The patriarchal matriarchy
Ah yes, the matriarchy myth. That’s one I haven’t gotten around to yet. Long overdue!
I have been a close observer of the myth of matriarchal prehistory for fifteen years now and have watched as it has moved from its somewhat parochial home in the feminist spirituality movement out into the feminist and cultural mainstream. But I haven’t been able to cheer at the myth’s increasing acceptance. My irritation with the historical claims made by the myth’s partisans masks a deeper discontent with the myth’s assumptions. There is a theory of sex and gender embedded in the myth of matriarchal prehistory, and it is neither original nor revolutionary. Women are defined quite narrowly as those who give birth and nurture, who identify themselves in terms of their relationships, and who are closely allied with the body, nature, and sex—usually for unavoidable reasons of their biological makeup. This image of women is drastically revalued in feminist matriarchal myth, such that it is not a mark of shame or subordination, but of pride and power. But this image is nevertheless quite conventional and, at least up until now, it has done an excellent job of serving patriarchal interests.
Precisely. Difference Feminism bollocks. Yes we are nurturing and sweet and slightly dim, but that’s a good thing. Bleah. We’re not nurturing and sweet, dammit, we’re ornery and crabby and disobliging and we bite.
[I]t is my feminist movement too, and when I see it going down a road which, however inviting, looks like the wrong way to me, I feel an obligation to speak up. Whatever positive effects this myth has on individual women, they must be balanced against the historical and archaeological evidence the myth ignores or misinterprets and the sexist assumptions it leaves undisturbed. The myth of matriarchal prehistory postures as “documented fact,” as “to date the most scientifically plausible account of the available information.” These claims can be—and will be here—shown to be false. Relying on matriarchal myth in the face of the evidence that challenges its veracity leaves feminists open to charges of vacuousness and irrelevance that we cannot afford to court.
Relying on any kind of myth in the face of the evidence that challenges its veracity leaves the people who rely on it looking like chumps. ID, Afrocentrism, Noah’s ark, the Goddess; away with all of it.
I have absolutely no fixed opinion on the subject of the differences, besides the obvious physical ones, between men and women. If anyone follows recent research on the subject, I would be interested in hearing what that research has to say. By the way, if I had signed all my posts with a female name, would anyone have perceived (assuming that somone reads my posts)that I am biologically male and see myself as male in gender terms? How about Ophelia? What if she had always signed her posts with the name “Arnold”?
G writes:
“I think well-documented change in the role of women that happened everywhere in the world with the rise of agricultural city-states and their hierarchal religio-political structures.”
I write from a position of almost complete ignorance of these matters, so here are a few questions.
1. At what period was the rise of agricultural city-states?
2. Examples of these agricultural city-states?
3. What is meant by “well-documented” in this context?
It’s a while (15 years!) since I read it but as I recall Rosalind Miles’ ‘The Women’s History of the World’ deals convincingly with many of these questions.
I think it’s titled ‘Who Cooked the Last Supper?’ in the US.
Re G. Tingey’s response to my three questions above, thanks, but I’m still not clear exactly what it is that has been well-documented. Something about gender roles – but what precisely?
Chris Whiley writes:
>It’s a while (15 years!) since I read it but as I recall Rosalind Miles’ ‘The Women’s History of the World’ deals convincingly with many of these questions.< Checking out Rosalind Miles to get an inkling of her ideas about society, etc, I found the following (partial) synopsis of her book *Love, Sex, Death, and the Making of the Male*: >The lurid title suits this swift, wry, anecdotal survey of the pitiful confusion that Miles finds in the lives of adult men: Acculturated largely by women to identify with their penises (which makes them prone to violence), they are, she says, ‘dislocated’ by the women’s movement, frustrated, angry, and even more violent than historically they have been known to be. According to Miles, males – born as biologically defective females with weak lungs – acquire ‘penis power’ from their worshipful mothers before being forced to reject the feminine side of themselves as they grow and engage in the ‘wars of virility’ with other men in the competitive worlds of education, athletics, business, and politics. Damaged in their youth, unable to fulfill the conventional expectations society has for masculinity, men take refuge in work, power plays, homosexuality, adultery, or violence, often against their wives and children…< Leaving aside the mish-mash of simplistic psychologizing here, Miles is reported as believing men (presumably Western men) are now more violent than historically they have been known to be. On what evidence would such a contention rest?
“On what evidence would such a contention rest?”
On the fact that Miles has only to look around to see how violent men are now, whereas if she looks around to see how violent they were in the past, they seem remarkably quiet.
OB, your last post tempts me to what is probably a deliberate misunderstanding.
Of course the men of the past seem remarkably quiet; they’re dead.
I suspect the Ophelia’s tongue was goring into her cheek when she wrote that!
This belief in a mythical golden age seems to be universal. In New Zealand there is an alternative myth of settlement of the country which invents a people called the Waitaha who of course lived in harmony with land and sea and for whom there is no evidence whatsoever, and therefore are believed in more absolutely. The more mythical you are the nicer you are.
Greenham Common was based on the superior moral and spiritual power of women – something that always put me off it.
Hee hee – that was the joke, Elliott.
Allen Esterson said:
The short answer to that is that, compared to all the evidence from extant hunter-gatherer societies (evidence of ancient hunter-gatherers being sparse for obvious reasons), which are largely egalitarian both within and between genders (albeit with considerable division of labor between genders), the status of women goes to hell in every independently arising agricultural civilization. The decline women’s political status from that of more-or-less equals to that of more-or-less chattel (or at least a sizable majority of women, as class differences do matter here) seems closely tied to the growth of civilization as such, although herding cultures also display some of the same traits (as compared with hunter-gatherers). This seems to be true, where there is sufficient evidence to judge at all, not just in Mesopotamia, but also also in the Indus valley, the Yangtze valley, and in Mesoamerica (though the evidence is thinnest on the ground for the Omecs, Toltecs, Mayans, et al).
I’d say more, but I gotta go!
There was a very good piece in the TLS a couple of month ago about the same kind of bias in recent studies of Ancient Greece (TLS October 5 2007, James Davidson Worshipping Women).
Davidson had to start by reminding the reader that the position of women in Ancient Greece was akin to or worse than in modern Saudi Arabia, before refuting the argument of the author he was reviewing, often using the documents and iconography included in her own book!
The whole debate was about the place of the priestess in Greece and how it was supposedly undermining the accepted vision of the place as a society were women were effectively invisible. Davidson had to show that the role of a priestess was a) highly anomalous and b) as tightly repressed and controlled as that of other women (even if the role itself was different).
One of his remarks was:
“Upbeat visions of ancient Greek women have been all the rage for some years now. But that this move represents ‘forward thinking’ I don’t believe. There is an unpleasant side to this jolly new identification-feminism that Connelly so blithely embraces, proudly partial, selectively subjective.
For an upbeat vision seems to mean ‘women like us’, ‘women’ meaning ‘decent women’, and ‘like us’ meaning ‘like modern Western women’, wise-cracking, independent, opinionated, stylishly dressed. That means that a lot of women in the modern and the ancient world are not welcome at this cheerleaders’ party.
He then proceeded to show that the advocates of this “upbeat visions” tend to downplay or ignore aspects of the historical data not in full accordance with their thesis, for instance sacred prostitution…
Still, it’s interesting to see how strong this myth of ancient and peaceful Arcadia is, where the lion and the lamb slept side by side. As if some people, even die-hard feminists, had not enough confidence in the intrinsic value of their position and still needed a kind of argument from authority.
“… kind of argument from authority”
Good point, A, very good point. To rewrite history in order to prove that the situation one fights against is merely a temporary anomaly is a standing temptation for radical movements [and reactionary ones, of course, which have the move down pat.] A naturalistic fallacy all the way through, of course…
G writes:
> […]The short answer to that is that, compared to all the evidence from extant hunter-gatherer societies (evidence of ancient hunter-gatherers being sparse for obvious reasons), which are largely egalitarian both within and between genders (albeit with considerable division of labor between genders),….< Extant hunter-gatherer societies are largely egalitarian between genders? Hmmm… I’ve seen several programmes on TV in which isolated hunter-gatherer groups with virtually no contact with the outside world have been reached, and I don’t recall that there were any women among the tribal elders and leaders. There were also tribes in which the men engaged in regular warfare with neighbouring tribes in the course of which women were forcibly taken for “wives”. Again, I don’t recall that the native American tribes had women among their leaders. I wonder if there isn’t some wishful thinking involved here – a mythical golden age before civilisation tainted everything (as Arnaud suggests above). Of course, with the rise of complex modern societies the organisational opportunities for explicit gender inequalities rose correspondingly, but I wonder if there was actually a fundamental change in the power-relationships.
“Pope John Paul II asserted that the challenge facing most societies “is that of upholding, indeed strengthening, woman’s role in the family while at the same time making it possible for her to use all her talents and exercise all her rights in building up society.” [Wiki].
So I’m supposed to believe that, for instance, a series in which someone whose evident deep interest in contacting and getting to know remote tribes on a personal level and in spending time communicating with them (and living with them) on their own terms, in a situation in which he has zero influence on the way they choose to deal with him other than that he goes out of the way to demonstrate his friendly intentions, is imposing a “narrative” for some obscure reason known only to himself and his film-making colleagues – and, of course, those with the remarkable ability to see through the deception?
Sure. There’s no obscure reason necessary–it’s just that people often see what they expect to see, and interpret others’ actions in the light of their own preconceptions, and this leads to inaccuracy a lot of the times.
How do you know that the person who did the programme had a “deep interest” in the culture, anyway? More importantly, how do you know he had the skills to find out what he wanted to? Is his (or her) work respected? Probably not. The general historical consensus among scholars is, as G. noted, that hunter-gatherers are and were egalitarian. You don’t need any “remarkable ability” to see through the deception. You just need to be able to pick up a book rather than watching TV.
Here, for instance, the most obvious explanation of why it is men who confront potentially dangerous outsiders is indeed so obvious that I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by spelling it out.
Oh, please. The most obvious reason for why you’d send *anyone* to deal with danger is because, on some level, they’re considered expendable. There may be other less-obvious reasons as well, but that’s the most obvious.
>Oh, please. The most obvious reason for why you’d send *anyone* to deal with danger is because, on some level, they’re considered expendable. There may be other less-obvious reasons as well, but that’s the most obvious.< I’ve only just caught up with Leia’s response, and I don’t suppose anyone is going to read this, so I’ll keep it brief. On this reasoning, the kings in the old days who led their armies into battle would have had to have been considered expendable – after all, what other reason could there be?
I see Leia’s reply was recent, so I’ll add to what I wrote above.
>How do you know that the person who did the programme had a “deep interest” in the culture, anyway?< If you read what I wrote again you’ll see I referred to a programme *series* (involving his staying with a number of groups/tribes for a period of time), not a single programme. Of course one cannot be absolutely sure of anything about another human being, but I have not the slightest reason to suppose that the evident enthusiasm and concern of the individual in question to take part in the life of the group so as to get to know the people and their customs on a personal level was feigned or insincere. Why should it have been? >More importantly, how do you know he had the skills to find out what he wanted to?< He wasn’t trying to “find out” anything in the sense you seem to be implying. He wasn’t engaged in an anthropological study (and in any case the record of such anthropologists isn’t always particularly impressive – cf. Margaret Mead), he simply wanted to live with the people for a time on *their* terms. >The general historical consensus among scholars is, as G. noted, that hunter-gatherers are and were egalitarian. You don’t need any “remarkable ability” to see through the deception. You just need to be able to pick up a book rather than watching TV.< General consensuses among scholars on some topics are not infrequently subject to fashion, and anthropology is notorious in this respect – think Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. (Since you mention G., I note that he/she acknowledged that “evidence [in relation to] ancient hunter-gatherers [is] sparse for obvious reasons”.) >You just need to pick up a book rather than watching TV< Coming from someone who had just written “It’s just that people often see what they expect to see, and interpret others’ actions in the light of their own preconceptions, and this leads to inaccuracy a lot of the times”, I find that an interesting comment. It’s difficult to resist (and I won’t!) the riposte, “Don’t believe everything you read in books”. >The most obvious reason for why you’d send *anyone* to deal with danger is because, on some level, they’re considered expendable. There may be other less-obvious reasons as well, but that’s the most obvious.< Since I evidently *am* going to spell it out, the obvious reason why men are the ones who confront potentially dangerous outsiders is that men are physically stronger, and no doubt have a great deal more experience in whatever weaponry the group/tribe uses. Are we to suppose, for instance, that the Native Americans in North America who went out to scout the activities of a neighbouring tribe with which they were in warlike confrontation were men because men are expendable? Or is there not a rather more likely reason?