Matrifocal family

In 1956, the concept of the matrifocal family was introduced to the study of Caribbean societies by Raymond T. Smith. He linked the emergence of matrifocal families with how households are formed in the region: "The household group tends to be matri-focal in the sense that a woman in the status of 'mother' is usually the de facto leader of the group, and conversely the husband-father, although de jure head of the household group (if present), is usually marginal to the complex of internal relationships of the group. By 'marginal' we mean that he associates relatively infrequently with the other members of the group, and is on the fringe of the effective ties which bind the group together". Smith emphasises that a matrifocal family is not simply woman-centred, but rather mother-centred. Women in their role as mothers become key to organising the family group. Men tend to be marginal to this organisation and to the household, though they may have a more central role in other networks. Where matrifocal families are common, marriage is less common. In later work, Smith tends to emphasise the household less, and to see matrifocality more in terms of how the family network forms with mothers as key nodes in the network. Throughout, Smith argues that matrifocal kinship should be seen as a subsystem in a larger stratified society and its cultural values. He increasingly emphasises how the Afro-Caribbean matrifocal family is best understood within of a class-race hierarchy where marriage is connected to perceived status and prestige. "A family or domestic group is matrifocal when it is centred on a woman and her children. In this case the father(s) of these children are intermittently present in the life of the group and occupy a secondary place. The children's mother is not necessarily the wife of one of the children's fathers." In general, according to Laura Hobson Herlihy citing P. Mohammed, women have "high status" if they are "the main wage earners", they "control ... the household economy", and males tend to be absent. Men's absences are often of long durations. One of Raymond Smith's contemporary critics, M. G. Smith, notes that while households may appear matrifocal taken by themselves, the linkages between households may be patrifocal. That is, a man in his role as father may be providing, particularly economic support to a mother in one or more households whether he lives in that household or not. Both for men and for women having children with more than one partner is a common feature of this kind of system. Alternative terms for 'matrifocal' or 'matrifocality' include matricentric, matripotestal, and women-centered kinship networks. The matrifocal is distinguished from the concepts: matrilocal, the matrilineal, matrilateral and matriarchy. The last because matrifocality does not imply that women have power in the larger community. ==Characteristics and distribution==

According to anthropologist Maurice Godelier, matrifocality is "typical of Afro-Caribbean groups" and some African-American communities. These include families in which a father has a wife and one or more mistresses; in a few cases, a mother may have more than one lover. according to Herlihy citing other authors, in some Mediterranean communities; In their study of family life in Bethnal Green, London, during the 1950s, Young and Willmott found both matrifocal and matrilineal elements at work: mothers were a focus for distributing economic resources through the family network. They were also active in passing down the rights to tenancies in matrilineal succession to their daughters. Herlihy found matrifocality among the Miskitu people, in the village of Kuri, on the Caribbean coast of northeastern Honduras in the late 1990s. According to Herlihy, the "main power" and a correlation with matrilineality, while some patriarchal norms also existed. The Nair community in Kerala and the Bunt community in Tulunadu in South India are prime examples of matrifocality. This can be attributed to the fact that if males were largely warriors by profession, a community was bound to lose male members at youth, leading to a situation where the females assumed the role of running the family.. ==History==

In the 14th century, in Jiangnan, South China, under Mongol rule by the Yuan dynasty, Kong Qi kept a diary of his view of some families as practicing gynarchy, not defined as it is in major dictionaries but defined by Paul J. Smith as "the creation of short-term family structures dominated by women" and not as matrilineal or matriarchal. According to Paul J. Smith, it was to this kind of gynarchy that "Kong ascribed...the general collapse of society" Matrifocality arose, Godelier said, in some Afro-Caribbean and African American cultures as a consequence of enslavement of thousands. In 2025, scientists reported discovering that DNA from the remains of individuals in the Iron Age in Britain showed evidence that men had moved to join their wive's families. Among the remains of a Celtic group that occupied the central southern coastal region of England, between 100BC to AD100, most genetic material showed that they were descendants of the same woman. == See also ==