key stockpiles of clothing, tools and food.”

Heide Goettner-Abendroth explains (2009: p. 1) “An accurate distinction would acknowledge that while matriarchal societies always pass goods and honour down though the maternal line, they are equally characterised by having their means of livelihood – the economy – rest in women’s hands…. Widespread misconceptions not withstanding, women’s strong positions in these societies does not mean that matriarchies are women’s autocracies. Rather, in matriarchies women’s power is counterbalanced by men’s power, so that neither gender dominates the other. The governing principle of these societies is balance, rather than domination.”

Goettner-Abendroth (2009) suggests that this balance is consciously preserved by surviving matriarchies, such as the Hopi nation in North America, the Berber and Tuareg people in North Africa, the Mosuo people in China, and the Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia. In matriarchies it is understood that allowing control through the male lineage almost inevitably leads to men trying to control female reproduction (in order to establish who are the men’s “legitimate” children). This in turn leads to competition between men for power, and to sexual repression, especially for women. One can see this trend in the world’s leading families today, such as the Trump Dynasty ruling America currently (Turner, 2024). Matriarchies are remarkably resilient, she says, and largely transition to patriarchies only when the latter engage in brutal colonial conquests. Marija Gimbutas (Gimbutas and Robbins, 1999) suggested that there was archaeological evidence for a “matristic” “Old Europe” which spread in the Neolithic from the Baltics all the way down to Greece, and Riane Eisler (Eisler and Fry, 2019) famously identified the same pattern in her studies of the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete, described by her as a “Partnership model” culture. Since then, while her hypothesis of Indo-European invasion has been supported by DNA studies, evidence of war and violence in Europe before that invasion has also accumulated. Matrilocality also seems to have continued after the Indo-European invasion, further confusing the picture, and suggesting that it was premature to make the claim that matristic society alone accounts for all human ills (Giffen, 2021).

Modern Matriarchal Studies proposes that war itself is simply a product of patriarchy, which in turn results from a culture facing severe and prolonged environmental stresses. The Indo-European and Semitic cultures are the most dramatic examples of patriarchy, and their combined dominance of so much of the world currently makes us imagine that they are somehow natural, but in the long history of humanity, they are the oddity. James Demeo (2009) was a Professor of Geography at Illinois State University and the University of Miami. He suggests that the collapse of matriarchy in these Indo-European and Semitic cultures was originally a result of the vast desertification that he calls Saharasia. He maintains (in Goettner-Abendroth 2009: 416) “I have concluded that there does not exist any clear, compelling or unambiguous evidence for the existence of significant, widespread or persisting patrism within any major region of the earth prior to c.4000 BCE…. However evidence exists for early and widespread peaceful matrist social conditions.”

This implies that matriarchy is our natural state. Indeed, this would align us with our closest surviving primate relatives – the bonobo. De Waal (2006) notes of bonobos that “The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression…. Bonobo society is, however, not only female-centered but also appears to be female-dominated.”

The seal shown in the image at the top of this article is from Knossos, Crete, and shows a woman atop a hill, flanked by lions, with a man looking up to her. In archaeology, following Eisler’s claims in 1987, there was a reaction against the idea of matriarchy in ancient Crete. However Hamilakis (2002: 185) notes “the debate on political and social dynamics in Bronze Age Crete is still influenced by the stereotypes of a high European civilization with strong hierarchical structure, monarchies and aristocracy.” Cichon (2022) makes a coherent case for Minoan matriarchy, in the modern sense, pointing out that there is a surprising lack of evidence of land ownership in ancient Crete, and clear evidence of women in higher status than men (women are often seated surrounded by men at lower level in images, but men are never seated). Driessen (2012) argues that the large multigenerational nature of houses in ancient Crete are strongly suggestive of a matrilineal and matrilocal clan-based society, and the mortuary evidence (Bouman et alia, 2009), including related mitochondrial (maternal) DNA found in women buried in Minoan graves, supports this.

Cichon sums up (2022: 239) “I have attempted to argue, based on archaeological evidence for clan houses; de-centralized record keeping and administration; the lack of spatial separation between monumental buildings and ordinary ones; the lack of fortifications in general; the evidence of benches at Ayia Triadha and Knossos; the communal as well as sacred nature of the temple-palaces; the new understanding of the Minoan villas as the centers of settlements where manufacturing, administration, and ceremony took place, rather than as the dwelling places of the aristocracy; and the archaeological as well as mythological and iconographical evidence for matrilineality and matrilocality, that such a political system for Minoan Crete is entirely plausible, and is more plausible than the traditional view of a strong centralized hierarchical structure, monarchy and aristocracy, or the recent alternative proposed by the factions theory.”

Graeber and Wengrow say even more emphatically “Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses. We might ask: why are contemporary researchers so resistant to this conclusion? One can’t blame everything on the fact that proponents of ‘primitive matriarchy’ made exaggerated claims back in 1902. Yes, scholars tend to say that cities ruled by colleges of priestesses are unprecedented in the ethnographic or historical record. But by the same logic, one could equally point out that there is no parallel for a kingdom run by men, in which all the visual representations of authority figures are depictions of women. Something different was clearly happening on Crete.” (2021:438)

When Friederich Engels claimed that primitive matriarchy was the original state of society (1884:75), he also held that with the rise of farming and civilisation, this “stage” of human society became untenable. We now know how mistaken that claim was. In fact, Minoan civilisation far surpassed the primitive Mycenaean culture that replaced it, in craftsmanship, artistry, and architecture, as the later Greeks acknowledged (Macquire, 2020). Minoan agriculture fed a large population on Crete for over 3000 years before the Mycenaeans emerged, and the Minoan trade “empire” spread across the Mediterranean and down into Africa. The Minoan collapse was due both to damage from a series of geological events and (probably) to superior Mycenaean war skills.

The reality of modern matriarchies (matrilineal societies where women are guardians of the means of production) also shows that such communities can remain stable, and are not a mere historical oddity. In 2006, my partner Julia Kurusheva and I spent time on the Hopi land in Arizona, hosted by Roanna Kagenveama, head of the Hopi Womens Society. She explained to us the matrilineal structure of Hopi society, and the control of land by the Women’s Society. I also spoke to men about their experience of living in a community where only women hold the title to land. “Land only brings trouble if men try to manage it.” one said to me.

In a separate video discussion, Kagenveama (above) explains (Collins, 2017) “We all belong to our mother’s clan family. We are born into society, we automatically live from our mother’s role passed on down to our generations and our children.” About her leadership of the Women’s Society, an extremely important role in a matrilineal society, she added, “They came to ask me if it was OK for me to stand up to be a leader and take care of the women’s society. I had to think about bringing the whole world in my hands: The whole world is taking care of all the people. That’s a big job …My aunt came to me: “I’m asking you, can you do this for me? I can’t ask anyone else.” … You have to love yourself in order to take care of yourself, in order to take care of another person.”

When we studied with Roanna, she often spoke in ways that seemed almost as if she had been reading new age books. When we asked her about this though, she explained that she was simply passing on to us the wisdom that her grandmothers had taught her. She provided a link to an ancient world that was much wiser, more accepting and peaceful than modern America that surrounded her. A simple little example gives a sense of how the matrilineal clan system protects diversity and reaches out to the world rather than closing in on itself. Jozeppi Angelo Morelli, retired state police investigator, explains that after being adopted into a traditional Italian American home as a girl, he grew up feeling he didn’t belong in more than one way (Gillespie, 2023). He discovered that he had genetic ancestral links to the indigenous American world. Morelli also underwent gender re-assignment surgery at age 54 and identifies as male. Feeling rejected and disrespected by his adoptive white American community, he was then adopted into the Hopi sand clan by Roanna Kagenveama in 2021. He moved to Sedona, Arizona, which, as he says, is sacred Hopi land. He says “Grandmother Roanna gave me the name Snake Warrior. Snake medicine is powerful, primal, healing, and transformational. My Hopi family sees, welcomes, and accepts who I am.”

The Modern Matriarchal studies movement is also a political movement which aims “to create an egalitarian economy and a peaceful society”, and to transcend hierarchical religious dogmas (Goettner-Abendroth, 2009: 437). As Cambridge University Classicist Mary Beard said recently: “Patriarchy has had several thousand years of practice – of course it’s good at it. It’s very good at bolstering its own sexist values.” (Higgins 2018). Rediscovering and defining the alternative is an important step forward. The values distinction between Patriarchy and Matrism may not be as black and white as some researchers originally imagined, but it does remain. Riane Eisler agrees that looking at modern matrilineal societies “None of these are ideal societies” but that research does suggest that “as the status of women rises, so also does the status of values and activities such as empathy, non-violence and caregiving” (Eisler in Goettner-Abendroth, 2009: 271).

The World values survey also shows that the status of women is the one single factor which correlates with the entire cultural trend towards what the values researchers term the rising tide of civilization, including acceptance of self-expression and rational beliefs (Inglehart and Norris, 2003: 156). Women’s empowerment and gender equality are “essential to global progress”, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stressed in his 2024 message for International Women’s Day, but the report of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs suggests that progress has reached a “glass ceiling” (UN News Centre, 2024). “It is not coincidental that for the most violent and repressive regimes and would-be regimes of modern times a top priority has been “getting women back into their traditional place” in a “traditional family”, a code word for a family where top down control and severe punishments are taught children as normal, moral and inevitable.” says Heide Goettner-Abendroth (2009: 278). The struggle to create a peaceful and equitable future cannot be separated from challenging the social relationships at the core of patriarchy: the male-dominated family.

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