Definitions, Scope and Topicality by Heide Goettner-Abendroth. The subject of Modern Matriarchal Studies is the investigation and presentation of non-patriarchal societies, those that existed in the past and those that still, to some degree, are still with us now. Even today there are peoples with matriarchal patterns in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania. None […]

Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. By Cynthia Eller. Steinem had been speculating about the origins of the patriarchy as early as 1972 … The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, […]

by Marija Gimbutas. The difficulty with the term matriarchy in 20th century anthropological scholarship is that it is assumed to represent a complete mirror image of patriarchy or androcracy – that is to say, a hierarchical structure with women ruling by force in the place of men. This is far from the reality of Old […]

A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions. by Robert Briffault. The learned Swiss jurist Bachofen, who was the first to draw attention to some of the evidence showing the prevalence at one time of feminine dominance, suggests that women rebelled in disgust at the promiscuity imposed by male rule… But nothing could be […]

by Johann Jakob Bachofen. The era of mother right was a joyless, dark, and wild life of blood revenge, in which each murder generated another one, in which spilt blood was washed off with the blood of another, in which the curse on a family ended only after the death of its final member.