Matriarchal Society: Does It Exist Today?

The extent of a society’s development is reflected in the freedom that its women enjoy. The patriarchal society existing today is at least three thousand years old and is known to have shown scant regard for women and  perpetrated many atrocities on them. Women have been objectified, considered men’s property, abused physically, their cry for justice dismissed, depoliticised and deprioritised, and in many countries, even their life is sniffed out at birth. Today 74 million women and girls are ‘missing’ in South Asia. Prejudices impede women’s entry in parliaments around the world so that they hold just over 18 per cent of the seats in positions of power.

The reasons for patriarchy is often assumed to be the superior physical strength of men with which they could subdue and bring women onto their knees, and hence patriarchy is assumed to be the natural order of things. Yet,  even today there are societies with matriarchal patterns in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania. Several ancient cultures have revered the Divine Mother principle that represents the nurturing spirit and the natural bond between the mother and the child. This Goddess cult could very well have been the origin of all matriarchal societies.

Matriarchy doesn’t mean a mere reversal of patriarchy, where women somehow rule over men – as the usual misinterpretation goes – instead, they are egalitarian societies. They are societies that have their guidelines and codes and are still free of domination. Power, as well as wealth, is not concentrated in a single person, and most decisions are made by the consensus of all. And this is what makes them so attractive to those looking for a new philosophy to support the creation of a just society.

Generally, matriarchies are extended clans. The people live together in big clans, which are based on matrilineality; that is, children are identified in terms of their mother rather than their father and kinship as represented by the clan’s name is passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists at least of three generations of women: the clan-mother, her daughters, her granddaughters, and the directly related men: the brothers of the mother, and her sons and grandsons. The women live there permanently, because daughters and granddaughters never leave the clan-house of their mother when they marry. This is called matrilocality.

Ancient societies were matrilineal because there was no “one-man-one-woman” concept; humans just lived in communities and being hunters and gatherers, they were always on the move. Paternity would have been difficult to determine; hence the children took the name of their mother.