Shouldn't we be setting our sights higher than the Stone Age?

[urbpan]

In art school, I was taught that some 40,000 or so years ago, there was matriarchal society (or societies) across much of Europe, if not the whole of the peopled world. (I should stress that I was not taught this in the context of a history or anthropology course.) This society, peaceful and artistic, produced artifacts like the "goddess of Willendorf." Many people I was close with embraced the notion of this society as fact, and moreover, as a model of what we--should we choose to discard the patriarchy--should aspire for our own culture.

Alas, there is a paucity of facts to back up the existence of this great matriarchy, and a great deal of wishful thinking. My bs detector wasn't as sensitive back then, but I did sometimes wonder how the fact of this unknown society had come to be so obscure. Shouldn't I have learned about it in, well, a history class? I should have, if there was any evidence that it ever existed, or any actual scholarly research done backing it up. For more than a decade I've let the possibility that it existed simmer on the back burner of my mind--it's a good story, at least.


Today's Straight Dope describes the idea, what's right with it, and what's wrong with it. Always good to hear from Uncle Cecil.

Comments

Sic transit gloria mundi

[frith]

The pipe dreams wafted by Cecil in that Straight Dope essay are so ridiculous that I find it difficult to believe anyone gave them any credence, unless it was to laugh up their sleeves at the simple minded. I think that people trying to postulate the existence of an organized matriarchal civilization are hampered by romanticism and puritanical ideals. In any society that incorporates hierarchy beyond close familial ties is going yield the power base to the most aggressive -- the men. Language is the key to spreading influence outside of the familial group. Language allows alliances to form between unrelated individuals. Male biological strategy is to breed with as many females as possible. Female biological strategy is to selectively breed with the best males. Male contribution to gestation and nutrition of the young is about nil. Female contribution to gestation and nutrition of the young is crippling. So here you have two distinctly different strategies at work here. Women's benefit from language would be to organize their resources and resolve conflicts (facial expressions, mutual grooming and a few well placed slaps will do the job just fine). Men's benefit from language would be to strengthen casual alliances, increase the number of individual males cooperating in maintaining their status, to forcibly acquire more women in their breeding pool and to overrule mate selection by women. In the struggle between the two breeding strategies, once armed with language, it was no contest. Language promoted the patriarchy. The more civilized the culture the greater the probability that men dictate the rules.

So if their is evidence of a matriarchal society, it is not in the pottery shards of civilizations past but in the genetic baggage we carry but cannot prune.