Most anthropologists hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal, at least no matriarchal society that have completely excluded the opposite
gender from roles of authority. According to
J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page, no matriarchy with the element of exclusion is known to have existed. which he asserts is the contemporary opinion of mainstream
anthropology, although there are some disagreements and exceptions. A belief that women's rule preceded men's rule was, according to Haviland, "held by many nineteenth-century intellectuals". stated that "the predominance of a supreme goddess is probably a reflection from the practice of matriarchy which at all times characterized
Elamite civilization to a greater or lesser degree, before this practice was overthrown by the patriarchy".
Europe Tacitus claimed in his book
Germania that in "the nations of the
Sitones woman is the ruling sex."
Robert Graves in his book "
The Greek Myths" (1955) controversially argued that many of those mythic stories derive from a time when European matriarchy and female-dominated religion was being resisted and eventually overthrown by patriarchal systems and beliefs.
Anne Helene Gjelstad describes the women on the
Estonian islands
Kihnu and
Manija as "the last matriarchal society in Europe" because "the older women here take care of almost everything on land as their husbands travel the seas".
Asia The
Khasi and
Garo peoples residing in the North East regions of India are two of the top matriarchal societies of
Meghalaya.
Burma Possible matriarchies in Burma are, according to Jorgen Bisch, the
Padaungs and, according to Andrew Marshall, the
Kayaw.
China The
Mosuo culture, which is in China near
Tibet, is frequently described as matriarchal. The term
matrilineal is sometimes used, and, while more accurate, does not reflect the full complexity of their social organization; in fact, it is difficult to categorize Mosuo culture within traditional Western definitions. They have aspects of a matriarchal culture: women are often the head of the house, inheritance is through the female line, and women make business decisions. On the other hand, political decisions tend to be made by men. It is also worthy of note that current culture of the Mosuo has been heavily shaped by their status as a minority in China.
India In India, of communities recognized in the
national Constitution as Scheduled Tribes, "some ... [are] matriarchal and matrilineal" "and thus have been known to be more egalitarian". According to interviewer Anuj Kumar,
Manipur, India, "has a matriarchal society", but this may not be scholarly. In Kerala, Nairs, Thiyyas, Brahmins of Payyannoor village and Muslims of North Malabar and in Karnataka, Bunts and Billavas follow the matrilineal system.
Indonesia Anthropologist
Peggy Reeves Sanday has said that the
Minangkabau society is a matriarchy.
Ancient Vietnam (before 43 CE) According to William S. Turley, "the role of women in traditional Vietnamese culture was determined [partly] by ... indigenous customs bearing traces of matriarchy", affecting "different social classes" That being said, even after adopting the patriarchal Chinese system, Vietnamese women, especially peasant women, still held a higher position than women in most patriarchal societies. According to Chiricosta, the legend of
Âu Cơ is said to be evidence of "the presence of an original 'matriarchy' in North Vietnam and [it] led to the double kinship system, which developed there .... [and which] combined matrilineal and patrilineal patterns of family structure and assigned equal importance to both lines." Chiricosta said that other scholars relied on "this 'matriarchal' aspect of the myth to differentiate Vietnamese society from the pervasive spread of Chinese Confucian patriarchy," and that "resistance to China's colonization of Vietnam ... [combined with] the view that Vietnam was originally a matriarchy ... [led to viewing] women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy as a metaphor for the entire nation's struggle for Vietnamese independence," and therefore, a "metaphor for the struggle of the matriarchy to resist being overthrown by the patriarchy." According to
Keith Weller Taylor, "the matriarchal flavor of the time is ... attested by the fact that Trung Trac's mother's tomb and spirit temple have survived, although nothing remains of her father", and the "society of the Trung sisters" was "strongly matrilineal". According to Donald M. Seekins, an indication of "the strength of matriarchal values" was that a woman,
Trưng Trắc, with her younger sister
Trưng Nhị, raised an army of "over 80,000 soldiers ... [in which] many of her officers were women",
Native Americans , of the
Hopi-Tewa People, in 1901; with her mother, White Corn; her eldest daughter, Annie Healing holding her granddaughter, Rachel The
Hopi (in what is now the
Hopi Reservation in northeastern
Arizona), according to
Alice Schlegel, had as its "gender ideology ... one of female superiority, and it operated within a social actuality of sexual equality." According to LeBow (based on Schlegel's work), in the Hopi, "gender roles ... are egalitarian .... [and] [n]either sex is inferior." LeBow concluded that Hopi women "participate fully in ... political decision-making." According to Schlegel, "the Hopi no longer live as they are described here" and "the attitude of female superiority is fading". and "the household ... was matrilocal". Women were central to institutions of clan and household and predominated "within the economic and social systems (in contrast to male predominance within the political and ceremonial systems)." since there was no "countervailing ... strongly centralized, male-centered political structure". through what may have been a matriarchy or gyneocracy. According to Doug George-Kanentiio, in this society, mothers exercise central moral and political roles. The dates of this constitution's operation are unknown; the League was formed in approximately 1000–1450, but the constitution was oral until written in about 1880. The League still exists. George-Kanentiio explains: In our society, women are the center of all things. Nature, we believe, has given women the ability to create; therefore it is only natural that women be in positions of power to protect this function....We traced our clans through women; a child born into the world assumed the clan membership of its mother. Our young women were expected to be physically strong....The young women received formal instruction in traditional planting....Since the Iroquois were absolutely dependent upon the crops they grew, whoever controlled this vital activity wielded great power within our communities. It was our belief that since women were the givers of life they naturally regulated the feeding of our people....In all countries, real wealth stems from the control of land and its resources. Our Iroquois philosophers knew this as well as we knew natural law. To us it made sense for women to control the land since they were far more sensitive to the rhythms of the Mother Earth. We did not own the land but were custodians of it. Our women decided any and all issues involving territory, including where a community was to be built and how land was to be used....In our political system, we mandated full equality. Our leaders were selected by a caucus of women before the appointments were subject to popular review....Our traditional governments are composed of an equal number of men and women. The men are chiefs and the women clan-mothers....As leaders, the women closely monitor the actions of the men and retain the right to veto any law they deem inappropriate....Our women not only hold the reins of political and economic power, they also have the right to determine all issues involving the taking of human life. Declarations of war had to be approved by the women, while treaties of peace were subject to their deliberations. looked at the evidence of
matriarchal religion in pre-Hellenic societies. The concept was further investigated by Lewis Morgan. According to Uwe Wesel, Bachofen's myth interpretations have proved to be untenable. According to historian
Susan Mann, as of 2000, "few scholars these days find ... [a "notion of a stage of primal matriarchy"] persuasive."
Kurt Derungs is a recent non-academic author advocating an "anthropology of landscape" based on allegedly matriarchal traces in
toponymy and folklore.
Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages Friedrich Engels, in 1884, claimed that, in the earliest stages of human social development, there was group marriage and that therefore paternity was disputable, whereas maternity was not, so that a family could be traced only through the female line. This was a materialist interpretation of Bachofen's
Mutterrecht. Engels speculated that the domestication of animals increased material wealth, which was claimed by men. Engels said that men wanted to control women to use as laborers and to pass on wealth to their children, requiring monogamy; as patriarchy rose, women's status declined until they became mere objects in the exchange trade between men, causing the global defeat of the female sex and the rise of individualism and competition. According to Eller, Engels may have been influenced with respect to women's status by
August Bebel, according to whom matriarchy naturally resulted in
communism, while patriarchy was characterized by exploitation. Austrian writer
Bertha Diener (or Helen Diner), wrote
Mothers and Amazons (1930), the first work to focus on women's cultural history, a classic of feminist matriarchal study. Her view is that all past human societies were originally matriarchal, while most later shifted to patriarchy and degenerated. The controversy intensified with
The White Goddess by
Robert Graves (1948) and his later analysis of classical Greek mythology, focusing on the reconstruction of earlier myths that had conjecturally been rewritten after a transition from matriarchal to patriarchal religion in very early historical times. From the 1950s, Marija Gimbutas developed a theory of an
Old European culture in Neolithic Europe with matriarchal traits, which had been replaced by the patriarchal system of the
Proto-Indo-Europeans in the
Bronze Age. However, other anthropologists warned that "the goddess worship or matrilocality that evidently existed in many paleolithic societies was not necessarily associated with matriarchy in the sense of women's power over men. Many societies can be found that exhibit those qualities along with female subordination." According to Eller, Gimbutas had a large part in constructing a myth of historical matriarchy by examining
Eastern European cultures that never really resembled the alleged universal matriarchy. She asserts that in "actually documented primitive societies" of recent (historical) times, paternity is never ignored and that the sacred status of goddesses does not automatically increase female social status, and she interprets utopian matriarchy as an invented inversion of
antifeminism. From the 1970s, ideas of matriarchy were taken up by popular writers of second-wave feminism such as
Riane Eisler,
Elizabeth Gould Davis, and
Merlin Stone, and expanded with the speculations of
Margaret Murray on
witchcraft, by the
Goddess movement, and in
feminist Wicca. "A Golden Age of matriarchy" was prominently presented by
Charlene Spretnak and "encouraged" by Stone and Eisler, but, at least for the
Neolithic Age, it has been denounced as feminist wishful thinking in works such as
The Inevitability of Patriarchy,
Why Men Rule,
Goddess Unmasked, and
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. The idea is not emphasized in
third-wave feminism. J.F. del Giorgio insists on a matrifocal, matrilocal, matrilineal Paleolithic society.
Bronze Age According to Rohrlich, "many scholars are convinced that Crete was a matriarchy, ruled by a queen-priestess" and the "
Cretan civilization" was "matriarchal" before "1500 BC," when it was overrun and colonized by the patriarchy. Archaeologist Marianna Nikolaidou investigated the question of matriarchy in
Neolithic Greece and Bronze Age Crete concluding, "Aside from the limited genetic data about family and kinship, which themselves are open to interpretation, the excavated evidence neither supports or precludes the existence of such a social system." Also according to Rohrlich, "in the early Sumerian city-states 'matriarchy seems to have left something more than a trace. One common misconception among historians of the Bronze Age such as Stone and Eisler is the notion that the
Semites were matriarchal while the Indo-Europeans practiced a patriarchal system. An example of this view is found in Stone's
When God Was a Woman, wherein she makes the case that the worship of
Yahweh was an Indo-European invention superimposed on an ancient matriarchal Semitic nation. Evidence from the
Amorites and
pre-Islamic Arabs, however, indicates that the primitive Semitic family was in fact patriarchal and patrilineal. However, not all scholars agree. Anthropologist and Biblical scholar
Raphael Patai writes in
The Hebrew Goddess that the Jewish religion, far from being pure monotheism, contained from earliest times strong polytheistic elements, chief of which was the cult of
Asherah, the mother goddess. A story in the Biblical Book of Judges places the worship of Asherah in the 12th century BC. Originally a
Canaanite goddess, her worship was adopted by Hebrews who intermarried with Canaanites. She was worshipped in public and was represented by carved wooden poles. Numerous small nude female figurines of clay were found all over ancient Palestine and a seventh-century Hebrew text invokes her aid for a woman giving birth.
Shekinah is the name of the feminine holy spirit who embodies both divine radiance and compassion. Exemplifying various traits associated with mothers, she comforts the sick and dejected, accompanies the Jews whenever they are exiled, and intercedes with God to exercise mercy rather than to inflict retribution on sinners. While not a creation of the Hebrew Bible, Shekinah appears in a slightly later Aramaic translation of the Bible in the first or second century C.E., according to Patai. Initially portrayed as the presence of God, she later becomes distinct from God, taking on more physical attributes. Meanwhile, the Indo-Europeans were known to have practiced multiple succession systems, and there is much better evidence of matrilineal customs among the Indo-European
Celts and
Germanics than among any ancient Semitic peoples. Women ruled
Sparta while the men were often away fighting, or when both kings were incapacitated or too young to rule.
Gorgo, Queen of Sparta, was asked by a woman in
Attica "You Spartan women are the only women that lord it over your men", to which Gorgo replied: "Yes, for we are the only women that are mothers of men!"
Iron Age to Middle Ages Arising in the period ranging from the
Iron Age to the
Middle Ages, several
northwestern European mythologies from the
Irish (e.g.
Macha and
Scáthach), the
Brittonic (e.g.
Rhiannon), and the Germanic (e.g.
Grendel's mother and
Nerthus) contain ambiguous episodes of primal female power which have been interpreted as folk evidence of matriarchal attitudes in
pre-Christian European Iron Age societies. Often transcribed from a retrospective, patriarchal, Romanised, and
Catholic perspective, they hint at a possible earlier era when female power predominated. The first-century historical British figure of
Boudicca indicates that Brittonnic society permitted explicit female autocracy or a form of gender equality which contrasted strongly with the patriarchal Mediterranean civilisation that later overthrew it.
20th–21st centuries The
Mosuo people are an ethnic group in southwest China. They are considered one of the most well-known matriarchal societies, although many scholars assert that they are rather
matrilineal. , the sole heirs in the family are still daughters. Since 1990, when foreign tourism became permitted, tourists started visiting the Mosuo people. It was founded on an empty piece of land by women who fled their homes after being raped by British soldiers. They formed a safe-haven in rural Samburu County in northern Kenya. Men of the same tribe established a village nearby from which to observe the women's village, and men suing to close the women's village. Although largely considered
matrilineal, some women's studies scholars such as Roopleena Banerjee consider the Khasi to be matriarchal. Traditionally, the youngest daughter, called the Khadduh, receives and cares for ancestral property. == Mythology ==