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In the past thirty years an uproar has arisen over ideas that women once had power; that people traced their descent through the mother; or that ancient religions embraced goddess veneration. Academia rejected these interpretations of history in the 1960s, and their massive comeback as a result of the women’s movement has caused an alarmed re- action. The straw doll of “matriarchy” is thrown up with an impossibly narrow definition, is then shot down on those grounds, and the matter is declared settled. Robert Schaeffer of www.patriarchy.com can then proclaim that “The feminist / New Age ‘Idyllic Goddess’ theory is not an intellectually respectable hypothesis.”



All this polarization and oversimplification avoids the real issue, which is not female domination in a reverse of historical female oppression, but the existence of egalitarian human societies: cultures that did not enforce a patriarchal double standard around sexuality, property, public office and space; that did not make females legal minors under the control of fathers, brothers, and husbands, without protection from physical and sexual abuse by same. We know of many societies that did not confine, seclude, veil, or bind female bodies, nor amputate or deform parts of those bodies.





We know, as well, that there have been cultures that accorded women public leadership roles and a range of arts and professions, as well as freedom of movement, speech, and rights to make personal decisions. Many have embraced female personifications of the Divine, neither subordinating them to a masculine god, nor debarring masculine deities. Most importantly, there have been (and still are) societies based on matrilineage, matrilocal social organization and other cultural structures that place women at the social center.

Evidence for such societies exists, though there’s no agreement on what to call them...



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