Were the matriarchalists right all along? A review of Heide Gottner-Abendroth's "Matriarchal Societies"

     In 2012, German author Heide Gottner-Abendroth quietly and with little fanfare reached a personal landmark. After decades of writing and deep analysis of historical and anthropological resources, all of which had failed peer review by the conventional, self-appointed Academic Expert Community, she finally managed to inch her magnum opus, a hefty tome titled Matriarchal Societies, though the agonizing peer-review process, and into mainstream publication. This was a tremendous shock at the time, given the long-standing academic bigotry against anything to with the concept of matriarchy, and even more shocking given that the general consensus in 2012-era academia was that matriarchal theory was dead, 1980s-1990s era sociobiology had irrevocably won the debate, and only a few crazy boomer New Age grandmas still paid attention to "all that Marija Gimbutas crap from the 70s".

    Fast forward to 2024, and a quiet revolution is in the process. Last year saw the highest amount of popular interest in matriarchal and matrilineal societies in recent memory, with a huge slew of articles being written in popular magazines, highly-viewed Youtube videos, and serious analyses by cultural anthropologists, highlighting the adaptive and functional nature of the many divergences from imperial, warrior patriarchism which we had supposedly "proven" to be the human norm a few decades ago. The rise of fourth wave feminism, the increasing critique of gender essentialism from neuroscientists and ethnographers, growing issues with sociobiology/evolutionary psychology and its harmful effects on Western culture, and the recent spate of evidence for women's ancient role as big game hunters all have had the effect of causing an Overton Window shift, finally, irrevocably, once and for all, away from the Whiggish male-centric narrative of human prehistory. And it is in this brave new world that Gottner-Abendroth has managed to accomplish what no other matriarchal theorist has in a century (except Riane Eisler to a very limited extent): the ability to bridge the gap between a "skeptical" academia, an enthusiastic feminist community, and a general public who are finally beginning to open their minds to the possibility of non-patriarchy. 

    I have seen the subtle shift over the past 13 years of my own life and work. In 2011, when I first began my higher education, and embarked on the quest to discover the ultimate secrets of human nature through studying anthropology and social history, all roads seemed to point away from matriarchal theorism as having any basis in fact whatsoever. I mentioned to more than one professor during my freshman year of university that there is a copious literature in cultural anthropology dealing with "non-patriarchal" societies (matrilineal, matriarchal, bilateral, egalitarian etc.), but the general reply was the canned NPC response "scholars don't believe there has ever been a matriarchal society". Or else, "yeah, but, men were the ones who did the hunting and the fighting so they ended up in charge even in the matrilineal societies". Being a young and naive mind, I listened to the self-appointed authorities for the time being, but my sense that something didn't quite stack up never really went away. As I read more and more deeply into the ethnographic record, perusing the work of such greats as Bronislaw Malinowski, Gerard Reichel-Dolmatoff, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Joseph Rock and a slew of others who had actual lived experiences with non-patriarchal cultures, I found myself increasingly skeptical of the "skeptics". If the "matriarchal myth" was indeed a myth, then it is one which is shockingly widespread, with examples of matriarchal narratives (usually reported by indignant and disgusted authorities in patriarchal civilizations) going back literally thousands of years. 

    One major realization that helped me conclude that "matriarchy" (depending on how it is defined) is much more real than most academic "experts" are willing to acknowledge, was the growing understanding that our own patriarchal model is actually highly maladaptive, and that adult men are actually just as victimized by "male privilege" as women are. Human nature is such that we always flourish from a physical and mental standpoint when we do the correct things, the ones that help us adapt and grow. While this is often brought up as a justification for the "natural male-dominated order" (after all, who could argue that this male order has been amazingly successful at building powerful empires and conquering the world), the truth is that we are not actually flourishing from a human well-being point of view. Just the opposite: our patriarchal empires and civilizations are oppressing and dehumanizing all of us, male and female alike; our socialization and child-rearing practices are traumatizing male children in order to create violent, murderous monsters for the military-industrial complex; our technological prowess is ruining the natural environment, turning what was living and lush into dead metal and wire, ruining air quality and destroying the protective ozone layer; our "superior" democratic international order is committing genocide after genocide, using soft-power, psyops and lies to colonize the globe according to the whims of a few diabolical billionaires; and our wonderful, "life-saving" allopathic medicine is castrating and mutilating women as part of what it calls "obstetrics", using poor Black and other minority populations as guinea-pig test subjects for mad-scientist experiments, enforcing unproven experimental injections on populations against their consent, and tabooing and suppressing (often to the point of ruining lives) those rare intrepid doctors who integrate holistic, indigenous healthcare into their methods. 

    As Walt Kelly's Pogo once acerbically stated, "We have met the enemy...and he is us!"

    I had my eureka moment in 2015, when I realized that the matriarchal bugaboo that academic "skeptics" (largely but not exclusively male) and frat-bros both feared was not fearsome at all, but actually would likely create a far more healthy and liveable world that the "civilized " savagery that we have now. After all, looking at a quick survey of matrilineal societies, one would hard pressed to find even one that was as gruesomely maladaptive, violent, pathological as the typical highly patriarchal, patrilineal imperial state. Where is the matrilineal equivalent to the Aztec Empire with its sacrifical mass murder sprees? In which of Eisler's "partnership cultures" can one find a level of internal instability and violent crime similar to that of most modern "Third World" patriarchal states? Are the Mosuo out there starving indigenous people in an open-air prison camp and bombing children's hospitals, or is that the radical Zionists of the ultra-macho Likud Party?

    As a man who does not fit into the very narrowly defined "acceptable" mold of male behaviors (aggressive temper tantrums, gymbro homoeroticism, autistic fixations on cars and guns, pathological sex-obsession) I never felt like I got much out of living in a patriarchal society. Somehow, being in a "man's world" isn't actually that wonderful and appealing to myself, and a large number of other men as well (only some of whom would willing to admit it). The truth is that Gottner-Abendroth's portrait of the matriarchal/matrilineal model of society would actually do a great deal to serve the man who is not aggressively macho, irresponsible, womb-envious, outwardly stoical as a means of hiding his affect-hunger, etc. The truth is that men in our culture have become their own worst enemies. The truth is that women do not oppress men in some "gynocentric" nightmare here in the West: it is the men who have come on top, clawing their way ruthlessly to the summit of the competitive rat race, over the corpses of all the other "loser" men, who oppress said "loser" men. And this evil system of misogynandry requires that you irrationally fear any alternatives, or else pretend they don't exist. Hence the reason why Eisler, Gimbutas, DeMeo, Crist, Berresford-Ellis, Dashu, etc. need to be pathologized, marginalized, ignored. 

    Gottner-Abendroth's work contains an excellent and (to my knowledge the most) detailed encyclopedic review of a copious number of matrilineal societies. She uses the term "matriarchal" to refer to these cultures, but they do not seem to be a reverse of patriarchy, with attendant brutal repression of men (though the Nair caste of Kerala seem to emotionally repress men to some degree, this is the only example of such a thing happening in her matriarchal examples, despite this being very common in patriarchy). Eisler would have called most of these "partnership cultures" to contrast with "dominator cultures", aka patriarchal warrior-imperial states. There are a number of important differences between various matriarchies, but a greater number of similarities. Whether in the Americas, Africa, East Asia ("Zomia"), or Oceania, matriarchal societies tend to share values of cooperation, kinship density, "soft" parenting and childrearing, emphasis on peace, promotion of a caring and nurturant personality in both men and women, high regard for the maternal role, and usually some sort of goddess worship or female shamanism. The idealization of the caring and nurturant personality reminds one of female socialization here in the West, which we arrogantly assume is so female-coded that some of the worst and cringiest evo-psych nutjobs are now arguing that there is a biologically hard-wired "female" response to stress called "tend and befriend". The very clear ethnographic examples across the record of matrilineal societies reveals that men are also socialized to have a "tend and befriend" type of personality, and they have much fewer psychological illnesses and problems with social functioning in these matriarchies than they do in the societies which they supposedly "rule", as a result. Gottner-Abendroth does an excellent job collating the huge amount of evidence for the superior adaptive qualities of matriarchal societies, using these actual real-life everyday examples, many of which still exist today.

    Overall, I think it is an excellent book, one of the better reads I've had in 2024. It is more realistic, evidential, and less fantasy-based than some earlier works on the history of non-patriarchal societies like The First Sex or When God Was A Woman. Its strength lies in the fact that Gottner-Abendroth focuses mainly on living examples (or recently extinct examples) of matriarchal societies, rather than relying on projections onto an ancient past for which there is little direct evidence. That being said, every now and then she does get into heavily speculative territory, and this is the weakest part of her book. For instance, in the chapter on China and Southeast Asia, Gottner-Abendroth opines that shamanism was originally an all-female activity, with men only occupying roles as religious specialists late in history. There is no actual evidence for this claim, and in fact even many of the most purely matriarchal societies in the ethnographic record have male shamans. Also, while Gottner-Abendroth thankfully falls short of endorsing the absurdist gender-essentialism which occasionally plagued 1970s-era works on matriarchy and the goddess movement, it is not clear from this book just how much of gendered behavior is learned vs. innate. She mentions early on in the book how women are innately superior when it comes to language acquisition (a common claim regurgitated by patriarchists who believe that women are naturally "talkative" and men are "silent and terse", but for which cross-cultural evidence is quite lacking), but it is unclear if she is presenting this as her own view or that of sociobiologist Richard Fester (she criticizes socio-biology, with good reason, a little later). And I think she sometimes overplays the level to which traditional societies (including matriarchal ones) construct male and female "spheres"; while every culture does have some understanding of divergence between male and female roles in society, just exactly what constitutes those roles differes greatly between cultures and can hardly be thought of as a consistent pattern (just look at the evidence that men are more cooperative and women more competitive among the matrilineal Khasi, for example).

    However, these small peccadillos aside, I believe that Gottner-Abendroth has more than enough reason to be proud of herself for this incredibly seminal tome. And I hope that it becomes foundational for a future in which the long-needed study of non-patriarchal alternatives for human social dynamics finally commences.