David Pearce – Popular Culture and Personal Passions

From a very young age I always preferred the company of females. I found them, and still find them, much more pleasant, generally speaking, as a gender than males. They had, again generally speaking, kindness and understanding that boys and men lacked. As I grew up I realised that throughout history their potential contribution had been wasted through patriarchal societies built upon patriarchal religions.

There is evidence that the patriarchal world developed once the hunter/gatherer model disappeared. Before that it is likely that division of labour led to a more egalitarian approach to life. After that, men, through their greater physical strength, started to impose control on everything from who women lived with to what they were allowed to take part in. Organised monotheistic religion then started to explicitly identify the creator as male, unlike Gaia the personification of the Earth, which was used as evidence for the rule that only men could lead religions and for male supremacy in the wider world.

There are a few examples of societies where women have control which point to the benefit not of a matriarchy, which has arguably never existed, but the benefit of much stronger cooperation. The Minangkabau of Indonesia are a matrilineal society where men hold titles and responsibilities across all areas of life, but women control property and land. The results are a very stable society with extremely low levels of domestic violence and real partnerships of equality. Interestingly, they are a devout Muslim society so it proves that the concept of female authority and religion is not incompatible.

The Mosuo of China are a small society where  women have control over economic decisions and inherit property, and is probably the nearest thing we have to a matriarchy. They have ‘walking marriages’ where the partners stay together at night but never share property. Therefore, if a couple break up there is no messy divorce and, as the children are looked after by their extended family, no threat of illegitimacy, a way that men have used to force women to stay in bad situations or bring social disapproval on them if they have the courage to leave.

Finally, the Iroquois Confederacy of the Native American nations had clan mothers who were a check on the chiefs who were too warlike. They had to agree to any use of aggression, and if they didn’t the chiefs were forbidden from going against them. Women controlled the food supplies for the clans so were able to bring real pressure to bear on those who tried to go against them and even had the power to remove a chief from his position. The results were a period of relative peace and a time of plenty.

Without the patriarchal societies we have grown up in over millenia we would probably have been safer, more equal and more stable as these examples indicate. We are a world that makes heroes out of violent domestic abusers like Henry VIII and venerates the ‘strong man’ as we are still doing to the massive detriment of the world. A matriarchy, if one had existed, would not have been perfect, because bad women exist although not in the same quantities as bad men, but it would have been an awful lot nicer than what we have endured for thousands of years.