What is Matriarchy?

Did Women Ever Have Equal Rights to Men?

The purpose of this new blog project, Smash the Matriarchy!, and my previous book has been to uncover the identity of the Israelite mother goddess Asherah and the other goddesses of the Bible. I am fascinated by the concept of the “Wife of God” and the implications for today’s culture wars.

I am going to make the case that Asherah is representative of old matriarchal cultures where women had equal rights to men and that her worship was banned with the final advent of patriarchy and male dominance over women which had grown over three thousand years.

I recently discovered the highly influential book by feminist historian Gerda Lerner titled The Creation of Patriarchy. I read it with some trepidation because I had already worked through my thesis and was nervous that her work would contradict my position. I was greatly relieved to find that my work tracks hers very closely and I can now dive in with improved precision since I learned some important details from her. 

Both Lerner and I argue that patriarchy is a much more recent phenomenon in human history than we are led to believe. We are generally taught that men have dominated women forever through sheer force of violence. We are fed images in children's cartoons of cavemen bashing women over the head with a club and dragging them home as though this was the norm for how primitive people formed relationships. Likewise, many erudite scholars state without evidence that the beginnings of agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago required hierarchically organized societies ruled by men. 

Lerner and I both believe that these positions are bullshit. There is no evidence of societies built on male dominance over women until the Bronze Age and the emergence of what we call civilization in the 4th millennium BCE when we see the first kings, armies, and slavery.

So if humans have not lived under patriarchy since time immemorial does that mean people lived under matriarchy? Not exactly. If you define matriarchy as a society where women dominate men and order them around similar to how men dominate women in patriarchy then the answer is no. There are zero examples anywhere in the world of a society where women as a group have systematically dominated men.

For this reason, Gerda Lerner rejects the term matriarchy while I use the term colloquially (one slight difference between us). I do this mainly because the expression “smash the patriarchy” has become such a common political slogan and cliche among modern feminists and social progressives. 

I am using the term matriarchy to describe a very common form of society that is found all over the world and still in existence among indigenous people where women have equal rights to men. The core elements that create the preconditions of equal rights are matrilineality, matrilocality, and sexual freedom for women, all of which I will demonstrate in various Bible stories.

These elements are considered to be the default social structure of hunter-gather tribes for the 200,000-plus years that homo sapiens have existed. In the colonial era, Native American tribes, South Pacific Islanders, and many other indigenous groups had these social structures and it has been a broad topic of discussion subject to extensive anthropological research. 

Matrilineality is a system where family lines are tracked through mothers and daughters instead of through fathers and sons. This is foundational to the discussion because when family lines are tracked through the fathers it requires that women’s sex lives be tightly policed to control for paternity. 

Under patriarchy and patrilineality, girls are expected to be virgins until marriage and they are also expected to have complete fidelity to their husbands during the marriage. Any sexual activity by women outside these narrow confines is expressly forbidden and women suffer scandal and social opprobrium if they violate the rules. Meanwhile, their husbands are not subject to these constraints and have wide latitude in their sex lives.

With matrilineality, women have much more freedom in their sex lives. Their husbands and sperm donors can be separate people with no concern from the family. It is outside the scope of my work to catalog the sex lives of indigenous people but generally speaking, it has been widely observed that matrilineal cultures are more sexually permissive for women than patriarchal cultures allow.

Matrilocality describes marriages where the husband goes to live with the wife’s family, as opposed to patrilocality where the wife goes to live with the husband’s family. Matrilocal marriages were often practiced as visiting marriages where the man came and went periodically from the wife’s family and they did not live together permanently. The women stay together, share child-rearing duties, and keep the babies. Father figures can be chosen from among the woman’s kin.

Matrilocality is hugely advantageous to women because in the case of unhappy marriages and divorces the men will leave while women remain with their families. In patrilocal marriages, the women leave their families and are forced to be dependent on their husbands. If the marriage is unhappy or abusive the woman is severely constrained in her capacity to leave if she is caring for children.

As we go forward we will explore the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy as seen in ancient law, mythology, and Bible stories. My argument is that patriarchy began with the Bronze Age in the fourth millennium BCE and became permanently entrenched in the first millennium BCE. During this long transition period, we see that patriarchal and matriarchal groups co-existed and interacted with some measure of rivalry between them.

I make one argument that Gerda Lerner does not, which is that the rise of patriarchy was initiated by a technological shift, the invention of bronze, which upset the delicate balance of power between the sexes. The invention of bronze was a profound technological revolution every bit as profound as the Industrial Revolution in modern times. Bronze introduced new agricultural tools like the plow that transformed planting into farming and also introduced weapons that set the stage for the rise of kings, armies, and slavery. 

Neolithic planting had primarily been women’s work that was relatively rudimentary and could be done close to home with children in tow. While farming with plows required the use of oxen and other large beasts of burden that only strong men could manage. Plow farming also leveraged larger fields farther from home and was less compatible with having small children underfoot. 

The introduction of weapons was likely even more important. Prior to bronze humans had spears and clubs to fight with and these were equally available to all so no tribe had a systemic advantage over others. But bronze was available to fewer people and it enabled them to make swords, daggers, and armor. Now a small group of ruthless men could murder a larger group of men and force the surviving women into slavery. This initial subjugation of women gave us the origins of slavery and the first dominance hierarchies. 

Bronze was invented around 4000 BCE in Mesopotamia, some 6000 years after the Neolithic Revolution first introduced agriculture and settled planting communities. As far as we can tell during the long Neolithic era there was no slavery, kings, class systems, or dominance hierarchies. Judging from burial practices, men and women had equal rights, respect, and diets. No graves have been found in this era of individuals that had significantly greater wealth or living standards than the rest of their communities. People were buried with personal possessions but not with the great piles of treasure that we commonly see later. 

Mesopotamian societies were the first to harness the power of bronze and transition to civilization as we know it. Around 3500 BCE in the city of Uruk, we see the emergence of a complex urban civilization featuring hierarchical class systems, organized religion with elite priesthoods, rule by kings, slavery, and diverse professions.

We will explore these themes in Mesopotamian law, mythology, and the Bible and show women steadily lose their power and independence. I will demonstrate where we can see matrilineality and matrilocality among some critical Biblical characters, such as in the marriages of Abraham and Sarah, as well as Jacob and his wives Rachel and Leah. It is not a coincidence that you see these matriarchal marriages in the oldest parts of the Biblical timeline.

The goddesses of ancient Israel; Asherah, Astarte, and Anat reflect matriarchy because they were not submissive or deferential to any of the male gods, neither the king of the gods nor the Heavenly Father. They had matrilocal marriages if they were married at all, and they were not monogamous. Some of the goddesses were wildly promiscuous and promoted female sexuality.

These matriarchal goddesses were completely unacceptable to the rising patriarchy and their worship was crushed for that reason.