matriarchy: fiction or fact?

Worshipping the Goddess or Just Healing Cramps?

I grew up learning that prehistoric humans lived under matriarchies worshipping female earth deities. You know, like the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf.

Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe points out the matriarchal theory got a push with the rise of Social Darwinism in the 19th century, a philosophy alive today but wearing masks (like “evolutionary psychology”). I recall from my classes that anytime archeologists found something they couldn’t explain in practical terms, they labelled it “religious.” I mean, the Venus of Willendorf may have been a charm meant to ease a woman’s period. Today New Age women carry around carnelians.

The idea that prehistory saw the matriarchy, with its earth goddess, supplanted by patriarchy under the rise of Greece, with its sky gods, fits nicely with our culture’s idea of progress and the supremacy of masculine ideals. What it doesn’t fit with is science.

My husband has a joke: “Why do husbands die before their wives? Because they want to.” But despite all the media about women outliving men, that is only a recent development. Until the last hundred years, more men lived to middle-age than women.

Sure, men tend to be more violent and reckless, consume more alcohol and tobacco. Men kill themselves and other men much more often than they kill women. This cuts men out early, with high mortality around adolescence. Then men tend to die off quickly around 60 from heart attacks. But that in-between part interests me, because that in-between part is where most of the political power lies.

The Power of Age

I have great-great grandfathers who married two and three times as each wife died having one of her children. Most of these men married a woman relatively close in age the first time. Then they became old men marrying young women. And isn’t it clear that an older person – whether man or woman – is a more powerful person? Age brings self-knowledge, wisdom, and resources, so any group or class that routinely outlives another will grow in power over the other.

Looking from a practical and political point-of-view, there’s no way a matriarchy could have held sway in a prehistoric culture. Women were dying younger than men due to complications from childbirth (and probably from worse nutrition, too, like most women in the world today). If that’s the case, then those earlier cultures were, indeed, “rule of the fathers.”

Violence Beyond Gender

Many people believe men run the world because they are physically stronger and more violent than women. Thuggish anthropologists support that notion, too, but doesn’t this contradict the foundation myth that man separated himself from the beasts and gained sway over the world because he’s a toolmaker?

I mean, once you put a weapon in your hand, the difference in muscle mass disappears. If a man can dominate a tiger because he has a spear, why can’t a woman control a man with a knife? In other words, it’s not the sheer physical ability but the willingness to dominate that accounts for the gender gap in violence.

The difference that remains is gender psychology, and that’s certainly influenced by hormones. But that’s not the end of the story. With the tremendous effort made by our culture to convince women they must be family peacemakers, martyrs for their children, and submissive to men, I think it’s pretty obvious that women aren’t “naturally” nonviolent.

If women were naturally nonviolent, we wouldn’t need all the cultural messages pounding their nonviolence into them, right? This argument reminds me of the one that women aren’t promiscuous due to some evolutionary logic. How ridiculous! Why invest so much coercive language, not to mention legal and social consequences, on promiscuous women if there aren’t any? A patriarchy takes great pains to MAKE women not promiscuous. It takes equal pains to make violence a male prerogative.

My point is that patriarchy isn’t established by physical violence but by resourceful old men. Violence is just the result of maintaining a patriarchy, the need to cull the herd that will inherit it, while bonding the survivors through blood-letting. I think women could be as violent as men if they were encouraged to be. But they haven’t been. With that being the case, men may continue to off themselves in cars and wars and murder, while women continue to live longer.

Matriarchy as Speculative Fiction

The 20th century saw a lot of gains in women’s rights. Who were the women leading the fight for those rights? 20-somethings? No. They were mostly established women with means and families, and they were middle-aged. It seems that more women are marrying younger men, getting educated, and gaining their own resources. If that’s the case, then maybe women are reaching an age parity with men for the first time in history.

In a really fascinating website, Matthew White estimates 1 out of 96 deaths in the 19th century were due to other humans, compared with 1 in 22 in the 20th. The 20th century may have seen more human violence than any other time, and I wonder how many of the estimated 185 million deaths were women and how many were men.

I wonder, because if men continue to be as violent as history has shown them, while women continue to reduce their mortality with better health care and nutrition, who will have the greater age-power in the future? Maybe the “rule of the mothers” belongs to our future rather than our past.