Download Matriarchy terms - Power to women in the community and more Summaries Sociology in PDF only on Docsity!
Matriarchy
Previous (Matilda of Scotland)
Next (Matrix (mathematics))
In a matriarchy , power lies with the women of a community. Conclusive evidence for the existence of true matriarchal societies turns out to be elusive. There are examples, both historical and current, of societies in which lineage is determined through the mother, or in which women hold dominant positions in the family structure. However, such societies generally occur in times of societal stress or instability, where the men are absent or unreliable. Successful societies, in which children are raised to continue and advance their culture, are those in which men and women together take responsibility as spouses and parents in the home.
Contents
[hide]
- 1 Matriarchy
- 2 Matrilineality
- 3 Matrifocality
- 4 Traces of matriarchy in modern languages
- 5 Matriarchies in literature
- 6 Matriarchies in mythology
- 7 From matriarchy to patriarchy?
- 8 The modern-day United States A matrifocal society?
- 9 Matrifocality is it a successful social paradigm?
- (^) 10 Matrifocality, matrilineality, and matriarchy as responses to social trauma
- 11 Conclusion
- 12 References
- 13 External links
- 14 Credits
Matriarchy
A matriarchy is a tradition in which community power lies with the women or mothers of a community, rather than with the men in a patriarchal community. The word matriarchy derives from the Greek words matÄr (mother) and archein (to rule). Use of the term is sometimes extended to "government by women," although this is more technically termed "gynocracy."
Did you know?
True matriarchal societies were, and are, extremely rare
True matriarchal societies were, and are, extremely rare. 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, 137). This "human universal" of male pre-eminence holds true for historical as well as current human societies. Wherever human societies have been found, be they ancient or modern, there has been a marked preference for men to hold the reins of power.
An apparent exception that comes readily to mind might be Great Britain, where strong women rulers have left their marks in history. Elizabeth I is considered by many historians to have been the best monarch England has ever had. Victoria was another famous British queen. The present queen, Elizabeth II, has been on the throne for decades. Great Britain appears to have strong matriarchal tendencies.
However, Great Britain is not a matriarchy. Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, and Victoria came to the throne in the absence of male heirs, not because of a system designed to place women in positions of power. Succession to the throne in Great Britain goes from the first son to the first son. If the first son were unable to assume the responsibilities of the throne, preference would go to a second or third son. Only in the absence of sons would a daughter ascend to the throne. Henry VIII's famous marital exploits are believed to have been motivated, in part, by his desperate desire to have a male heir, thus avoiding a crisis of succession. In the absence of a prince to ascend to the position of king, succession crises have been resolved by elevating a princess to the position of queen.
Societies that have been characterized as matriarchal have been subjects of anthropological debate. 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 of matriarchy, are not thoroughly and consistently matriarchal. Karl Kerenyi noted this in the introduction to Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (1967, 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. However this view has engendered considerable dispute. 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, 51). On the other hand, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday favored redefining and reintroducing the word matriarchy, especially in reference to modern societies like the matrilineal Minangkabau. This group lives in West Sumatra and numbers about four million. Sanday argued that this society is a modern matriarchy defined not in polar opposition to patriarchy, but on unique terms. Some, particularly feminist anthropologists, such as Heide Gƶttner-Abendroth, use matriarchy in the sense of "motherly beginning," arguing that the term comes from matÄr ("mother") and archĆŖ ("beginning, origin") rather than archein (rule) (Vonier 2007).
In any case, true matriarchal societies were and are few and far between: "There is no 'complete matriarchal people' known today ... this description will be 'fictional' and somewhat theoretical (Vonier 2007). Such societies appear more in the realms of mythology and legends than verifiable history.
Matrilineality
Matrilineality, on the other hand, is a more common form of female pre-eminence in society. Matrilineality is distinct from matriarchy. In matrilineal societies, children are identified in terms
The turn-of-the-century mythology about a peaceful matriarchal civilization being put to the
torch by patriarchal, nomadic barbarian invaders is a powerful literary image that still endures.
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. Robert Graves and poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound also made use of this 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 literature and the Trojan War; to works of pure fantasy such as Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne.
Matriarchies in mythology
One area where written myths are available from an early period is the Aegean, where the Minoan "Great Goddess" was worshiped in a society where women and men were apparently equals. However, modern self-described "Goddess women" are too quick to assume that any culture that worships a "Mother Goddess" must be a matriarchy. 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.
Greek mythology, despite the insistently patriarchal Olympian mythology of classical Greece, contains traces of earlier matrilineal systems. For example, Jason is linked to the "Minyan" daughters by his mother Alcimede. Another famous legendary matriarchy (and gynocracy) 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. Regarding the Amazons, Michael Grant notes that these female warriors were said to live at the boundaries of the world to which Greeks had traveled, making them kin to marvelous beings or monsters supposed to dwell in distant lands, like the Blemmyes or the 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.
From matriarchy to patriarchy?
Whether matriarchal societies might have existed at some time in the distant past is
controversial. The controversy began with the publication of Johann Jakob Bachofen's 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 Bachofen and Jane Ellen Harrison, scholars, arguing usually from myths or oral traditions and neolithic female cult-figures, suggested that many ancient societies were matriarchal. It was even proposed 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).
Belief in a matriarchy, and its subsequent replacement by patriarchy can be linked to the historical "inevitabilities" which the nineteenth century's concept of progress through cultural evolution introduced. Friedrich Engels, among others, formed the curious and rather racist notion that some primitive cultures 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, they acted to claim power to monopolize women and claim children as their own offspring. The move from primitive matriarchy to patriarchy indicated a step forward in human knowledge.
This account was the result of errors in early ethnography, which in turn was the result of unsophisticated methods of fieldwork. 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. While there have been many different explanations of the "mechanics" of pregnancy and the relative contributions of each sex, no human group, however primitive, was actually unaware of the link between intercourse and pregnancy. The understanding 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, 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 MĆ¼ller's hypothesis that an ethnically distinct Aryan race had invaded and displaced or dominated earlier populations in prehistoric Europe. Their conquests, according to MĆ¼ller, 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 hypothesisāthat of military conquest and forced cultural displacementāin recent decades.
The modern-day United StatesāA matrifocal society?
Certain cultural indicators show that American women 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 in the United States. 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.
Social scientists agree that the biological family of father, mother and their children is a childās
best guarantee for success. This is not to say that the traditional patriarchy is the most desirable norm for family life in all ways. It is saying that an active, involved, and present father is a necessary component of familial health. When men become marginalized, social problems increase.
The social decline in the United States associated with the breakdown of the traditional family, and the subsequent marginalizing of men and the rising pre-eminence of women in family life, 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 youngāthe future of any society.
Matrifocality, matrilineality, and matriarchy as responses to
social trauma
Matrifocal societies in the Caribbean have evolved as a response to male unreliability.
Matrifocality in the United States might also have evolved as a response to male absenteeism. A significant number of North American fathers see their biological children less than once a year after a divorce from their biological mother. Matrifocality appears to be a response to a breakdown in the social structureānamely, the marginalization or absenteeism of the father.
One of the most famous woman leaders in history, Boudicca of Britain, rose to a position of power in response to the breakdown of her society through Roman invasion. Her tribal king husband made the Roman emperor co-heir to his kingdom along with his two daughters in an effort to maintain his lineage and kingdom. However Tacitus recorded that after her husband's death Boudicca was flogged and her daughters raped. Boudicca then took up arms in response to the desperate social situation of her people, represented by the trauma in her own family.
Matrilineality in the Jewish culture may also be the result of a breakdown in the social structure. The diasporadic nature of the Jewish peopleāa people beset by captivities, enslavements, battles, and exileāmay have led to identification through the mother. During pregnancy and their children's infancies and early years, even women in desperate circumstances are charged with the nurturing of their children. Defining children in terms of their mothers' lineage may have been the best way to preserve a Jewish identity under unstable circumstances.
Conclusion
There is a paucity of female-dominated societies in history. In many cases, female dominance
appears to be a response to trauma or social breakdown rather than a naturally arising, alternative social form to the patriarchal society. Yet male-dominated societies have serious flaws. Modern research shows that men and women working together as lifelong committed partners in a loving family provide the optimal setting for the nurturing of the next generation, thus standing as the foundational unit of a successful society.
References
- 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, 263-280. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-
- Berger, Brigitte. 1998. "The Social Roots of Prosperity and Liberty," Society 35 (March- April, 1998): 44.
- Brown, Donald. 1991. Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN 007008209X
- Czaplicka, Marie Antoinette. 1914. Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon press.
- (^) Dawson, Deborah. 1991. "Family Structure and Children's Health and Well-Being: Data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey on Childrenās Health," Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 (August 1991): 573-584.
- 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): 17-81.
- Gimbutas, Marija. 2001. The Language of the Goddess. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-
- (^) Goettner-Abendroth, Heidi (ed.). 2009. Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past Present and Future. Inanna Publications. ISBN 978-
- Goldberg, Steven. 1999. Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance. Open Court. 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
- Popenoe, David. 1996. "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 Social & Behavioral Sciences edited by N.J. Smelser and P.B. Baltes. Pergamon. ISBN 978-
- Shapiro, Joseph. 1995. "Honor Thy Children," U.S. News & World Report , February 27, 1995, p. 39.
- Vonier, Hannelore. 2007. Description of Matriarchy matriarchy.info. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
External links
All links retrieved May 8, 2011.
- Free knowledge base about matriarchal indigenous societies
- Matriarchy: history or reality?
- Matriarchy and the Feminine Divine
