There’s Never Been a Matriarchy
So please stop using that word to mean anytime women exert a bit of power
“You should be proud to know that the matriarchy also has its role in pressuring women to bear children,” someone said to me the other day in a comment about patriarchal expectations that women cannot fulfill their purpose on earth unless they bear offspring. The problem with this statement, however, is that there is no such thing as a matriarchy in the US, and there never has been in human history — not unless you believe the Greek myth about the Amazons.
A patriarchy is a dominance-based hierarchy where men have primacy, a certain amount of social control of women, and larger societal power. Despite great improvements over the past 50–60 years, the US is still a solidly male-centric nation. Overwhelmingly, in a heterosexual two-parent household, the man is still considered the leader of the family. More than 50% of Americans believe this explicitly and many more believe it subconsciously. Women overwhelmingly still take their husband’s names in marriage.
An alien race trying to learn about us from our media would conclude that white men make up 70% of the population, rather than the 30% that they actually do. There are more Fortune 500 CEOs named John than there are women in that category. Women currently comprise about 27% of Congress, a significant uptick from recent years. These all point to aspects of patriarchy.
Nothing like that has ever existed in human cultures — only flipped so that women have primacy, more power, and social control over men. Not even close. There is, however, a rich history of matrilineal, matrifocal cultures, where women, and particularly mothers, are revered and honored. These societies are not dominance hierarchies though. Each one displays a noted sense of balance and mutual respect.
The Minangkabau of Indonesia are the largest modern matrilineal culture in the world today, with a population of about 4 million. They practice Islam but also have a long-held matrilineal tradition, or matriarchaat (from the Dutch).
Minangkabau matriarchaat is an established social system that appears to be drawn largely from the customary practice (adat) that involves tracing inheritance through the matrilineal line and giving prominent roles to women in public ceremonies.
Minang women uphold these pre-Islamic adat customs, which not only trace ancestry through the female line but also involve a complex social system in which women and men share power and control based on the principle of interdependence and mutual responsibility.
When couples marry, the groom moves to the bride’s house. Nearly all household decisions are made only after being deliberated by both husband and wife.
The Akan people of Ghana have a social organization that is fundamentally built around the matriclan, which determines lineage, inheritance, and position in the group. “All matriclan founders are female, but men traditionally hold leadership positions within the society. These inherited roles, however, are passed down matrilineally — meaning through a man’s mothers and sisters (and their children).”
Many indigenous cultures have this sort of power balance as an intrinsic aspect of their societies. Men may hold political power, but only with the support and consent of women. Land is nearly always held and passed down through the female line. Clan mothers or other female elders may wield as much power as a chief, albeit a slightly different kind of power.
The Iroquois clan mother is responsible for the welfare of the clan. She names all the people of the clan and holds a position in nominating the next Chief, where then the members of the clan have the final say whether the nominee is suitable for the position. They are considered the life givers. The clan mother’s position is hereditary; her title rests within the clan and is usually passed on to her female relatives, looking first at her eldest sisters, other sisters, then her eldest daughter and other daughters.
For the Mosuo of China, it’s typical for women to handle business decisions and men to handle politics. Children are raised in the mother’s household and take her name. There’s functionally no such thing as marriage or even fatherhood, although men living in their mother’s houses help to raise the children of their sisters and cousins and are much more involved in their day-to-day care than is typical in the West.
“Mosuo men are feminists by any standards,” says (author Choo) Waihong. “Boys think nothing of looking after their baby sisters, or taking their toddler brothers by the hand everywhere. I was once made to wait before talking business with an elderly Mosuo man until he had bathed his family’s twin baby girls and changed their nappies.”
To call these matriarchies is a misnomer, however, because they are centered in balance and egalitarianism. Gender roles may exist but they don’t have the same kind of rigidity that we see in patriarchal cultures, where men doing “women’s work” is often looked down upon, and anything feminine is considered less than.
Some men use that term as a way to try to deny that patriarchy is a real social dynamic in America or to insist that women have just as much social power as men do. Quite often, elements of patriarchy that are upheld by women are attributed to some sort of matriarchy — as the commenter above was doing. In a patriarchal social system, women’s primary function and identity is imagined to be in the bearing and raising of children. If there are women who buy into this as well, that’s just internalized patriarchy on their parts. It’s not some sort of matriarchy that co-exists alongside or within a patriarchal system.
A mere 60 years ago a woman couldn’t get a credit card or a home loan in her own name. She could be fired for being pregnant and openly paid less for the same work because it was assumed that the money she earned was either “extra” or just being used to support herself, and not a family. Married men no longer have a legal right to their wives' bodies, whether she gives consent or not, although marital rape did not become a law in all 50 states until 1992.
We’ve come a long way baby, and in general, women now have the same legal rights as men, although entrenched inequality still exists. Most of the poor are female, rape culture is alive and well, and one of the worst things that you can call a boy is to equate him with something feminine.
“You throw like a girl!”
“Don’t be such a pussy!”
Women may have more societal power than they’ve even had before, but we’ve still got a ways to go to catch up with men and that doesn’t mean that now there’s a matriarchy about to unfold. A lot of men fear that, because a dominance hierarchy is a zero-sum system, with winner and loser as the only two options.
They fear women gaining equal footing because any leveling of the playing field reads to them like a loss. They assume that if women gain too much power, they will treat men the way they’ve been treated for the past several thousand years, and as much as some protest that patriarchy isn’t really all that bad, they know better than to want that level of disempowerment for themselves.
So now that you know what an actual matriarchy is, please don’t use that term to mean any time that groups of women exert some influence or wield some measure of power. There’s never been an actual matriarchy and there probably never will be, and that is fine with me. I don’t want to be a part of a social system where men are disenfranchised and looked at as second-class citizens. I’d much rather see our society move towards the balance and mutual respect of the more egalitarian matrilineal, matrifocal cultures that have existed since the earliest days of human history.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2021
