“When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
–same author.
Considering history in the main was written by men, and for most of our recorded existence women have been held back by males, is it hardly surprising that there is no evidence of a successful matriarchal society?
The obvious problem with this theory is that it takes a lack of evidence as evidence. We could use the same kind of argument to support the theory of a prior peaceful civilization of slightly damp sponges.
Now you are being silly. How do we know whether or not there was whole shelves in the library at Alexander that recorded such instances?
We don’t, but there is more chance of it than there is of any involvement with sponges.
How do you know there were? If I’m being silly, you should have a good deal of evidence to support your position.
Not really*. I found this though.
You’re being silly = I’ve got lots of evidence.
Nope! Still don’t see it.
An uncredited, unreferenced, unsourced article on a geocities page by some guy calling himself “Zen Werewolf” is hardly a cite at all. Is there any scholarly work that references matriarchial societies documented in the Great Library?
ivan astikov said:
Doesn’t matter what might have been at Alexandria and destroyed for all time. WE do not have that evidence, so we cannot say that there were peaceful matriarchies ruling the world. As soon as you get some evidence that there were, then it will cease to be silly to argue that they existed.
So introducing sponges into the discussion adds, what? Other than coming over like a condescending twat!
I use hyperbole as a teaching tool. I can see it does not have the desired effect on you. Do you have any evidence to back up your claims yet?
(BTW, I did not know men could be twats.)
No, I mentioned it to further the topic conversation, not as a prologue to some ultimate source. It’s called supposition; sometimes it leads nowhere, other times it unearths gems.
You live and you learn.
I didn’t notice the ''Zen Werewolf" bit; I take back everything I’ve said.
(As a Brit colloquialism, not only can men be twats or cunts, but it’s considered slightly less improper than applying the term to a woman. Like “bugger” being considered a lesser profanity than “fuck”, it doesn’t have to make sense.)
/aside
It also lets them project any guilt or responsibility for their shortcomings on the Evil Patriachy/Church/Communists/Government/Choose your Evil. 'Hey, I would be sweet and harmonious if only they hadn’t fucked things up.
Agreed. I’m reminded of a chapter in Reay Tannahill’s ‘Sex in History’ entitled ‘The not so Great Goddess’. We lapse lyrical about the miracle of birth. How do we imagine a girl probably not into her teens thought about it in a primitive society without medical or anaesthetic knowledge? Or a woman expecting her fifteenth child, ten of them dead in infancy? How did the tribe scratching to survive feel? I have my suspicions that all those legendary maidens sacrificed to dragons might have their origin in sending the youngest girl likely to get pregnant (or already so) into the cave selected for winter quarters first to see if anything nasty would reveal itself. She would be the biggest liability and least likely to survive birth. One thing we know about all ancient societies is that they did not carry the weak and disabled. It is hard to blame that on patriarchy since we should expect any boy to be preferred to a girl and that is not true.
The Egyptian link is a cesspool of crap. Egypt has left more than enough about its religion going back to at least 2,500 (none of it, incidentally in cuneiform) and were there anything significantly matriarchal in there it would show up. Contrary to the assumption, it is universally understood that if Egyptians came from anywhere it was from further South and a recent National Geographic focusses on a disputed but growing belief that the whole Pharoahic Thing came along a known trade route to the south-west leading into Chad (at the least) - nobody knows how far it went into ‘Darkest Africa’ which was probably less forested at the time.
Because men wrote history would be a reason to notice any matriarchy, primordial or still extant, just as they noted the Amazons (though just where is a matter of conjecture). The likelihood is that the original Amazons were simply people whose women fought as well as men. That could well be the Galician Celts (since other Celtic women fought) who must have passed through or round Greece on their way to central Turkey and probably conflicted with the ancestral proto-Greeks en route.
What’s more, there’s no reason to imagine that the structure of matriarchy would differ at all from patriarchy. What matters to an early relatively peaceful society is Survival, the Home, the Village. A matriarchy would most likely hold those in high esteem as primarily women’s activities with men as hunters, protectors and occasional impregnators when the women wanted to become pregnant. Since once man can impregnate a lot of women it is quite likely that only the strongest potential warriors would be allowed to live. Its only difference from patriarchy would be where the power and respect lay.
There is circumstantial evidence that such societies may have existed and with patriarchal conquest continued with much the same structure but political power transferred to the war band in Sparta and Crete. Warning though: there is no real evidence for Sir Arthur Evans’s Art Deco bathing-mad Minoans considerable evidence that his ‘baths’ (made of water-soluble gypsum and without plumbing!) were actually sarcophagi and ‘palaces’ for the high-ranking mummified dead.
However, Classical Crete did venerate the Great Mother and had a barrack structure and enslaved indigenous population rather less extreme than Sparta’s. We know that the legendary Lykourgos legislated Sparta’s system but he probably only codified existing custom.
Sparta venerated the Great Mother above all and flogged boys as a trial/sacrifice to her. Some usually died. It was a tourist attraction until banned when Christianity became compulsory about 370CE. Helen of Troy was originally Helen of Sparta. Why would the Mykenaian Greeks mount such an expedition to get her back that it became Scripture to their successors? They were at a ‘Viking’ level of civilisation, more ready to kill her than to retrieve her. She must have been mightily important, so much so that instead of laughing at Menelaus, they feel obliged to join his expedition. The reality may be something quite different but that is less important than that however garbled, later Greeks had to believe it feasible. (According to Wikipedia, Theseus abducted her as a child because she was of divine birth).
When the heroes return, Klytaimnestra promptly assassinates Agamemnon and continues to rule his kingdom with her lover Aigistheus. Echoes of The King must Die. Penelope, however has remained faithful to Odysseus for some 20 years.
There are strong hints that succession and authority lie with the queen. (These are ‘royalty’ where it surprises nobody to find King Odysseus ploughing his own fields - ‘chieftans’ really) No Palace Guard prevent Klytaimnestra from replacing her husband. Penelope’s tenacity is exceptional and her son has not taken over. It is easy to imagine that the incoming patriarchal Mykenaians are only just establishing themselves through marriage to the established Queen.
So maybe there were matriarchies, but ‘peaceful’ or any different in structure from patriarchies, very doubtful.
A matrilineal patriarchy is not a matriarchy.