You don’t actually understand an idea until you know its history. That lesson is one that most people have been doing their level best not to learn in recent years. Their unwillingness isn’t any kind of accident. Once you know where an idea came from and what kind of vagrant wanderings it’s been through on its way from its birthplace to the present day, it stops being possible to shove that idea into the simplistic straitjacket of “true or false.” You have to come to terms with who invented it, what causes they meant it to support or oppose, who picked it up and did other things with it, and so on. You have to see it in its actual context, not just in whatever context has been invented for it by the the culture or counterculture of today.
That principle’s going to get a workout this week. As most of my readers know, whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, the readers of my blog get to nominate and vote for a topic for the fifth Wednesday post. Since I have not only the best but also the weirdest commentariat on the internet, the topics chosen for fifth Wednesday essays have strayed all over the map, and in some cases it’s been a hard-fought struggle between options. This month was different. By a large majority, my readers wanted me to follow up on a few stray comments I’d made a while back, and talk about matriarchy, patriarchy, and the fuss that’s been made about both concepts in and out of feminist Neopaganism over the last half century or so.
Most of the discussion of these concepts during that time has fitted neatly into the simplistic straitjacket mentioned above. On the one hand there are people who insist that, as a matter of historical fact, some, or most, or all societies before the dawn of recorded history were ruled by women, and that these matriarchies were overthrown by patriarchal invaders. On the other hand there are people who insist that there were no such prehistoric matriarchies. Around and around the debate has gone; since it’s all but impossible to know much of anything about the gender politics of societies that left no written records, there’s basically nothing to stop both sides from finding what they want to find in the equivocal traces turned up by archeologists.
This is where the perspectives offered by the history of ideas come in handy. Let’s set aside questions about prehistory for a moment, and ask some that are less trouble to resolve: where did this belief in ancient matriarchies come from? Who invented it, when and where did they do so, and what causes did they intend the concept to support?
The answers here are refreshingly straightforward. The concept of prehistoric matriarchy was invented by a man named Johann Jakob Bachofen, a Swiss philologist and professor, and it was introduced to the world of modern thought in his book Mutterrecht (Mother-Right), published in 1861. His ideas were taken up enthusiastically by leading anthropologists, and for a while were widely accepted in scholarly circles generally. What makes this particularly interesting is that not only Bachofen but nearly all the important names in the 19th-century literature on matriarchy were male—and the vast majority of them thought matriarchy was a very bad thing.
It’s important to put Bachofen’s work in its proper context. The idea of women-only societies, in which women occupied traditionally male social roles, goes back into antiquity; the Amazons of Greek legend are the most widely known example of the kind. What sets this trope apart from Bachofen’s invention is that the Amazons and their equivalents didn’t rule over societies of men as well as women. Their societies, according to legend, excluded men absolutely. Nor, of course, did anyone portray the Amazons as a universal stage in human history. Amazon societies were always pictured as exotic phenomena, far removed from the usual way of things.
This wasn’t at all what Bachofen was saying. He proposed that all of humanity passed through a series of evolutionary stages on the way from primitive savagery to the first settled civilizations. There were three main stages; since this was the 19th century, what defined those stages was, of course, sex. The first was the stage of primitive promiscuity, where everybody mated with everybody else and family ties didn’t exist yet. The second was the stage of matriarchy, when family ties focused entirely on the mother because nobody had yet figured out the connection between sex and pregnancy, and so women ruled society. The third was the stage of patriarchy, in which men took power away from women and established the family in its modern form.
It’s a nice simplistic scheme and so it inevitably became very popular in European thought for the next century or so, even in fields seemingly far removed from prehistoric gender studies. Read what Freud had to say about the oral, anal, and genital stages through which all children supposedly pass, for example, and it’s not hard to see Bachofen in the background. For that matter, currently fashionable notions about “evolutionary stages” borrow extensively from Bachofen’s scheme, usually at third or fourth hand. That happened as readily as it did because, like most revolutionary ideas, Bachofen’s was less original than it looked.
He took the idea of tracing human social forms back to current notions of primitive savagery and ignorance from Giambattista Vico, who wrote during the late 17th and early 18th centuries but whose ideas had come back into vogue a few decades before Bachofen wrote. He took the idea of chopping up historical development into three sequential stages from G.W.F. Hegel, whose ideas were wildly popular among European intellectuals in Bachofen’s time. Hovering over the whole enterprise was the work of Charles Darwin, who published The Origin of Species in 1859, and more broadly the Western world’s discovery of deep time. All across Europe and the European diaspora, people who’d grown up thinking of the world as just 6000 years old were flailing frantically as scientists forced them to start thinking of millions of years. (Billions were still a little while in the future then.) Nice neat stages made that a little easier.
But there was another specter at Bachofen’s feast. In 1848, a group of women met at Seneca Falls, New York, and held the convention that launched first wave feminism. That also had history behind it, since the first half of the 19th century had seen a dramatic loss of women’s rights across much of the Western world. That was when women lost the right to vote in some American states, which they’d had since colonial times, and when women in England lost the right to own property. Combine those historical trends with robust female involvement in the struggle against slavery, in which many of the early feminists learned the tools of political activism, and an explosion was inevitable. Well before 1861, as a result, male intellectuals in Europe were confronted by pushback from women who were profoundly dissatisfied with the roles in life that 19th century culture assigned them.
The invention of the concept of matriarchy by Bachofen, and its enthusiastic adoption by male anthropologists and scholars generally, was thus a counterblast to the rise of first wave feminism. The ink was hardly dry on Darwin’s theory when people started to use it as a way to prop up social hierarchies, by insisting that “more evolved” equalled “better.” (This isn’t at all what Darwin said, but then as now, too few people who use the word “evolution” bothered to read The Origin of Species.) With this in mind, Bachofen and his followers presented patriarchy as “more evolved”—that is, a later developmental stage in human evolution—than matriarchy, so that feminism could be denounced as a throwback to primitive, less evolved conditions.
Ah, but constructing a straw man along those lines carries with it a constant risk that it may be turned around and used against you. That was what happened with the concept of ancient matriarchies: a lot of people, not all of them female, read what Bachofen had to say about matriarchy and decided that it sounded a lot better than what 19th century Europe offered them. The crucial figure here was Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s good friend and the co-inventor of Communism. In his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1888), Engels drew extensively on Bachofen’s heirs in the anthropological community but stood their theory on its head, insisting that primitive matriarchy had been a utopian arrangement free of poverty, war, and oppression, before the invention of private property—the equivalent of original sin in the Marxist rewrite of Christian theology—brought the whole thing crashing down.
Engels’ book signaled “game on” for radicals of many different stripes, who embraced the concept of ancient matriarchy and revised it for their own rhetorical purposes. Some first wave feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, adopted it and used it efficiently in propaganda for their side in the gender wars of that era. Many Marxists and anarchists took it up as well, with varying success. It’s doubtless no accident that the entire concept was dropped like a hot rock by academic anthropologists thereafter. That didn’t slow it down in the least. All through the twentieth century, the notion of ancient, peaceful, utopian matriarchies was a commonplace among cultural radicals on the left.
The difficulty these ventures faced, when they passed beyond simple dogma and tried to prove their case, was the same difficulty faced by their critics who tried to disprove the same thesis: the data concerning gender relations in prehistory is so sparse that almost any imaginable spin can be put on them, and conclusive evidence is essentially impossible to find. Thus Marija Gimbutas threw her considerable academic talents into the attempt to prove that prehistoric southeastern Europe had been a close equivalent to Engels’ matriarchal utopia, only to end up assuming what she meant to prove: decide that every drawing of an eye must by definition be a sacred icon of an otherwise undocumented Eye Goddess, as she did, and it’s not hard to find goddesses wherever you happen to look.
(Mind you, it’s also anything but safe to assume that a society that worships goddesses must be feminist. Feudal Japan, hardly a feminist utopia, revered the sun goddess Amaterasu above all other Shinto deities; ancient Athens, which kept married women locked up in harems, gave first place to Athena. Nothing is more difficult than trying to tease out the details of social relationships when all you have to go on are sparse archeological traces of material culture.)
It’s from this process that we ended up burdened with the claims that matriarchy and patriarchy are the basic organizing schemes of society. Those claims had another importance as the 20th century drew on, and the erasure of social class became a core element in the camouflage that the managerial class used to conceal and exploit its power over society. That’s why it became fashionable to talk about gender, race, and other notionally biological divisions, but never about class. That, in turn, how we ended up in a situation in which an African-American woman in suburban Maryland who makes six hefty figures plus benefits working in the federal bureaucracy can claim to be oppressed by a white man in West Virginia working three part time minimum wage jobs in a desperate effort to keep his children fed, when the policies she administers and the party she supports are directly responsible for his plight.
It’s past time to step away from that self-serving rhetoric and recognize the value of one of the few genuinely good concepts the modern left has come up with, the concept of intersectionality: the recognition that the rights and burdens allotted to you by society are not governed by sex alone, or by race alone, or by class alone, or by any other single factor, but by all these things and more. We do not live in a hierarchy—we live in a heterarchy, in which power is complex, nuanced, personal, and situational, varying along a galaxy of different metrics. It’s generally safe to assume that those who try to flatten that reality out into some kind of simplistic binary scheme are doing so in an attempt to claim unearned power for themselves and their allies.
Thus it’s long past time to admit that we do not know if there were ever societies in prehistory that were governed by women, and if academics weren’t so terrified of the words “we don’t know”—I think they’re afraid their noses will fall off if they say that—they’d doubtless agree. What we do know is that evolutionary schemes of fixed “developmental stages,” through which all societies pass, consistently fall to bits when tested against data from existing societies and written records from those that aren’t around any more. When Ken Wilber tried to revive that 19th-century habit in recent decades, in other words, he was barking up the wrong stump. Yet there’s an important sense in which the rhetorical construction of ancient matriarchies tells us something very useful, not about the ancient world, but about the present.
Let’s step back and talk a little about the nature of social power. By and large, there are two ways to exert power within a human community, which we can call formal and informal power. You can see this at work in most American Protestant churches. The formal power in the church is vested in the pastor and certain other individuals, usually male; depending on the denomination, these may be elected by the congregation, selected by a council of elders, or appointed by the local bishop, but all of them have specific offices with defined rights and duties.
Then there’s the informal power. In every church I’ve ever interacted with, this is possessed and exerted by a small group of old women—“the church ladies” is a common label for them. They may have nominal positions in the altar guild or what have you, but that’s irrelevant to their real power, which is exercised through gossip, networking, and other indirect means. That doesn’t make their power any less potent; for all practical purposes, they run the church, and nothing happens without their approval. Smart pastors flatter them, negotiate with them, and get them on board; weak pastors knuckle under to them, and generally get by tolerably well.
A pastor who irrevocably loses the support of his church ladies, however, is doomed. He will be tried and condemned by a court from which there is no appeal. Gossip, innuendoes, whispering campaigns, and a galaxy of similar tools come into play. If the estrangement is severe enough, unless he has the brains to flee from position at once, he can count on having his career destroyed, and quite possibly his marriage and his life into the bargain. Pastors in such situations generally get removed from their positions in disgrace if they don’t drink themselves to death first.
As in churches, so in societies more generally, there is a broad tendency—not universal, not without plenty of exceptions, but still more often true than not—for formal power to end up in the hands of male leaders and informal power to end up in the hands of female elders. This division by gender is by no means a perfect system, but it seems to work, and it may be hardwired into us. In traditionally male activities such as hunting and war, after all, there’s no time to seek a consensus and there needs to be no question about who has the right to make snap decisions. (“You three go that way, the rest of us’ll go this way, and we’ll hit the mammoth from both sides.”) In traditionally female occupations such as gathering, child care, and elder care, informal consensus is more workable, and in many cases more appropriate as well.
Most human societies make room for this twofold pattern, and some explicitly rely on it. One of the things that sets modern Western industrial societies apart from almost all other human societies in history, by contrast, is that they have gone out of their way to shut down every venue for informal power that women have relied on.
In the United States, though women’s informal power had been waning for many years, the breaking point came with the manufacture and mass marketing of suburbia. Before the Second World War, the vast majority of American women lived in neighborhoods where they had many opportunities to interact with other women and create the networks of stable interpersonal relationship that make informal power function. With homes, shops, schools, churches, and workplaces all close by, and geographical mobility very modest, informal power thrived, and provided women with ways to exercise power in their communities.
The coming of suburbia ended that. Suburbs were designed to leave their inmates isolated from one another, miles away from venues for interaction, while mass media drowned out other social activities and a rising tide of geographical mobility made it impossible for stable social bonds to form. Women were suddenly deprived of a mode of social power that had been central to many of their lives, and told by the media that they had no choice but to accept a condition of complete powerlessness in which they had lost their informal power but were shut out of access to formal power. That made second wave feminism inevitable, as women responded by seeking the one variety of power left to them: formal power, exercised in competition with men. The rhetoric of ancient matriarchies served as an effective symbolic language for them to talk about a very real sense of deprivation of power.
As what James Howard Kunstler wryly calls “the paradise of happy motoring” slides down into history’s trash can, and suburbs collapse back into more viable settlement patterns, informal power will doubtless resume its normal place in our society. In the meantime, though, certain social changes being pursued by some elements of society need to keep the reality of women’s informal power well in mind. A significant number of younger women these days are embracing the “tradwife” movement, abandoning careers in the business world and taking up roles as housewives and mothers instead. That will only become a lasting phenomenon if they can also establish and maintain their own informal power in something like the traditional pattern.
That depends, in turn, on whether young conservative men have the brains the gods gave geese, and recognize that it’s essential to step back and not even try to interfere as their wives begin to weave the old networks of informal power back together again. That’s going to involve some inconveniences, because that informal power will tolerably often be deployed in ways that men don’t like. Still, that’s the nature of power; all human beings, irrespective of gender, will find ways to exercise power, and if you don’t like what your wives are doing with it, gentlemen, just recall the history of the last two centuries and be aware that the alternative could be much, much less to your taste.
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current only to 7/14). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May 12 year old Sebastian Greco of Rhode Island, who recently suffered a head injury, make a prompt and complete recovery with no lasting problems.
May MindWinds’ father Clem be healed of his spinal, blood and cardio infections and returned to good health and wholeness; and may he and his family keep up a robust sense of humor and joy in each others’ continued company.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah, who has been in the hospital for a cold, and Noah’s mother Viktoria, who is recovering from her c-section, both be blessed with good health, strength, endurance, and protection, and may they swiftly they make a full recovery.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Fabulous article Mr. Greer. I was aware of Engels use of the word “patriarchy” but had no idea that the very concept of “matriarchy” was originally a derogatory term invented by a man to describe an originally less “evolved” mode of existence.
Yes, often in history women in domestic roles are less like June Cleaver and more like Hyacinth Bucket (see the picture below)!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HenpeckedHusband
That was apparently the case in my mother’s neighbourhood in the Toronto area as late as the 1970s.
Would another good example of female informal power be how cheerleaders, or at least “mean girls”, often rule an entire high school making the nerds do their homework, their jock boyfriends become their submissive puppies, and often even making the (especially male) teachers give them better grades. The idea of primitive societies run by informal networks akin to a ruling clique of girls in high school was provactively explored in this article from a few years ago.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
This has a lot of interesting twists, I’m going to have to read it again and ponder. I’m particularly intrigued by the Ken Wilber smack talk. I’ve been reading his work for years, and I’d be interested to hear more of your critique if you ever are so moved. Maybe another subject for a longer essay!
Great post. I try to learn and establish views from different sources, but direct observation is weighted most. By a long ways. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, I developed a view mostly in line with the informal power that women held, and that was the case in my family. On the best day, I could only achieve a distant third in the hierarchy of the household, with my parents (on even terms) well ahead of me and my three siblings.
Over time it became apparent our culture was dishing out propaganda intended to influence women much more often vs. men, and polarize us for gains of the upper crust in society. When Billie Jean King crushed Booby Riggs in an exhibition match in 1973, I had no clue to the status of gender wars, but that event hardly settled any question about equal abilities.
While it would be nice to have a system that allowed for trad wives, feminists, passage of the ERA, equal pay in sports, etc., it appears we’re not wired for that by default. Power vacuums and such. Humans have to keep in mind we’re really not that far advanced from the Good Old Days, which quite a few guys I know would be defined as:
“The first was the stage of primitive promiscuity, where everybody mated with everybody else and family ties didn’t exist yet.”
Since being diagnosed with breast cancer in December, I have been awed by the power of groups of women. Singular men have helped too, but in individual ways. The women have brought meals, driven me to and sat with me during appointments, held my hands in scary moments, and cheered every tiny victory. I have been deeply thankful for this demonstration of community. The men have offered physical help – gardening, repairs, yard work. It’s a microcosm of your description, to my eyes.
In great news, I had my last infusion yesterday and rang the heck out of the “I’M FINISHED” bell, which was, aptly, a ship’s style bell. This Sailor appreciated that!
Just a bit of informal power in action. My great grandmother was born in 1883 and lived to be 106. She was a large part of my life. When I got to what ever point it was that we discussed Women’s Sufferage at school, I asked her what it was like to get the right to vote. She said, “It was nice, of course, but we never felt excluded. The women’s club gathered for luncheon on Wednesday afternoons. We decided what needed doing and told our husbands. Believe me! When the president of the College Park Women’s Club sneezed, the Mayor caught a cold!” Of course, those were upper class white women, but they did have the interest of the community at heart. At one point she chaired a PTA committee that went out to do the research and made a presentation to the Board of Regents that got hot lunches served in public schools.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
David, in healthy human societies, formal and informal power balance each other out, and there are often formal-power roles available to women and informal-power roles available to men. It’s when that breaks down that we end up with unchecked power on both sides, with the “mean girls” as one example of toxic informal power.
Corvid, I’ve discussed some of the problems with Wilber’s rehash of the 19th-century rhetoric of developmental stages here:
https://www.ecosophia.net/against-enchantment-i-ken-wilber/
I may revisit him, if the press of current events lets me get back to my discussion of enchantment.
Drhooves, the wish-fulfillment dimension of all these schemes is of course very strong!
Michelle, delighted to hear that those networks are still strong where you are. Best wishes for a prompt and complete recovery, btw!
Bruce, that’s a classic example of what suburbanization destroyed. It will have to be rebuilt in the generations to come.
What I can remember from my grandparents generation is that the male formal power and female informal power do not excise on the same spectrum. Male formal power is mainly on external matters and execution of things and female informal power is on internal matters and long term planning. So my grandfather and other male relatives had to deal with carrying out day to day tasks and dealing with external parties. Running the house and long term guidance of young ones, there education marriage all were strictly came under family female members. So the two systems do not conflict with one another and coexist harmonically.
Nice post. I have had many discussions with friends about the breakdown of community that has followed from the extraordinary mobility made possible by modern transportation and communication systems. An often-heard mantra in our community is “those with get-up-and-go got up and left”. Virtually the only organizations that promote community here now are the churches, and even these have congregations that come and go, leaving them in constant, fragmented flux. What is left is a town that has been brain-drained, a main street with thrift shops, dollar stores, closed computer stores, and flea-market antique stores that no one patronizes. Everyone heads to cities 45 minutes (=40 miles) away to shop for anything but groceries and prescription drugs.
There is some community in our local neighborhood as the men help each other with hay harvesting and the like. But even here there has been about a 30% turnover in the last 10 years. Most of these people are older now and have day jobs. Agriculture here now is uncompetitive with 45,000 dairy operations in the mid-west and the beef industry has been destroyed by cheap imports form Argentina. The main industry in our county now is timber, the former agricultural fields having reverted to forest.
So in addition to women having less opportunity for the kind of soft power described in this essay, I would add the powerlessness of small family-oriented commercial enterprises such as farming and shop-keeping. The mass closure of these stores during Covid while the big box stores remained open and the demise of family farms as they fall to agricultural conglomerates succinctly illustrates the powerlessness of these enterprises.
I never understood what neo-pagan women meant by the patriarchy and how men kept them down. I realized that part of their ideas was because they themselves did not like men. The ones I knew usually had an absent or distant father and a mother from hell. They would tell stories about their bad mothers but reserved their hate for men.
One woman discussed the domestication of women by men. I.e. they were like raising cows – kill off the ornery ones and keep the docile ones. I have heard this theory at various times. The idea that men rose up and killed their friends’ wives, sisters, and daughters, who were creating trouble. This way, women were docile.
Of course the punch line, was the teller of the theory was usually a special woman who made it through.
Question: Have you ever heard of this theory? Where does it come from.
As for me, I never experienced any of that living in Northern Maine. Yes, we had hard men but we had hard women. My grandmother was the town treasure and ran the local phone service. Her mother was the town mayor. And so forth. They were not exceptions but were a part of the norm.
In my neighborhood a large portion of he households are from India. Nearly all of these households would fit in well in 1950’s America ( race aside). Married couples ( arranged) , two kids, one car, one wage earner etc.
And as far as I can see the informal power structure is without a doubt with the women. They run the household, set and implement the social schedule etc. I assume this is the household power dynamic back in India and it has just been transplanted here aided by a compact walkable neighborhood, very close grade school.
Marvelous article, as always. Your analysis of the ‘church ladies’ is also spot on (as someone who has worked as a church musician for 50 years now), except that you missed a key figure: the church secretary. Always female. (Hmm.) She wields enormous power behind the scenes, knows where all the skeletons are buried, who’s doing what to/with whom, etc. Pastors/priests come and go, but the church secretary keeps the wheels turning. The church ladies’ ‘First Lady’?
>That depends, in turn, on whether young conservative men have the brains the gods gave geese, and recognize that it’s essential to step back and not even try to interfere as their wives
Most young men aren’t even dating, much less thinking about marriage. There was a recent rectangle girl talking about how girls are resorting to stealing men’s food at lunchtime in some Cluster B Hive, er, big city, just to get them to talk. In any case, you’re talking about a hypothetical, we’re not even there anymore.
>The coming of suburbia ended that. Suburbs were designed to leave their inmates isolated from one another, miles away from venues for interaction, while mass media drowned out other social activities and a rising tide of geographical mobility made it impossible for stable social bonds to form. Women were suddenly deprived of a mode of social power
I think back to some early Saturday Night Live skits, about housewives being on tranquilizers, to cope with their empty lives. Drugs are a way of dealing with stress. Not a great way, but a way. Nowadays, I guess they spend all their time pawing their phone, until they go mad and destroy it all.
Shiva was a man, right, that destroyer of worlds? Maybe he should’ve been a woman.
Fascinating and grounding. Thank you, Papa.
X
>I’m particularly intrigued by the Ken Wilber smack talk. I’ve been reading his work for years
Hoe_math, is that you?
A lot of the tradwives on social media are actually just grifters that portray an idealized lifestyle that has no connection to the realities of traditional lifestyles. Here’s a particularly humorous example:
https://ibb.co/0yTrNXSW
I think the most important thing to come out of the modern tradwife movement is that it acknowledges that there’s a yearning among many women for a kind of life that is different from the one that third-wave feminism tells them they should want, even if there’s no clear consensus on what the alternative to modernity is. It’s going to take a while for that alternative to become a real future rather than a pantomimed performance of an idealized past.
Dear JMG,
This was, as always, an interesting and thought-provoking post.
In discussing the traditional formal vs. informal power of women in society, wherein women generally held the latter, is it your belief that women tend to perform less well than men when in positions of formal power? (And perhaps conversely, that men tend to do less well in positions of informal power?)
Your post reminds me of a phenomenon that I have observed many times in the past, and just observed yesterday. I had gone on a rather long hike on a local mountain trail, and encountered several groups of people, three I think that consisted of either two or three men, and two that consisted of either four or five women. Due to the switchbacked nature of this trail, I was within ear shot of each group for some time. And far from the first time, I noticed that the groups of men were mostly silent, with just occasional conversation, whereas the groups of women were constantly speaking, with it seemed never a break (my thoughts were along the lines of “Do they EVER shut up?”). More than that, the men, when they did talk, were speaking of various matters, whereas the women were all speaking about other people, and the relationships between them, or their feelings regarding those other people. I must admit that as a man, I would find this tiresome in the extreme.
I’ve seen some analysis of the “tradwife influencer” phenomenon including a satire in which a woman made a Cocoa Puffs type cereal from scratch, forming each little puff by hand. The analysts tagged tradwife videos as a new flavor of “If I were rich” fantasy, pointing out not just the obvious (most of today’s young women, even if they have husbands and children, will have to have jobs just to keep their families from sliding down the socioeconomic ladder; I’ve also seen a third-hand quotation from some MRA/trad Christian type expressing dismay that most men, given the choice between an obedient wife whom they must fully support and one who has her own income and insists on being treated as an equal within the marriage, would rather have the money) but also the presence in these videos of, for instance, a stove that cost more than the average new car. The one advantageous thing about the whole phenomenon is that, by emphasizing cooking from scratch and sometimes even keeping a kitchen garden, the trend is encourageing young women to pick up skills that will continue to be useful after the jobs go away.
In that photo of the three women cooking with their hair down, I can’t help imagining the trad husband at the dinner table picking strand of hair out of his food.
Some recent, as of last few decades, developments I am having trouble understanding:
Post 2nd wave feminism, the women taking up powerful roles formerly reserved for men all too often seem to be either mean girls, such as Hillary Clinton and Kathy Hochul, or shallow “lookers”, like AG Blondie. That is the result of the social movement which was supposed to give hard working, intelligent girls a chance at something other than teacher, librarian, secretary. (I know the helping professions are necessary and important, but not all women, or men, are temperamentally suited for them.)
I read a conservative commentator say that beauty is part of women’s “virtue”. Huh? I wonder what he even means by that word. People can, of course, date and marry whom they like, but why the intrusion of sexual choice into other parts of life? Especially by the allegedly more “rational” gender?
As for the Trad wives; it looks to me like that is a lifestyle which requires at least middle or upper middle-class affluence, and which displays the typical conservative/liberal PMC disdain and contempt for working people and the poor.
TS, thanks for this. Some such arrangement seems very sensible.
Helix, that’s an important point. The destruction of small businesses also contributed massively to the abolition of informal power, and thus to the ascendancy of formal power in the form of the three-headed monster of corporations, bureaucracies, and (notionally) nonprofit organizations.
Neptunesdolphins, that theory is a straightforward inversion of one of the commonplaces of the old matriarchal rhetoric, which you’ll find in Robert Graves among other places: the notion that the best and brightest of the young men in each tribe was sacrificed to the Goddess every year. I once wrote a short story from the point of view of a young man who didn’t get picked, and in the process, realized how efficiently his matriarchal society used that custom of annual murder to keep men subservient. At the end of the story, he starts walking east, toward a rumored place where men ride horses and don’t get sacrificed: the land of the Horsemen. (That’s spelled “evil Kurgan patriarchal invaders” in modern Goddess-speak.) Of course I never tried to get it published; I was still making nice with Neopagans in those days.
Clay, that’s good to know. I hope it catches on.
William, well, that shows you that I haven’t belonged to a traditional church, or I’d have known that. Thanks for the data point!
Other Owen, (1) I saw that. What I took from it is that the current gender divide is nearing the breaking point, and a reset is imminent. (2) Doctors in the 1950s and 1960s called it “the housewife problem,” and handed out fantastic quantities of tranquilizers to treat it. (3) Er, you’ve heard of Kali, haven’t you?
Erika, you’re most welcome.
Nephite, sure, but today’s media pseudoculture is so pervaded with fakery that there’s no other way the concept could surface. Give it time.
Alan, (1) I wouldn’t generalize that way. I’d say that women in positions of formal power tend to use that power in more informal ways, and men in positions of informal power tend to seek to formalize it. (2) That’s one of the reasons why it’s important for men and women to have venues where they can go be with members of their own sex. Men and women have different styles of interaction, and trying to make them spend all their time in each other’s company isn’t good for either one.
Joan, the fascinating thing is that most couples, if you factor in the cost of maintaining two jobs and the amount of nonfinancial wealth that one stay-at-home member can produce in the household economy, will be better off with one cash income than with two. I’m not just shoveling theory here; for more than half of my 40 years of married life Sara and I had one income between us–I was a househusband for quite a few years while trying to break into print, and then she stopped working outside the home once I could support us. Even in her last years, when there were sharp limits on what she could do, we lived rather more comfortably than two-income couples I know. The problem is that the two-income family has been so heavily pushed by corporate propaganda for so long that few people can see past it.
Mary, (1) well, of course. Look back further in history and you’ll find the same thing — while there were exceptions, mostly via hereditary monarchy, mean girls and cute fluffballs make up a very large share of the politically important women in history. (2) It would be interesting to ask him what he meant by that. Jezebel and Delilah, two of the wickedest women in the Bible, were both very beautiful. (3) The online-influencer version, sure; as I noted to Joan, there are other options.
I have mixed feelings about the whole women and informal power thing. I am female, have aspergers or something like it, and find informal power systems extremely confusing to navigate. I still end up in them sometimes – like running the music at church or taking on assorted other roles at church. Be helpful and friendly and you tend to get roped in, especially in smaller churches with too few people who are willing to do the assorted things that need doing. I still am bad at navigating or understanding informal power networks and gossip related stuff, and they stress me out and exhaust me even though I can mask and pass most of the time if I really try. I’ve kind of had to learn how to cope.
Being bad at networking also affects formal stuff like access to jobs. I think my failure at networking was a big issue when trying to transition from university to jobs.
The wargaming I’ve been doing is very heavily male, and the feel of the group is very different. Its a relief not to worry about the sort of backbiting you get in the soprano or alto section of a choir, for an example.
JMG,
It is my understanding that there are some indigenous cultures that are not exactly a matriarchies , but in them land or possessions are owned and passed down by the women. I could see some advantages to this if men were frequently killed In battle this would provide a much more stable social structure. Are there good examples of these, or an example of wishful thinking by some?
“the current gender divide is nearing the breaking point, and a reset is imminent”
What do you think that looks like? How do you think it might happen & play out? Any tips for surviving the break or the culture wars in general?
Here are two posts by Yves Smith at the Naked Capitalism website:
“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”: Why Are Young Men Giving Up on Sex?
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/youve-lost-that-lovin-feeling-why-are-young-men-giving-up-on-sex.html
Reverse Lysistrata: More on Men Cooling on Dating, Sex and the Role of Societal Denigration
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/reverse-lysistrata-more-on-men-cooling-on-dating-sex-and-the-role-of-societal-denigration.html
None of this is news to anyone on this comment board. What I find remarkable (and hopeful) is that Smith, a prototypical Affluent White Female Liberal (AWFL), is actually willing to honestly engage this subject, and seriously ask whether or not young men have a legitimate source of complaint. She avoids the schoolyard bullying and kindergarten name-calling so typical of the feminists of my lifetime.
A drop in the bucket, to be sure. Nonetheless, I encourage any such good-faith efforts when I see them.
Lord Byron had something to say about female power:
“But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?”
As to disempowering women by moving them to the suburbs, Alexander Graham Bell had to go and spoil it all by inventing the telephone. And anyway, didn’t women demand to move to the suburbs? It was seen as superior to staying in town. It is women’s drive for status that shapes society.
Fascinating as always!
I wonder how much of the current turmoil in men/women relationships is due to the rewriting of behavior standards so they no longer parallel what’s hardwired into our species.
Wanting children in a culture that no longer assumes everyone will marry and have them comes to mind.
An odd, large offshoot of “I was the alien’s love slave” subgenre is “I want you because I want lots of children.” Yep, alien men need human wives not just because Earth Girls Are Easy but to propagate their species because for various reasons their own alien women no longer bear children. They want children. Badly. This subgenre is popular! I don’t know how many cat moms adore it but I’d guess more than a few.
Thanks for this article. I spent much of 2024 investigating the premise that the advent of the potter’s wheel forced women out of the manufacture of ceramics and demonstrates the triumph of technology over nature. The genealogy of this idea (at least the European line to the US Studio Potter movement) travels through Bernard Leach –> Engels and Marx –> Lewis H Morgan (US) –> Bachofen –> Hegel. Seeing my old pal Bachofen at the head of your post made me smile. I had never heard of him before I made this deep dive and I am much the better for it. I agree with you that we cannot know the “truth” about the power dynamics based solely on material culture. But, after my study, I must conclude that the idealized, peaceful matriarchy Gimbutas and others imagine and aspire a return to is a myth. Worse, it reinforces present tensions between the genders. Anyway, if there is any interest in the subject: https://brandichase.com/before-and-after-the-potters-wheel/
On another note, Michelle #5, congratulations on your milestone! I know that ring!
And yes, The Other Owen #13, do find Kali and Durga.
About Suburban isolation: a certain wicked Russian-expat witch, now dead, had a useful touchstone. I’m going to substitute her “don’t” with “*Before* you examine a folly, ask yourself what it accomplishes. ” What did cutting women off from their sources of informal power accomplish? The same thing as a hut tax imposed on a subsistence society – to force the inhabitants into the money economy.”
I’ve noticed that postwar attempts to reform society, end looseness and corruption etc, seem to include a crackdown on women’s rights and on the freedom of “the lower orders,” and of course, cracking down on youth as well. Frex, what were the juvenile delinquents of the 1950s doing? smoking cigarettes, racing hotrods, and listening to rock’n’roll, even dancing to it. Oh, and sometimes riding motorcycles. The crackdown of the early 1800s involved putting people back in their places, tightening racial laws in the South, etc. Wanting everything neat, logical, orderly, “a place for everything and everything in its place.”
As for Bachhofen et. al. –he obviously didn’t know a thing about other cultures present or past, nor even those of our hairy cousins the chimpanzees, but like a lot of Victorians, thought he and his like were the crowns of creation and the culmination of evolution. Shakes head….
Folks – an old folks home like the one I live is a de facto matriarchy; we are most of the volunteer committees, though the resident garden is run by a man, and believe me, the men here are not oppressed, but valued as table companions and for whatever else they have to contribute. (Well, there are certain old goats – and – complaints queens here. Show me a community without them.)
I do believe in a world where everyone can be what they’re called to be, but for the love of Athena, why should being in a high position of power necessitate wearing 5-inch heels?
>whereas the groups of women were constantly speaking, with it seemed never a break (my thoughts were along the lines of “Do they EVER shut up?”)
The Japanese have two characters. https://imgur.com/NgmoLdL
How much of the crazy sexual behavior these days is due to the collapse of more traditional male/female power structures?
I ask because I walked today with Sheri. She told me that her niece’s baby might not be her husband’s but instead her lover’s and that the niece’s husband also had an affair with his female squadron mate. She’s got a nephew in his early 40s with three young children by three different baby mamas. It’s apparently fine because the purpose of life is finding your bliss and maximizing your own pleasure.
Closer to home, my sister-in-law’s nephew’s mother has four children by four different baby daddies. No marriage of course and no paid employment for anyone. Nephew’s mother named her newest baby Abraxus. She lives with her mother, all the children, AND two of the baby daddies who … well, I don’t know what they do and I don’t ask.
I keep hearing these stories, along with the ones where grandparents raise their grandchildren because the parents and their baby partners are completely incapable of functioning as adults.
Could this be related to our distorted male/female power structure?
@neophyte #16
Lol, strawberry trees. There’s a lot of people these days who are just “playing one on TV”, now that it’s possible for everyone to have their very own TV show if they want it. They say a politician is someone who tells you what you want to hear. What do you call someone who portrays what you want to be? Maybe the proper term is indeed “youtube grifter” but there may be some nuance there that is getting ignored.
People talk about RETVRN, but I would say less romantically that “last known good” lies somewhere between 1920-1950. In any case, the current arrangement of things – does. not. work. Show me something that works and I’ll get behind it.
>What I took from it is that the current gender divide is nearing the breaking point, and a reset is imminent.
I don’t know why but after hearing about this, I started humming the jingle to “Salad Shooter” but replaced it with “Salad Stealer”.
pygmycory @ 21, I also have difficulties, to put it mildly, with navigating informal power arrangements. I don’t think I have aspergers, being rather bad at math, for one thing, but I do suffer from a quite serious case of what has recently been designated as CPTSD–to make a long story short, let me just say many of the Greatest Generation were not so great at raising children. Before anyone asks, no, folks like me neither request nor expect Special Victim Status but being left alone to figure things out for ourselves would have been nice over the years.
What I found particularly frustrating was the female supervisors who could not or would not give explicit instructions. One such lady even said she should not have to, her staff should “just know”. I do think that in a formal structure, like a workplace, formal instructions of the here is what we need variety, are necessary.
Martin Back @25, the suburbs were heavily subsidized, for commercial reasons. Think of the industries who benefitted, from auto to construction to insurance to real estate to purveyors of all kinds of household goods.
Fascinating article JMG.
Here’s a data point from my personal experience: I attend quite a few planning and zoning meetings, in which the discussion revolves around land use for proposed projects. Most–but not all–of the citizens speaking at these meetings are women, and they are generally there to object to the proposed projects. Because current planning and zoning rules essentially require suburban development, this means that these women are campaigning against the traditional, walkable development pattern you talk about in the post.
There are a number of things going on here, including generational conflict between baby boomers and younger generations, but it is interesting that women would lead the charge in opposing the forums for women’s soft power you are writing about. I’ve also noticed that it is women who most vociferously attack: 1) breast feeding 2) natural childbirth 3) home schooling and 4) traditional women’s roles such as the stay-at-home mom.
Interestingly, even in the appropriately rigid hierarchy of the military, there apparently is (or perhaps used to be) a quiet awareness of the utility of the twofold formal/informal pattern. In the 1950’s novel “Alas, Babylon,” a character refers to a common saying regarding rising through military ranks: “Anyone can make Colonel on their own, but it takes a wife to make a General.”
I get the tentative feeling that, among at least some subset of what’s sometimes called “generation alpha,” that there’s a rising affinity for genuinely re-examining and reclaiming some of these lost patterns, precisely because they were sacrificed on the altar of dying liberalism. I regard it as a hopeful sign.
As Elrond said to Frodo, you will find friendship on the way, secret and unlooked-for.
Excellent analysis…and in our neighborhood, there is still a powerful female collective which decides most things, of which my wife is a powerful member, and I am a humble advisor, being the only attorney…And sometimes they have actual nominal power, but it all comes down to the same thing…If the collective decides something, it happens…
There sure was a lot of claptrap flying around in the 19th century…There are still hunter-gatherer bands in places like the Amazon and Philippines which date back tens of thousands of years, and none of them function as matriarchal..But that fact was ignored by these theoreticians…Like Rousseau, they simply made up a theory…and the right people pushed the theory….In fact, .men are genetically suited to hunting, war, and toolmaking, while women are suited to child rearing, light gardening, and creating society and culture…that has never changed….
Chimpanzees are our close cousins, and we have much in common with them:
https://releasechimps.org/chimpanzees/chimpanzee-society
Excerpts:
“Chimpanzees search for food communally when foraging or hunting prey. A group of males will chase, corner, and kill small monkeys for meat. (…)
Chimpanzees acknowledge and respect the hierarchy within their group. Within chimpanzee politics, dominance relationships are influenced by alliances, and males form coalitions. They will attack trespassing males from another territory to defend their own.
Social groups consist of a dominant male, adult females, subordinate males, and juveniles.”
Bands of chimpanzees sometimes wage war against other bands of chimpanzees, to protect or gain control of territory (and therefore, of the resources necessary to their survival). Like hunting, war (which is in our DNA) is a male activity. War is dangerous, but the reward is that successful warriors are very attractive to female, and therefore more likely to pass on their genes than weak or cowardly males.
This looks like patriarchy, but who decides if and when the tribe will move to a more bountiful place? This is the most important decision a tribe can make. The dominant male, or the adult females? I guess that the dominant male takes the initiative, but the adult females have an informal right of veto… like the “church ladies”? It seems to me to be the most likely hypothesis.
The Iroquois Confederacy had strong matriarchal features – see below but were quite warlike and even could be considered genocidal in their treatment of non Iroquois tribes.
“ Iroquois destroyed several confederacies and tribes through warfare: the Hurons or Wendat, Erie, Neutral, Wenro, Petun, Susquehannock, Mohican and northern Algonquins whom they defeated and dispersed, some fleeing to neighbouring peoples and others assimilated, routed, or killed”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars
So much for the peaceful influences of matriarchy.
According to Google AI
Key Aspects of Iroquois Matriarchy:
Matrilineal Descent:
.Family lineage and clan membership were determined by the mother’s line.
Clan Mothers:
.The oldest women in each clan held the power to choose and remove chiefs, oversee the well-being of the clan, and name children.
Political Power:
.Women’s influence extended to the Grand Council, where their chosen chiefs represented their nations, and they could remove chiefs who were not fulfilling their duties.
Economic Control:
.Women controlled the agricultural production, distribution of food, and the provisioning of warriors, granting them significant economic power
“… it’s all but impossible to know much of anything about the gender politics of societies that left no written records, there’s basically nothing to stop both sides from finding what they want to find in the equivocal traces turned up by archeologists.”
I feel sorry for archeologists; it must be stressful to squeeze pottery shards so hard to get papers out of them that it cuts their thoughts into shreds.
“… if academics weren’t so terrified of the words ‘we don’t know’—I think they’re afraid their noses will fall off if they say that…”
I think it’s because they’re afraid that their funding will be cut off if they say that.
Thank you for this post; it makes sense of the subject. As a woman who has often found herself in mostly male spaces – often enough in my younger years as the only woman – and knowing that men speak differently if there is even one woman present, I have had plenty of opportunities to notice how differently men speak with each other, even when I am around, than I speak with the women I know in women-only spaces. For me the difficult part is that I generally find mostly-men spaces more intellectually stimulating and enjoyable than all-women spaces, but that may have a lot to do with my not having raised any children.
@Teresa Peschel: Some of us actually come from families where we have siblings by multiple fathers and mothers. The sexual instinct starts young. At least it did in traditional societies. People couldn’t afford to wait around when they might day just a few decades in. So that part is hardwired into us. This is also a class thing. Of course it happens in the upper class, they just don’t talk about it so much, while in the lower class, its de rigeur to have multiple partners. Not so strange to think that a young woman might have a few partners before settling down with one. Babies might just be a result of that. I don’t think that is an excuse to not take responsibility though. What you noticed does happen, but I don’t see the hang up about people having multiple kids with multiple people. That’s why, as Clay Dennis noted, a lot of societies were matrilineal in their genetic Benne Gesserit genealogies. Matrilineal doesn’t equate to matriarchy though.
Bravo, John Michael. You did not disappoint.
Plenty to think about here. I have a few thoughts, and will have more as I think about this weeks post. That is one of the great things about this community: You can read the post multiple times during the week, and integrate the thoughts of the commentariat into your reading. It’s marvelous, a true forum, and I for one am eternally grateful to our host for providing this space for us to all get together. It makes me seriously consider Erica’s idea of a get together.
As I apply this thinking to my own relationships/marriage/partnership(s) I recall my upbringing. By the time I came along, the fourth child separated from my nearest sibling by a decade, my parents had already weathered a decade and a half of hardship, learning, economic downturns, and the stress of providing for a family by working in the timber industry. My sister says I grew up in a different family than her and our brothers. The model that was portrayed to me was of equals, who had arrived at an equilibrium of relationship and working together. My father would get home from work, and converse with my mother while she prepared dinner. Her role as a stay at home mother was recognized for what it was: essential labor that made the partnership work.
Not that they were hippies, my mother was an old world catholic lady, and my father was driven to provide for his family, it’s just that the household was based on communication and sharing. Just a working class lumbering family.
JMG: “Then there’s the informal power. In every church I’ve ever interacted with, this is possessed and exerted by a small group of old women—“the church ladies” is a common label for them.”
Back in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church when there were still lots of nuns, they often wielded a lot of power. Of course it was often abused (see mean nuns and Magdalen Sisters), as power often is, but religious orders often attracted forceful women who did a lot of good (see Mother Cabrini, and teachers who educated the children of impoverished European immigrants).
Ironically, since the Church is technically patriarchal, priests were often afraid of the nuns. I recall an old-school priest saying (in reference to a novena, a nine-day prayer): “Never argue with the nuns – they go down to the convent, and nine days later you’re dead!”
Hi JMG,
I loved that article. A lot of the stuff they teach in Universities is such horseshit. I remember when Mitochondrial Eve was the Mother of us all. Don’t hear so much about her now.
About the subjugation of women, I think a lot of it is assumed from ignorance. When I was a young woman, I was speaking with an English man who was an Arabic speaker and entomologist so he was good at observation. I said something about the Gulf Arabs treating their women little better than slaves.
My friend corrected me with this story. As a young man, he was in Saudi Arabia at his usual coffee shop and his male companions began to take of shooting and how good they were at it. One old gentleman invited the group back to his place and they would have a shooting match to see who was the most skilled.
They group got back to his place and he told his wife to give them all a dozen rounds from their storeroom. She flat out refused. She had the right to do that because she ran the stores. Her husband was in a position to lose face over this so she eventually, and with bad grace, gave each man one round and told them to go off and play.
I never forgot that story.
Maxine
@JMG @Alan
Masculine and feminine styles of interaction are learned. This has been studied. Mothers speak to their daughters more than to their sons from birth, and boys are told to hush more often than girls. My brother and his wife were told by a social worker they knew, when their son was (I think) around eight, that the kid had the level of articulateness that was more typical of girls, and specified that this was because his parents had talked to him in a way more typical of parents with a girl.
This learning tends to stick around. Two friends of mine, both trans, both early trans-rights activists, now married to each other, bought a house in the country some decades ago. For the first few years, they would host big house parties a few times a year, lasting a whole weekend, inviting all their friends from the city. I attended enough of these parties to notice a pattern. After lunch on Saturday, the group would split. Everyone who was raised male, no matter what their current gender, would do some activity together such as sledding or archery or, if the weather did not permit, watching TV. Meanwhile everyone who was raised female, no matter what their current gender, would get hot beverages and sit around the dining room drinking them and talking about relationships. The one exception was the hosts’ daughter, who had as close to a gender-free upbringing as this society allows. She had the flavor of ADHD that hates to sit still and loves physical activity. She always went with the raised-male group.
You precisely described what happened to my father, a mainline protestant denomination pastor at a rural long-established church in South Carolina. It was during the mid-1960s and his views with respect to civil rights did not comport with the views of the membership. As to the ladies of the church, my mother (with three elementary aged children in tow) did not meet their expectations and became the subject of malicious gossip. Everyone in our family ended up with psychological scars to one extent or another. We stayed there less than 3 years and my dad decided to change careers.
>most couples, if you factor in the cost of maintaining two jobs and the amount of nonfinancial wealth that one stay-at-home member can produce in the household economy, will be better off with one cash income than with two.<
Nowadays I think this is a statement whose accuracy waxes and wanes with the cost of housing relative to income. Housing costs are inevitably financial. You need income to stay housed. When the price of housing is reasonable, then household production (that nonfinancial wealth) can make a big enough difference to tip the balance. When the price of housing is insane (e. g., now) then continual grubbing for cash is the first order of business.
The other consideration is that people who are locked into a fixed-rate mortgage can use household production to stave off foreclosure. This is how my farming grandfather did it. When the Great Depression was beginning to really bite, he sold off all the motorized equipment on the place, including the car, and went back to horses because the motors burned fossil fuel, which had to be bought, while the horses ate fodder, which could be grown.
I recall a story, from a Maori leader in New Zealand (it’s a common enough story), born into a rangatira family (i.e. Maori aristocracy). He was young, and had probably been told at some point, he would become a tribal leader, although (then as now), that didn’t mean special rights as much as constant, exhausting hard work of ceremonies. He was later ushered into a tribal meeting, told to sit quiet down the back, whilst a committee of vaguely terrifying elderly Maori women up the front did the real work – and was told, these kuia (respected, elderly Maori women) run the tribe, annoy them at your peril. It’s much the same in most rural societies.
In another context, I’ll never fail to laugh at the third, or fourth, or as I now call it x-wave feminists, who, upon landing in a female dominated office culture after obtaining some degree, get relentlessly bullied by their female bosses who are somehow smashing the patriarchy, and quietly express, it would be better with a male boss. Not perfect, but better. Any modern office bureaucracy, public or private sector, is living proof that no, a matriarchy is not utopia 🙂
JMG: Please publish the story about the young man fleeing his matriarchal society to join the horse lords.
This Texas girl usually has to read your posts a few times — you’ve got some rich word swagger, Greer — but I’ve been wanting to chime in on a few, and this one? Yeah, this one’s fun for me.
Coming from a woman — one who unfortunately knows her gender’s inner workings far too well — let me say this:
You’d be better off putting a tiara on female power and letting it take the stage than pretending it’s harmless running the lights and fog machine. I learned early that manipulation is the go-to tool for far too many women, and I don’t find it clever — I find it pathetic. Whether it’s a conference room or a Bible study, I’ve watched entire conversations get hijacked by “kind” remarks and passive digs dressed up as wisdom. It’s worse than a velociraptor — at least those don’t smile while circling. Women know exactly when and what to exploit. You men stay sharp.
Now, I don’t have time to research who’s already said this — but when you create life, it’s a big deal. And at some point, you’re faced with a choice:
… Do you create a dependent fan club of cloned heirs, or do you release and let them become their own?
That’s lesson one of motherhood. Do you hold… or release?
Brave women have nothing to prove. They’re okay with untraveled terrain. And here’s the truth: when a woman releases control — truly releases — that’s when she’s at her most powerful.
If someone mistakes that for weakness… well, let the story play out when they cross paths with a woman perfectly capable of the trained-velociraptor response.
Also — as a mom to two sons — I’ve told them straight: Don’t hold back with women. Say what’s real. Secure women won’t flinch — they’ll lean in. Maybe even kiss the truth. But if she defaults to sidebars, whispers, and triangulation? She’s not mature enough for keys — she needs a curfew. Besides public restrooms, we need to stop dividing up folks. This gender, age sectors shows such a maturity gap. Keep people on the same field, it encourages accountability and real growth.
And by the way? Tiaras are dumb.
Where did that even enter the gene pool — was there a shortage of ideas that century?
Mission-minded women don’t need material bling or precious metals. The underwire bra is all the metal I can tolerate. Presence — not sparkle — should carry her truth.
It would be a more balanced world if this dance finally adjusted — not with dominance or retreat — but with a steady meld instead of constant ebb and flow. Maybe one day there will be daring men and brave women, even if it’s one.single.day.
Great post. It had honestly never occurred to me to suburbia caused a loss of women’s circles of influence and power. Much to chew on with that.
For one thing, it’s changed the way I think of something that happened recently (which I’m surprised no one’s commented on): an app named Tea became the #1 app on the iOS App Store. The app is a women’s-only app for discussing men they have dated or are considering dating, including sharing red flags and identifying men who are dating multiple women behind their backs.
Upon hitting the #1 spot, the app drew a lot of hostility, mostly from men but some women joined in to voice their concerns. The fear was that the app would be used by bad actors to spread malicious gossip (“tea” is slang for “gossip” after all) against men. Others joked that it would be used as a dating app by women who were into creeps.
FWIW, I think the concerns are valid. As several people pointed out, if you flip the sexes the problem is obvious: an app to let men secretly gossip about women would be abused immediately.
On the other hand, I now see that the app is in its own way an attempt by women to rebuild the kind of circles that used to be their social domain. In a probably dysfunctional way but such is the way of things when the Internet gets involved. So I’m a lot more sympathetic to it than I was when the news broke.
Anyway, the app was hacked less than 24 hours after hitting #1 (where by “hacked” I mean they somehow forgot to secure their data in any way whatsoever and someone just grabbed it from a public API), doxxing thousands of women and making thousands of private messages public. So it’s not clear the app has a future.
I admit to having some smug schadenfreude about the hack at the time, but in light of this post I’ve changed my mind. Now I think the whole thing is just kind of sad.
Yes, it’s hard for a girl with Asperger’s, who has trouble navigating the informal power structure. On top of that , you get the double bind of “the girls don’t like me because I’m a geek. The geeks don’t like me because I’m a girl.” There should be room for the exceptions to the norm – and the “50s (roughly, the late 40s – through the Kennedy administration) were pretty stifling, even in the cities. And my family lived in cities for the most part.
In ancient Greece, a strongly patriarchal culture, there were the Little Bears of Artemis, little girls who lived in the temple and ran wild in the woods. IIRC, the idea as to get that out of them before they were of marriageable age. But wives didn’t live in harems! Multiple wives were not part of the picture at all.
Their houses did have women’s quarters upstairs, which were the center of the wives’ biggest job, weaving for the household, and they stayed there when their menfolk were entertaining other men downstairs, but don’t take Xenophon for a spokesman for the norm; he was an ultraconservative in his day, before he was caught behind enemy lines in Persia and had to lead his men out. Edith Hamilton has some interesting things to say on that subject. Also, a book called, IIRC, “Slaves, wives, whores, and priestesses,”
But yes, the only independent women in that culture were courtesans, generally foreigners.
interesting essay JMG. what you referred to in the beginning is called “gossiping, shaming, and rallying” by evolutionary psychologists. there was a now deceased youtuber, Kevin Samuels who called this “SIGN language.” Shame, Insults, Guilt, the Need to be right.
i appreciate the historical context, especially the point on what purpose an idea serves the person. but what i think was left out, and hopefully followed up on, is the exploration of the hypothesis, that young women, under 45, are for the most part the biggest victims to the egregore of social media. and how this and 100 years of feminism and leftist universities have women spellbound to a lifestyle and modality of thinking that is in fact ruining their own innate female gifts of empathy, kindness, child rearing, and the ability to give birth. and on top of that, is bringing down the world because all of those wonderful traits have been completely weaponized against them.
thanks
@pygmycory #21
Thank you for sharing this! As an autistic male, you’ve described my own feelings about dealing with informal power structures to a T.
I’m glad you’ve found refuge in war games; I may have to finally dip my toe into that space. (One of my big problems is that I just don’t like Warhammer at all, either fantasy or 40K, which together seem to take up 90%+ of the wargaming mindshare.)
I’m mainly into old-school tabletop roleplaying games (TSR D&D, Classic Traveller, etc.), and unfortunately that space is very much not devoid of informal power structures and high school level drama. Backbiting and malicious gossip have become rampant.
“We do not live in a hierarchy—we live in a heterarchy”
I’ll probably quote this line in the future!
I’ve generally encouraged and been pleased by the informal networks my wife and other feminine relatives have established and have continued to establish. It’s as incredible to see in action as it is incomprehensible. Many struggling modern young men would find their lives rapidly improved by befriending a couple of church ladies, more rapidly and thoroughly than they would by just following redpill advice.
About trad wives – I never knew anyone who had a stay at home mother. Everyone worked since rent had to be paid and food had to be eaten. I think it is a class thing that as someone outside classes – very rural did not have. I was raised to have a job skill since you never know when something bad may happened to the family. Having only one income earner was asking for trouble since the man could be sick. The one aunt that I had did not work but she watched the children of everyone else.
So for me the whole trad wife is well some sort of fairy tale that certain classes tell each other. You had to be very well-off to have people not work. Is that the implication of a non-working wife – wealth?
What we did in our free time – was if female – sew, etc usually while waiting for something or chatting. If male, chopping wood, keeping up the home and hunting. So we did segregate by sex as to what we did for chores.
When formal power and informal power get a bit muddled up in Suburbia, the result is Homeowners Associations (HOAs).
I did note one thing though as an adult – the idea of working women was foreign if you became a mother. I was living in cities then, and later D.C. I believe it was a class thing again of wealthier people had stay-at-home mothers. I remember in my new mother class the amount of guilt people had for working. Not me. Nada.
What I had was a husband who was struggling with jobs until he could get treatment for his rage seizures. I was the main breadwinner. He cared for our children. Later, we were a team with child raising. Both parents went to the school, surprising people excepting only the mother. Having a father along changed things.
I did run into the “you make more than your husband” stuff. I just shrugged it off. I believe all these things came out the suburbs and the culture they endorsed.
Pygmycory, this is one of the reasons that I stressed that you find men and women alike on both sides of fhe formal-informal power divide. My late wife was the same way — she was on the autism spectrum, and from late childhood on preferred to hang with boys (and then men) rather than girls (and then women) because she disliked the informal-power realm and never could do it well. That’s one of the reasons why she became the first female presiding officer of an Odd Fellows lodge in Washington state; when the Odd Fellows decided to let women join, the brothers of my lodge (who all knew her via social and charitable activities) asked her to join and then voted her into the big chair because they all knew her, liked her, and knew she’d follow the rules of formal power rather than trying to twist them into comformity with the ways of informal power.
Clay, control of wealth by women is tolerably common in world societies, partly for that reason and partly for others. The crucial point is that the property in question cannot convey formal power — as it did, for example, in the British aristocracy.
Dijon, my guess is that if women are resorting to stealing salads to try to attract the attention of men, the next step for them is to figure out why men aren’t interested in dating, and abandon those habits that drive them away. It’s not exactly hard to figure out what those are. You’ll know it’s happening when left-adjacent media outlets start howling in outrage. In terms of survival strategies, depends on your current situation and needs; it’s a complex landscape — and, er, asking an autist for advice on interpersonal relationships may not be your best move. 😉
Michael, good heavens. Yeah, I think the wind is changing in a big way. The second article is particularly good, as it begins to talk about the extremely toxic double-binds that today’s female culture imposes on men who might be interested in dating.
Martin, if you use saturation propaganda on any population, you can get them to demand something, no matter how disastrous it turns out to be.
Teresa, good heavens. That was a theme in men’s SF back in the day — either aliens kidnapping earth women to produce offspring for them (cue the camp classic movie Mars Needs Women) or alien cuties cuddling up to human men with the same goal in mind (cue the Roger Zelazny short story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”). Then it became a theme in UFO-themed hypnagogic fantasies (aka “alien abduction”); now it’s buff alien men playing romantic lead in romance fiction (aka emotional pornography) for American middle-class cat ladies. Quite a trajectory…
Brandi, hmm! Thanks for this — a fascinating light on the whole process. I’m inclined to agree that the utopian matriarchy of Old Europe is a myth, but then its factual nature is irrelevant to its mythic status — a myth is any story people use as a template for making sense of the world, whether or not it has anything to do with the world of observable fact.
Patricia M, don’t ask me about the heels. I have no idea why women put up with those at all.
Teresa, doubtless, and it’s also a function of culture death. There’s a sense in which Bachofen got things the wrong way around: the age of polymorphous perversity happens in the twilight of a society, not in its dawn.
Other Owen, funny! I’d like to see “salad stealer” turn into slang for a salary class woman who wants a boyfriend but isn’t willing to change her own behavior, even in the slightest, in order to attract one.
Samurai_47, of course. In most societies women are the conservative sex, and informal power serves as a brake on social change. Having fully embraced the roles assigned them by corporate pseudoculture, the Karenocracy is now filling its time-honored role as the enforcement arm of the conventional wisdom.
RaabSilco, here’s hoping. What we have certainly isn’t working.
Pyrrhus, so the old patterns are reestablishing themselves. That’s probably for the best.
Horzabky, if you know the habits of social primates you can predict the behavior of most human social structures at a glance. Yes, the dominant male chimp has the formal power, the older adult females have the informal power, and the balance between them varies from band to band depending on the personalities of the individual chimps.
BeardTree, the Iroquois are among the societies I had in mind when I mentioned that some cultures institutionalize the informal power of women. Notice that here again it’s female elders, who are selected by informal processes among the female population, balanced against male chiefs, selected by more formal means.
SLClaire, I may have to do a post sometime soon about the fear academics so often have of having their noses fall off. It really does explain a lot!
John, thanks for this. That’s a good example of how that kind of marriage can work well; I wish I’d had the chance to experience something like it in this life.
Yavanna, the priest wasn’t joking. The Catholic church has a long and very curious traditions of clerical black magic among its religious orders, and novenas in particular have been used for some very dark purposes down through the years.
Maxine, a good example of the interface between formal and informal power!
Joan, I’d want to see those studies and check for bias. Given the sheer scale of the replication crisis these days, any study that conforms to current cultural prejudices needs to be given the bent eye and examined for biased design and statistical manipulation.
JIG, I’m sorry to hear that, but not at all surprised. Anyone who thinks that matriarchy would be kind, peaceful, and benevolent has never spent time around old women who have power.
Joan, it’s certainly true that the corporate economy has made every effort to force people into subservience to the money system. Nonetheless my point stands; especially if there are children, having one parent stay home erases so many expenses, and replaces so many purchased products with homemade ones, that in many cases housing becomes more affordable, not less.
Peter, yep. There’s a reason why formal male leadership attracts support from many younger women: rule by female elders can be unbearable, and there are no checks and balances to restrain the abuse of informal power.
Raymond, I know of no venue that would accept it for publication. It’s not a long piece, but these days it would require an introduction of a couple of pages to explain what it’s talking about — and even now, a story like “The Horsemen” (that’s its title) would be rejected with shrieks of outrage by every fiction venue I know of.
Sabrina, thanks for this! I don’t know if there’s much hope of that steady meld in my lifetime or that of anyone breathing today, but here’s hoping.
Slithy, I considered including that in my discussion, because yes, it’s relevant. Of course it’s going to be abused — power, formal or informal, always is. The question is how men will respond to it. The young men who are simply refusing to have anything to do with dating have chosen a powerful tactic; we’ll see how it plays out.
Patricia M, by “harem” I mean a separate women’s quarter in each house to which they were restricted — the Greek word was gynoecion. Since men under Greek law had free sexual access to all female slaves, the resemblance to a harem with one principal wife was fairly close…
R, I don’t think it’s fair to say that young women are the biggest victims — it’s young people of both genders. Other than that, yeah, your point stands.
SirusTalCelion, I’ll be expanding on the concept of heterarchy in a later post. Glad you found it useful.
Neptunesdolphins, growing up, I knew several one-income family, and my mother didn’t go into the workforce until my sister and I were both in school. So it did, and still does, happen.
Walt, and then it’s the worst of both worlds!
My mom was Director of Christian Education at a very large mainline Protestant church in my formative years. To her credit, she ran a PK-12 and a community college on a shoestring with a volunteer staff every Sunday for thirteen years. Her role was an amalgam of hard and soft power, though it may have been as much a product of suburbia as second wave feminism. She did a rather good job until a couple of ex-hippies (both male and ascended into titular pillar of the community roles, btw) shouldered their way onto the board, turned the dial to the All-Liberal-All-Day station and ripped the knob off – which drove her away and killed the institution in short order. (My disgust caused me to go looking for other options, but that’s a different story.)
My observations of said church suggest that your division of labor into masculine and feminine spheres is correct, but the groups are neither monolithic nor self-aware. As a primer, observing a large troop of baboons in the wild sub-group, squabble and reform before moving one’s blind and camera to a church would make for time well spent.
I concur with William Zeitler about the role of the secretary, but they are not inviolate, though they do tend to hang around well past their pull-by dates. Her inevitable take-down makes a far worse and longer lasting mess than tossing a disposable pastor.
That the same behaviors caused me to exit a prominent neopagan organization bears mention here, I think, if only to point out that baboonery is omnipresent, while the Age of Happy Motoring leaves us poorly equipped to cope with our hardwired selves.
Many thanks for the opportunity to speak here.
I remember reading in one of Jason Miller’s books that the most effective group of witches he ever met was a group of church ladies who prayed together. They of course don’t think of themselves as witches, but that doesn’t diminish their effectiveness.
This pattern of formal / informal power is so pervasive it even replicates itself in female-only groups.
I was the President of a textile arts guild for three years, with a board of directors. When we came into conflict with the Old Ladies, we lost as often as we won. Early in my tenure we had to change the locks on the office – necessary, because twelve people had keys to it, and it also contained members’ personal and credit card information, but offensive. I completely underestimated the symbolic value of those keys to the twelve sub-group leaders. (There were actually twelve, this is starting to sound symbolic.)
In retrospect, Removing The Keys from The Twelve was something I got punished for , but I was socially tone-deaf enough not to connect the two for a while. Which is what I was doing in the formal power structure in the first place, but I deeply resented Those Women for getting in my way while I was trying to keep the bills paid, the lights on and us from getting sued.
Of course, Those Women had their own role in keeping the organisation alive and mentoring new members, and those times I flattered them I was rewarded.
“a conservative commentator [said] that beauty is part of women’s “virtue”. Huh? I wonder what he even means by that word. “
Maybe he meant it in the sense of what a thing is good for? Like an herb’s virtue might be its utility in preventing infection, for instance.
I’ve also often encountered the idea that via their beauty and charm, women are able to exert a civilizing and pro-social influence on men and motivate them to excellence for the betterment of society; thus it is a virtue to be beautiful, since ugly women do little to motivate men to their best efforts or behavior.
Oops, that last comment was meant to be addressed to Mary Bennett.
I witnessed the informal power many times as a grade school kid in the early 60s. The moms had complete control over the local school, stores and government. If they didn’t like a teacher, that teacher was gone pretty quick. They got stop signs moved, police patrols rescheduled and parks upgraded. They were present in every school room, as “helpers” and room mothers, monitoring what was going on also.
Their network was amazing! Everyone knew everything almost instantly. A vocal crowd could be in the principal’s office in an hour.
They also had power over the children, teaching them wrong from right and directing they way their kids would think and act in the world.
I often wonder why moms gave up all their power for equal rights. Maybe they were “played” by the system to become workers, commuters and consumers.
@Joan,
I was thinking that about housing prices changing the calculus of two incomes vs 1 income plus home production too. I think you’re right. Among other things, it’s hard to do as much home production in a small apartment as you can in a house with garden space and space to set up a workshop/craft space, and if housing prices are nuts and you’re struggling with them, well, a lot of people are living in little apartments.
Other Owen,
“Most young men aren’t even dating, much less thinking about marriage.”
Is it really most? I know the marriage-rejection thing gets talked about a lot, but what surveys I’ve seen seem to suggest that while marriage and kids are on a downward trend, most people (including and maybe even especially men) still want to get married and have kids.
For instance:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/among-young-adults-without-children-men-are-more-likely-than-women-to-say-they-want-to-be-parents-someday/
Totally and absolutely off topic!
If anyone here is interested in traditional Pennsylvania Dutch Magic, aka powwowing,
our library just bought the new book:
“Powwowing in Pennsylvania: Braucherei & the Ritual of Everyday Life” by Patrick J. Donmoyer.
343 pages of densely written text, indexes, appendices, pictures, footnotes, and such. It also features Dr. Helfenstein’s “Secrets of Sympathy: A New & Improved Translation.”
Mr. Donmoyer is the director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University. He’s published similar books on Pennsylvania Dutch magic.
If I didn’t tell you and the commentariat about this book right away, I’d forget.
It would be just like the movie ‘The Wicker man’.
Men would be held in permanent menial jobs and once a year they would sacrifice an unsuspecting man for their fertility offering
No thanks
@ Indigo Crotchety Peacock #40
The issue the families have with these fine folks having plenty of babies with numerous partners they have no legal obligation to is their utter irresponsibility.
Who pays the bills? The state or grandma.
Who cleans the house and takes care of the kids? Grandma or relatives who step in to see the kids get their headlice seen to, they take their meds, make it to school, and wear clean clothes.
Do these fine folks indulge in recreational pharmaceuticals? You need to ask? Of course they do, you narrow-minded prig. They know how to have fun.
Eventually, when things get too bad (abuse, child endangerment, and so forth) child social services gets called.
If everyone involved were responsible, job-holding, bill-paying adults, fear and concern over the wellbeing of the kids would drop down dramatically.
As for the name “Abraxus.” I remember vividly a child from my student teaching days in Sussex County, DE in 1982. Her name was Lasagna. She was in first grade. As you can imagine from the relentless teasing, she already had a thick file with the school’s guidance counselor for fighting. Giving your kid a really weird name, when your family is already in shambles, isn’t doing them any favors. It’s just another handicap.
@slithy toves,
there is a bit of an informal power structure in the wargaming club I’m in, but it seems to be mostly based on who organized games, set up the tables, brought the terrain, knows the rules and is willing to teach others. Being able to win games, and paint and build minis and terrain well is also important. So basically its a case of put the time in and don’t be a jerk. I haven’t run into the kind of stuff I’ve run into in mostly female groups of musicians (which also varies by instrument. Flute and voice is terrible for catty behavior, but recorder players are usually much more laid back and harpists are delighted to find anyone else who plays their instrument YMMV).
Warhammer does take up a lot of the oxygen and attention, but there’s a lot of other games out there and people playing them. The problem is finding them. Facebook or discord wargaming groups for your city are a good place to ask around what other people are playing. Also independent local gaming stores. Out of curiosity, what are you looking for in your tabletop wargaming? Giant armies? Small warbands with strong narrative? Historical accuracy vs fantasy vs science fiction? Because there’s almost certainly something out there you’d love.
While we are in the subject of the alleged nature of ancient matriarchies, I have found it strange the common notion among neopagan women and the like that it was Christianity of all things that re-introduced patriarchy into the world. This is story arc in the Da Vinci Code, whereby the Edenic goddess-worshipping Classical world is torn apart by patriarchal Christians.
Clearly, such people haven’t heard of “pater familias” whereby a Roman man had the power of death over descendents who displeased him!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias
Or how in Classical Athens, the most beautiful thing was considered to be a man’s body (there’s a good reason for all those strong, well-endowed statues) and females were often considered little more than vessels with which to bear children.
I find the adherents of the views outlined in the first paragraph particularly amusing given how the Theodosian Dynasty, which did more than any other to make the Roman Empire into a Christian theocracy, had a large number of highly influential females (perhaps to make up for the relative lack of competence of its males).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galla_Placidia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelia_Eudoxia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulcheria
Or how the Franks who would become some of the most ardent enforcers of Christianity in the 8th and 9th Centuries initially saw their leadership convert in the 5th Century thanks to the wife of their King Clovis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotilde
Even the Crusader State of Jerusalem had one respected queen at one point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melisende,_Queen_of_Jerusalem
It was ironically the Reformation that really saw steps back for women as Martin Luther and his disciples interpreted the Bible in a manner that saw a woman’s main role as the wife of a man (for that matter, unmarried men were also stigmatized under Protestantism). This lead to the closure of nunneries and smashing of icons of female saints among other things.
Interesting considerations. Thanks.
Especially this distinction between formal and informal power and their gender implication. I never really though about it this way. But it makes a lot of sense.
Incidentally, many traditional societies, if not matriarchal, are organized according to the matrilineal principle: membership of the clan or group, and ultimately inheritance, comes from the mother, and children tend to be raised not by their father, but by their uncles (i.e. their mother’s brothers) whose own biological kids stay in their mother’s clan. This can even go as far as women being quite free to have sex with whoever they want, because that’s how they bring new babies into the clan.
With such arrangements, women’s informal power can probably take a more important place than in patrilineal societies.
If anyone would like to begin exploring the vast world of “I was the alien’s love slave,” specifically the subgenre about Earth girls being needed to be baby mamas, look for
Ruby Dixon and her “Ice Planet Barbarians” series.
Ms. Dixon envisions a group of human women kidnapped by aliens for the galactic sex trade but the space ship crash lands on an ice planet. The surviving women are rescued by said ice planet barbarians (seven feet tall, blue, furry, horns, interesting added appendages) and the fun ensues. It’s a large series, 24 books (I think) and each lady gets a story of how she meets and is wooed by her very own barbarian.
Ms. Dixon can really tell a story but my lord does she need an editor. I stopped after book four. I think, eventually, the ladies discover who kidnapped them in the first place but I don’t know.
Here’s her book page with covers! https://rubydixon.com/series/ice-planet-barbarians/
I’d include the covers, especially the ones with furry blue babies with horns but I’m unsure how to add them.
These books sell like crazy.
Regarding the dual income trap – I think one reason why many women work is that it offers the opportunity for them to socialize with other women every day, and I expect that if things were a little different, men would do the same thing. There’s certainly no economic explanation for my mother working once my siblings and I were old enough to be left at home alone – my father did quite well and my parents always lived well within their means. Her first post-motherhood job was a volunteer one at a charity, which paid nothing (and in fact required a second car for her to get to it). That became unpleasant for various reasons, so she switched to low-paid government work, which at least paid for the car she used to get there.
The ’50s model of marriage, where the man works with other men and the woman is isolated at home in a suburban luxury prison is completely incompatible with people in general and it is good that it is being abolished whether we like it or not.
Another part of modern work/sex dynamics that doesn’t get discussed enough is the corporate harem – which might be kept under wraps at huge companies by lawyers and HR reps, but at the small companies I’ve worked for over the course of my career absolutely is alive and well. The corporate harem is where underqualified but attractive women are hired, and then fired or promoted based on them having sex with the right men.
@jennifer
It isn’t so much “do not want” as it is, not enough economic opportunities (DEI), unaffordable housing and an absolutely broken dating market. The young men, if you’re willing to listen to them, will tell you. They’re out there, posting away. And I do think in the Cluster B Hive, the risks and the costs have gotten so out of whack, that the idea of just keeping your head down and going home is more appealing than the other choices. Especially the more successful of those “finance bros” they’re stealing salads from, they have some idea of risk/reward.
Pardon me if I perceive professional pollsters as primarily goalseeking propagandists.
Jennifer Kobernik @ 66, Here I thought you do what is right because it is the right thing to do, not because you have been cajoled into it.
What I read from you and the commentator I mentioned seems very close to the George Gissing social philosophy of the 1980s. Gissing claimed that if criminally inclined young men had someone at home they could mistreat, they would not be inclined to be a danger to the rest of society.
If someone wants to advance the notion that “via their beauty and charm, women are able to exert a civilizing and pro-social influence on men and motivate them to excellence for the betterment of society; thus it is a virtue to be beautiful, since ugly women do little to motivate men to their best efforts or behavior.” they can do so, but let us please not call it a virtue.
No wonder not much of use gets done in our society anymore. In between silly women having to talk over how they feel about some necessary task, and the men who are waiting for the girl of their dreams to make them want to be productive trash can’t be picked up, empty housing can’t be rehabilitated, folks in need can’t be fed, all tasks which one would think are fairly simple.
#25 I think America did suburbs in a more thorough way than any of the other countries that adopted them, they did things on a bigger scale so that there was much less within reach, in a way there probably would be in most suburbs outside the USA.
#33 I don’t see this as a specifically female thing, but you get some bosses who will give you explicit instructions, but ones that are mixed messages, up to the point of being contradictory. This can take the form of saying your goal should be X, but you must do Y and Z urgently which leaves you no time to do X and maybe these things actually work against achieving X in some way. This can be simply the important but not urgent category conflicting with the urgent but not important, where you don’t have people under you to delegate tasks to.
It can be however a situation where the explicitly stated goal, is not really the actual priority but there is some kind of reason why this actual priority is either not mentioned or downplayed.
#34 of the 4 things you mention, I can sort of see why some women would be wary of them, because people could be on a continuum from choosing those things for themselves, and then being evangelical about it, and then maybe even pushing that onto other people whether they want it or not if they had the power to. Therefore they will overreact to some of these things because it activates these fears.
drhooves,
“Humans have to keep in mind we’re really not that far advanced from the Good Old Days, which quite a few guys I know would be defined as:
“The first was the stage of primitive promiscuity, where everybody mated with everybody else and family ties didn’t exist yet.””
Arguably, this has become standard operating procedure in the underclasses of America and Great Britain (and probably other nations I’m less familiar with). Alas, not as good as many supposed it would be (or pretended to suppose, anyway).
Dear JMG,
I have the impression that M. Giambutas’s analysis is considerably more complex than the one proposed in this post, which confuses his contribution. It is perfectly possible to discern, based on archaeological remains, whether a culture is hierarchical and warlike or not. Giambutas’s analysis, at its core, speaks of the replacement of a non-hierarchical and non-warlike culture by one that is, probably the product of invasions rather than cultural drift resulting from technological developments.
With this, your analysis of matriarchy, in my opinion, is correct since, as part of a hierarchical and competitive (warlike) system, it is indistinguishable from the patriarchal system as two sides of the same coin in the administration of power, something that is correctly articulated in your article as informal and formal networks of power.
But this leaves aside the most important aspect of Giambutas’s analysis, or what can be gleaned from his research: unarticulated systems in the administration of power, that is, systems that are not patriarchal/matriarchal.
And which, from my perspective, will be fundamental in a deindustrialized future where the possibility of exercising power will be very limited or, downright, questioned.
I’ve noticed men tend to abandon work fields and educational spaces when the female to male ratio gets to a certain point and female informal power structures have come to dominate.
“He proposed that all of humanity passed through a series of evolutionary stages on the way from primitive savagery to the first settled civilizations. There were three main stages…”
I chuckled to myself when I read this. I thought to myself: We’ve heard this song before, a number of times. How many western brain farts have this origin story?
Also, it appears western elites have a long history of confronting unwelcome changes and politics by cooking up a narriative that undercuts those groups or interests. Which works in the short run, but since it does nothing to address the issue at hand it all but guarentees that it will come boiling over later and elsewhere.
When I was working in a corporate environment, 1984 to 1992, secretaries were still common. They were all women, and they had the important informal power of controlling access to their bosses, nearly all of whom were men. A good secretary’s power to control access was so strong and beneficial to her boss that everyone at director level or above had a secretary who stayed with him when he moved laterally or up in the corporate hierarchy. But that was before computers became ubiquitous and everyone, no matter how high up in the hierarchy, was expected to use them to do their own report writing, meeting scheduling, and so forth. I have no idea who, if anyone, exercises that kind of informal power these days.
Rhydlyd, thanks for the data points! These days, I’m impressed when anybody shows signs of self-awareness, and “monolithic” is never a term that describes any group of human beings greater than 0.
Moonwolf8, I’ve seen the same thing. It takes some degree of competence to sidestep an evil spell cast by a group of people who think they’re just virtuously asking Jesus to smite the wicked.
Kfish, thanks for this! Yeah, that makes sense.
Uncle G, they were indeed played. One of the weaknesses of informal power is that, being manipulative, it’s vulnerable to manipulation.
Teresa, thanks for this!
Workdove, that’s where the ideas for The Wicker Man came from!
David, you must know some unusually clueless neopagans. (I admit they’re out there!) The ones I know always push matriarchy conveniently back just before the dawn of recorded history.
Tris, the interesting thing is that anthropological studies suggest that in matrilineal societies, power tends to gravitate to the mother’s brother or brothers. There are traces through that all through mythology — look how often the main conflict is between uncle and nephew.
Teresa, okay, that sounds so awful that I may have to hold my nose and read one.
Justin, that’s a good point!
Gustavo, Gimbutas was demonstrably wrong about the supposedly peaceful nature of the Corded Ware culture (her “Old Europe”) — there are archeological sites in that culture that show fortifications and mass killings of the kind found in war. You might look up the sites of Herxheim, Schletz, Schöneck-Kilianstädten, and Talheim, for starters. May I point out also that your notion that power will be limited or questioned in a deindustrial future flies in the face of all historical evidence? In every previous case on record, the decline of a civilization leads to widespread violence and the rise of charismatic warlords, and this continues straight through the four or five centuries of dark age conditions that follow.
PumpkinScone, I’ve noticed the same thing.
Team10tim, yes, it’s a very old song. As for manufacturing narratives to undercut insurgent groups, that’s what ruling elites do!
SLClaire, that’s another good example of the abolition of women’s informal power — thank you.