The Patriarchs

[...] Nineteenth-century American women’s rights activists such as Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she [Cynthia Eller, a scholar of religions at Claremont Graduate University in California] writes, also had an ‘analytical reliance on differences between women and men’ that assumed femininity ‘was simply better than masculinity. Female domination was the morally preferable alternative to be followed in creating a new social order.’

For the American gender theorist Judith Butler, beliefs in a matriarchal prehistory have too often overlooked the true complexity of gender difference in favour of simplistic, reductive accounts of women and their experiences. These beliefs squeeze women all over the world into one narrow version of what women are, and strain uncomfortably when it becomes clear that individuals do not always fit these definitions. What this kind of gender essentialism does, as other feminist scholars have also been at pains to point out, is ignore that women are also capable of cruelty, coercion, and violence. Men, too, can be nurturing and creative. The ‘feminist recourse to an imaginary past needs to be cautious’, argues [Judith] Butler. The qualities we define as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are shaped by social and cultural forces. There’s no basis for assuming that what sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century beliefs about gender were held by people living in completely different societies thousands of years ago.

But then, every feminist wave brings along its own notions of
‘female specialness’, notes [Cynthia] Eller. This is understandable in societies in which women have been undervalued. It’s a way of regaining a sense of pride and self-belief. For some, it has become the lexicon of female empowerment. The cracks appear when this ‘specialness’ proves to be another straitjacket, distancing women from what are seen as ‘masculine’ traits and defining ‘femininity’ in tight, prescriptive ways. Behind the ‘Mother Goddess’, after all, is the archetype of the selfless, nurturing woman whose primary role is to reproduce and care for others – a set of expectations that does not hit all women, and has proven a burden to many.

Over millennia, we’ve been pushed gradually into believing that there are just a few ways in which we can live. Our societies have homogenised through colonisation and the spread of a narrow subset of laws and faiths – coalescing into what are now our ‘traditions’. Our institutions of government have ossified to the point where they feel immovable. Even relatively small changes to legislation can take gargantuan effort over many years. We resign ourselves to the systems we have, even when we know they’re not working. It’s no surprise, given this inertia, that we feel the social patterns we follow must be natural or divine, rather than manmade.

At the end of this journey – one that has taken me from deep time all the way to our turbulent present – I’m left wondering if the radical societies we create now could someday form the basis of tomorrow’s habits and customs. How can we rediscover our capacity to be socially bold? As permanent as our ways of life appear to be, as solid as our institutions, our constitutions, our beliefs seem, there was never anything fixed about them. We cooked it up, almost all of it, and we can invent something else. There are no natural limits to how we make the future; only our imaginations and our courage. Yet, we hesitate. Standing at the precipice, we look back and feel terrified at what we might lose.

Imagine instead everything we could gain.