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 […]

by Merlin Stone. Published 1976, New York: The Dial Press. Professor R. K. Harrison wrote of the Goddess religion, “One of its most prominent features was the lewd, depraved, orgiastic character of its cultic procedures.” … Professor W. F. Albright, one of the leading authorities on the archaeology of Palestine, wrote of the female religion […]

First published in 1936 as: Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (“Sexuality in the Cultural Struggle”). by Wilhelm Reich. In matriarchal society, which rests on the social order of primitive communism, children have unrestricted sexual freedom. The ideology of asceticism for the child develops along with the development of patriarchy in the economy and social structure. This […]

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.