The Matriarchy

Catal Huyuk: Where the girls are?

The English textbook with which I am currently teaching includes, in this week’s lesson, a description of the ancient city of Catal Huyuk.

“Women were important in this city: many were in high positions and there were a lot of special goddesses.”

Right; a typical example of the myth of paganism. This, in fact, it is impossible to know. We have no written records from or about Catal Huyuk; we know only what we can know from digging in their garbage. Almost anything we say about them is highly hypothetical. They might have had green skin and feathers.

Wherever and whenever this situation occurs, the doctrine since about the 1960s is that this was a “matriarchy” that worshipped “the Goddess.” Why not? Without any written records, the claim can never be disproven.

"The Goddess" as she appears in the trash of Catal Huyuk. Or maybe a bit of ancient pornography. Or maybe the original Barbie doll. Or maybe an alien in a space suit.

Why do people want to make this claim? Politics: without it, the currently dominant feminist ideology has a problem. All known societies have in fact been “patriarchies”—i.e., always and everywhere there has been a clear sexual division of labour. Always and everywhere women have minded the home and the children, and men have handled public affairs and government. (Wikipedia defines “matriarchy” as a society in which women “have the central roles of political leadership, moral authority, and control of property”: a patriarchy is a society in which men take this role.) This is of course not the society feminism wants; feminism holds that such societies have come about only because of the “oppression of women.” But if patriarchy has _always_ been the norm—as it has—it begins to look a little as if this is natural, necessary, and just, and not a question of oppression of one sex by the other. After all, if the same one sex has always and everywhere oppressed the same other sex, how could that have been possible? How could they always pull it off, beginning at random? How did that coin always come up tails? Short, that is, of men actually being—well—superior?

We have to throw out all these claims of ancient “matriarchal” societies as bogus, or at least unprovable. Which leaves us with the prime candidate for a “matriarchal” society of which we do have some written record. As noted by the Wikipedia entry, this is the Iroquois.

Iroquois women at work. Note the presence of baby and food. And, say, aren't they barefoot and possibly pregnant?

So, were the Iroquois matriarchal? Actually, not at all; certainly, it was nothing like what the feminists envision for the future. Women did not take roles of political leadership. The Iroquois did have a quite strict sexual division of labour. Women raised the children and tended the garden; men went off to hunt and to war.

It is called matriarchal because 1. Men when they married moved in with their wife’s family, and 2. Women chose one of the tribe’s two chiefs.

This, surely, is weak tea. If men moved in with their in-laws, does this mean they were dominated by their mother-in-law, not their father-in-law? Nope. If women chose one chief, that chief, who actually did the governing, was still male, and he shared power with a war chief chosen by the men.

Traditional Iroquois chief's dress. Notice any breasts?

Nowhere near being a matriarchy, then. I think at most it is fair to say that, in Iroquois society, women had rather more say in the community’s formal government than in most other societies; but not enough to break the mold.

Why did they? Why did this particular society tend to bring women in closer to the council fire?

Aristotle observes that polises in which women are prominent are more warlike. Of course that is not politically correct; the feminist line is that societies ruled by women would be more peaceful. Yet this is a good case in point: Iroquois society was the one known society in which women were most prominent, and probably no society ever created was more warlike than the Iroquois. Native North Americans in general were in a state of perpetual war with their neighbours, and among them the Iroquois has a special reputation as the fiercest. It is worth noting that women were also unusually prominent, among the Greek city states, in Sparta.

So a simple equation, and perhaps a very good reason why no known society has seen fit to put women in power.

Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter.

Of course, the connection of women and war may be as either cause or effect. If a society is going to be constantly away at war, the men are often going to be away. One may need to ask the women to take a more active role in the running of the community in such circumstances, a la Rosie the Riveter.

However, because women have less to lose in warfare, they might also be expected to be more inclined to resort to it as a matter of policy. Women have less to lose by holding any position adamantly than a man; a man always risks having to defend his opinion with his fists, and risk pain, injury, or death. A woman will, counter to feminist propagandizing, rarely be attacked physically by a man, in any culture; all a man’s instincts run against it. If she is attacked by another woman, she is unlikely to suffer serious injury. A woman can therefore afford to be more ruthless, more rigid, less compromising, in any situation. If it comes to blows, she calls in a man to take them or give them for her; to her it all remains rather abstract.

You want matriarchy? I'll show you matriarchy...

It should be no surprise then that when women have been given chief executive authority in the polis, they have shown a strong tendency to end up at war with their neighbours. Elizabeth I, Bloody Mary, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir.

It is hard to overstate the harm feminism has done.