A matriarchy is a form of government or tradition in which the balance of power is held by the senior females of a community. The term is sometimes used to refer to "government by women", although this is more properly termed gynarchy.

Matriarchal societies are rare, if not nonexistent. 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). Feminist Joan Bamberger notes that the historical record contains no reliable evidence of any society in which women dominanted (Bamberger 1974). The Trobriand Islands were considered a matriarchy by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, but this has been disputed.

Whether matriarchal societies might have existed at some time in the distant past is controversial. Some scholars, arguing usually from myths or oral traditions, have 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). A famous legendary matriarchy (and gynarchy) is the Amazon society. Some professional historians, however, claim that the "evidence" in the form of myths or oral traditions is too murky to conclude anything from. Some people use this lack of solid evidence as a basis for believing that there has never been a matriarchal society.

Belief in a matriarchy, and its replacement by andrarchy or "patriarchy" was one of the historical "inevitabilities" which the nineteenth century's concept of progress through cultural evolution introduced into anthropology. They 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 bad 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. In fact, while prior to 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, nor of the fact that each child has one unique father as well as a mother. 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.

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.

Matriarchy is distinct from matrilineality and matrilocality.

Compare: patriarchy

References

  • Bamberger, Joan. (1974). The Myth of Matriachy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Scoiety. In Women, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 263-280. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
  • Brown, Robert. (1991). Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press

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