(Essay) What I’m learning from matriarchies by Tina Minkowitz

[Author’s Note: This essay was first published in The Radical Notion (UK journal, now defunct).]

Background: I’m reading materials on modern and ancient matriarchy including the work of Marija Gimbutas and Heide Göttner-Abendroth, taking in the materials of Max Dashú’s Suppressed Histories Archives, and have just returned from the Women’s Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete originated by Carol Christ and now led by Laura Shannon.  This latter connected me with my own ancestral and personal knowledge, through simple personal resonances with matriarchal leanings in my life and family and cultural resonances with my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage that has some shared elements with the rhythms and tonalities of music and dance and sensibility of spirit I encountered there – in our circle of women learning from the ancients and our own immediate teachers. 

I’ve been interested to approach this as a lesbian and as a woman who has often been on the edge of community through my own doing and also through that of others.  What place can there be for someone like me in a close-knit society that is based on motherhood?  I’m not a mother, don’t have particularly strong material or social skills that I imagine would be useful.  What I’m learning is, among other things, that eligibility criteria are actually not a thing of matriarchy where everybody has a place but of patriarchal capitalism where we are required to sell ourselves and justify our existence based on productivity or reproductivity.[1] 

My personal background and how I come to this: As a child I felt deeply connected with my mother yet in some sense felt ashamed of this connection.  She had trouble in her life, and I felt I had to contribute to her stability by not making life more difficult for her – becoming a ‘good girl’ and suppressing or taking care of my emotional needs on my own.  As a teenager I remember creating a multimedia art work consisting of a painting and two little papier mâché pieces in reds, browns, and black, representing a mountain mother and a red daughter in the shape of a snake.  Looking at the Goddess materials of Old Europe I can see my longings for continuity and my anguish over not being able to understand or articulate further what I needed, in any way that could make it real. 

When I was eighteen, my needs and frustrations erupted or imploded when I couldn’t pursue the paths set out in front of me to continue a triumphal march toward independent adulthood.  My mother, with whom I had had conflict as a teenager but still loved deeply, had me psychiatrically institutionalized and I had to revert to my childhood strategy of managing her environment and managing my own needs.  It was a stark place that I had to survive again and again on multiple levels once I got out and was faced with building a life when I didn’t know who I was any more.  I turned to spiritual seeking and solitary healing, and eventually heard the voice of the earth and my own spirit, water, trees, the life force, and eventually a life path and work that honored all of who I was and felt like there was some purpose that could lead me out of shame and into dignity. 

I’d like to share some points I now feel are useful to focus on in envisioning and putting into practice a society in which patriarchy decisively falls and is reabsorbed safely into the earth, metabolized by her sacred birds of prey and her infinitesimal microbes.[2]   

• Dispersed relationships of mutual reliance, cooperation, affection.

Couples and nuclear families are not expected to meet most or all of one another’s needs. Kinship through the motherline is both the fundamental structure and the pattern for the most important social relationships.[3] 

• Brother-sister bond the paradigm for relations between the sexes

Heterosexuality is de-emphasized and not put at the service of men individually or collectively, when kinship through the motherline brings men into relationships of respect and cooperation with women.[4]  Women’s sexuality and capacity to bring new life into the world is sacred; men’s inseminating capacity is sacred but subsidiary to women’s creative life force.

• Distribution not hoarding of wealth (through, creating, and reinforcing the dispersed relationships)

Women, mothers, and the principle of mothering are at the center of economic planning, activity, and distribution so as to provide for everyone’s needs, expand the wealth by expanding enjoyment of it, and cultivate what is needed for the future.[5]  The earth is an active participant in economics and is interacted with respectfully and mutually.[6]

• Functional leadership also distributed, rising and falling back into the common circle

The paradigm of mothering also gives attention to everyone’s voice, gifts and troubles, recognizing strengths and skills and knowledge as they arise and allowing us to fall back into times of healing and taking in without sacrificing our place in the circle.[7] 

• Space for individual boundaries – everything affects the group, but respect for solitude

The public/private distinction is a matter of learning emotional continence and speaking up for what we need and believe, rather than modeling individual sovereignty on the state as domains of legitimate domination and control inaccessible to others.[8]  Honest disagreement and conflict, however painful, does not have to become violent when everyone is maintaining the group container at the same time as asserting personal boundaries that may require separation in some form.[9]

• Wisdom and interconnectedness the basis for action, not mere will

Mothering as a consciousness of our interconnectedness pays attention to the earth’s promptings, our inner wisdom, the needs of everyone around us that we are sensitive to as an extension of ourselves.[10]  We act with certainty when we know what needs to be done, individually and collectively – yet this is always open to new information as we remain interconnected.

• Sexuality identified with the life force, not only generative (as ‘productive’) but regenerative

Lesbian sexuality is regenerative as it flows from and strengthens our capacity for joy and celebration of one another.[11]  Desire is creative and honors the life force in one another.  In flowing between and among women, lesbian sexuality is another manifestation of the women’s circle that amplifies energy among us. 

• Balance between life and death, rhythms and cycles beyond one individual

While we grieve a beloved person, a lost energy or part of ourselves, we honor the death-givers and those who clean up after the dead (like vultures) as part of the creation of beauty in the world, inseparable and cyclical and interdependent.[12] 

• Female specificity as circle of community that connects us to source of life in ourselves, each other and the earth

Sistership as a bond that encircles and includes mothering and daughtering in a mutual seeing and knowing of one another deeply that we acknowledge as basic to life and maintaining of community and the cosmos.[13] 

• Erasing and peeling off layers of misogyny and oppression, paying attention to earth’s whispers and our own bodies and breaths and our learnings in circles

To accept our sistership is both simple and obvious, and for us requires confrontation with the challenges of patriarchy outwardly and inwardly, including: a sense that we ourselves have to do it all or have everything mapped out ahead of time, not trusting ourselves or other women, fearing persecution and incoherence in our relationship to the world around us.  How we work in a context where persecution and incoherence happen, can focus on our relations with one another, strengthening our vision, articulating it where it can attract others, and speaking out or otherwise resisting oppression despite the possibility of persecution when our voice can matter.[14] 

• Activism as meaningful action to change a configuration towards our values, communicative and guiding or inspiring

The working of our will is done within the context of interconnectness and attention to inner and outer wisdom, aiming to change the energies and dynamics of a situation rather than bend it to our personal interests.[15]  This requires acceptance of pain and conflict when it comes but conflict and pain (inflicted or received) are not the point. 

• Imperfections, pain, conflict as part of the circle – not dominating it, hearing and seeing and making space for big and small eruptions of discomfort and anguish that can signal a new birth or something dying or being reborn/renewed

We accept the impact on our circles of personal crises and conflicts, and also accept and work with our disabilities and limitations.  As our circles become stronger and expand as interconnected spiral webs, we become more and more capable of holding each other through the most challenging times, and we also learn how to maintain our own connections honoring community during our worst times.[16]  We learn to let go of the need to personally control as individuals everything that allows us to survive, since community with each other, ourselves and the earth is real.

Coda: My other work, or life path of work up to this point, has focused for the past twenty years on the abolition of forced psychiatry using opportunities available in international lawmaking.  This has been a sacred task that taught me some of what I say here.  It feels odd to connect that with matriarchy, as international law is still a system created by and accountable to patriarchally-organized states and inter-state global and regional organizations.  Yet I have found there the creativity open to eruptions of collective outcry against injustice, that bring matriarchal principles into articulation and focus for further work to make them reality.  In my current work I am bringing these closer together still working through both dimensions – exploring and talking about matriarchy explicitly in spaces like this one, and also continuing the normative development and guidance of disability human rights law. 

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[1] I’m choosing to put some things in footnotes as explanatory references or background to some of these bits.  For this one – a friend said in another context that our modern society judges people by their ability to be productive and socially compliant.  I think that social compliance also has the nuance of power dynamics, by which a person or group can achieve influence over others and change the terms for social compliance.  Yet that process, even if pursued honestly for good ends, is damaging to us by perpetuating the terms of power rather than interconnectivity and moving together for the good of the whole.

[2] In a workshop at Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival by Luisah Teish in the 80s or 90s, I learned that the Goddess Oshun, goddess of beauty and sweet waters, also had a warrior aspect as a vulture.  This is perfect I think as a description of how consuming and thereby clearing away what is no longer needed is inseparable from beauty.  The Goddess Inanna, according to Judy Grahn’s book Eruptions of Inanna, who has many dimensions including being a goddess of sexuality and also a lawgiver, took the aspect of a raven to go and see what is happening in her kingdom that needs to be corrected.  I love this also, linking a scavenger bird known for its keen intelligence with the social dimension of identifying and eliminating what is no longer living.  That image had come to me for my human rights work before I read about the connection to Inanna.

[3] On the Goddess pilgrimage, Diana and I benefited from apartness as well as togetherness and the circle of women that allowed us to relate to community each in her own way.  We are still taking in our changes separately and together.

[4] For me what’s most important about the brother-sister bond in matriarchies is its social function taking precedence over heterosexual coupling to organize kin (family, but in matriarchies it is bigger than what we think of as family) relationships and obligations.  Mothers’ brothers have obligations to her and her family while her husband has primary obligations to his own sisters and their children.  This is well documented in Heide Göttner-Abendroth’s book Matriarchal Societies and elsewhere (see that book for additional references).  I think that the implications of this difference must fundamentally shape ordinary social relations and encounters between men and women, what is seen and expected as ordinary.  Even where gender is a primary structure organizing society and culture, the complementarity between sisters and brothers is entirely different from the enforced heterosexuality we are familiar with in patriarchy (e.g. female leadership viewed as a challenge to men resolvable by sex or rape).  It seems to me that this difference may cause many women living under centuries of patriarchy to misunderstand the principle of gender complementarity characteristic of many matriarchies.  On the complementarity see Göttner-Abendroth and also Barbara A. Mann, The Gantowisas: Iroquoian Women.  And see Shanshan Du, ‘Frameworks for Societies in Balance,’ in Göttner-Abendroth ed., Societies of Peace, on four models of gender equality, which she calls ‘maternal centrality,’ ‘gender complementarity,’ ‘gender triviality,’ and ‘gender unity.’   

[5] Matriarchal Societies; The Gantowisas; Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop, and much of the material in the Maternal Gift Economy salon presentations, https://www.maternalgifteconomymovement.org.  Göttner-Abendroth summarizes the key features of matriarchies as follows:

‘… matriarchies can be defined at the social level as non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.

… matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.

… matriarchies are egalitarian societies of consensus.

… on the spiritual level, matriarchies are sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess.’ 

From https://www.goettner-abendroth.de/en/matriarchy/. 

[6] In addition to other references see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Paula Gunn Allen’s essay ‘The Woman I Love is a Planet, the Planet I Love is a Tree’ in the edited volume, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein) – also at http://www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/paula-gunn-allen.pdf.

[7] The pilgrimage taught me this experientially as a great gift of learning from the leaders and my sister pilgrims.  Political egalitarianism is a principle identified by Göttner-Abendroth as a feature of matriarchy, and the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace (and story of the Peacemaker and Clan Mother that shows where it came from) show how balance and complementarity allow everyone to be heard.   As it is concretized in a wampum belt, reading the written (and translated into English) versions and interpretations is worthwhile: I have read those of Oneida Nation https://oneida-nsn.gov/our-ways/our-story/great-law-of-peace/, Ganienkeh Territory Council Fire  http://www.ganienkeh.net/thelaw.html, Joanne Shenandoah’s musical retelling in Peacemaker’s Journey (despite the language barrier, the music and English song titles convey meaning), and Barbara Mann’s interpretation in the Gantowisas. 

[8] While second-wave feminism rejected the public/private distinction, this mainly served the purpose of criticizing the enshrinement of male and capitalist ‘private’ realms as freedom from interference by the state in their exploitative and abusive relationships of domination towards women, children, and workers.  This left a contradiction within feminism about our own bodily privacy (which has to be upheld as to our sexual and reproductive autonomy, our personal boundaries of space and time which men and bosses and abusers of any kind feel free to abuse at will, and our freedom from state repressive control through its many faces that include psychiatry and social service systems as well as jails, prisons and police – while full abolition of state carceral and control systems is debated in feminism, the impact of these systems on women and their patriarchal and capitalist origins and purposes need to be reckoned with).  Second-wave feminism also put forward the more radical possibilities of bringing private and public together from the point of view of women’s agency – restoring the agency allocated to women within the family and household as a sphere for public action (however as counter-examples we have ‘Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press’; grass-roots community organizing orchestrated by women and conducted through women’s outreach to other women in civil rights, housing rights and other movements; feminist consciousness-raising groups; lesbian-feminist organizing, community building and cultural productions including the landdyke movement).  But I don’t recall this aspect of public/private being discussed in connection with the advocacy to eliminate the distinction because of its upholding male ‘privacy’ to abuse.  Matriarchal theory helps (at least me) to put the pieces together.

[9] This is important to me for many reasons including its intersectionality with disability.  Lesbian communities and feminist services for women have discriminated against women whom they view as mentally ill or unstable and wanted to resort to the psychiatric system to remove them or simply exclude them from the beginning.  On the other hand, the peer support community emphasizes connection which is favored over disconnection.  I believe that the dispersed and strong connections created in matriarchal forms of organization can help to resolve the tension between self/community/other selves that is at the heart of this dilemma.  See also below, footnote 16 and accompanying text.

[10] Indigenous women interfacing with feminist movements (who may or may not identify themselves as feminist) often point out that in their societies (which are matriarchal or retain some matriarchal elements) women’s role is understood as responsibility more than power.  Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul and Sally Roesch Wagner, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists, in addition to other references.  

[11] I focus on lesbian sexuality as it is where I am grounded and I choose to center ourselves here.  Lesbian sexuality is entirely regenerative as it is free from reproductive interests.  The Great Goddess of Old Europe, according to Marija Gimbutas, is a goddess of birth, death and regeneration.  Linking lesbian sexuality to the regenerative dimension of the Goddess and to its power as a force of connection among circles of women, whether or not all women in a circle are lesbian, restores us to a place in matriarchy that is more than ‘women are sexually free so can choose women or men as others, what’s the big deal?’ – which to me is unsatisfying as it’s an absence rather than presence. 

[12] See material in footnote 2.  Grieving a lost part of ourselves is also honored.  The Goddess Lilith can be called on to remove what is no longer needed in oneself. 

[13] The inclusion of mothers and daughters together in a sisterhood of women breaks cycles of abuse and trauma and breaks with the patriarchal image of mothering as a subsidiary and kinder form of domination in a family under the overall control of men whether directly in the family or indirectly in the state’s, society’s or religion’s norms enforced against mothers or daughters or both.  Thinking of child welfare services, psychiatry, family law and courts, guardianship and adult protection as sites of repression that can be enforced by mothers against daughters, by fathers and state authorities against mothers and/or daughters, or eventually by adult daughters against mothers. 

[14] From the pilgrimage I have a new or deeply affirmed sense of why it’s important and really wonderful to create sister bonds among women.  The women in my lesbian CR group (by zoom) might wonder why it took me so long, but our two-week-long and ritually intense, and well-led and deeply present experience gave me what I haven’t had in other settings.  Diana and I want to create a women’s circle with a spiritual basis locally as a focus for community, this would require a lot of hard work and prior planning (including discussion with women already doing that work in other places to answer questions and tell us what we aren’t asking); if we can find the time and attention to give it would help with some of our loneliness in the place where we live. 

The question of resisting persecution and oppression has sometimes felt to me as being in contradiction with matriarchal values of holding space, peacemaking, and exercising leadership by attraction (teaching, example-setting) rather than dominance or combat of any kind.  Law uses both ways, and resistance might sometimes involve combat or subterfuge to defend oneself and one’s community.  The images of resistance fighters against Nazi occupation in the Heraklion Historical Museum (mostly male images but women also participated) presented a clear contrast in stance, facial expression and demeanor with images of military officials that help me think about a distinction that may be similar to responsibility vs power; Tolstoy’s War and Peace also addresses this distinction in the character of General Kutuzov who rises to leadership because his instincts coming from love for his people and land are needed to defend against aggression and occupation but when Russia’s army turns to its own aggressive agenda they demote him and he retires to a simple life.  Maybe it is putting oneself on the line rather than others, as Audre Lorde’s poem ‘Power’, which has always intrigued me, starts: ‘The difference between poetry and rhetoric/ is being ready to kill/ yourself/ instead of your children.’  Read the whole poem, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53918/power-56d233adafeb3.  Watching the documentary about rita bo brown, a working class butch lesbian revolutionary, put me in the same frame of mind – https://julieperini.com/The-Gentleman-Bank-Robber-The-Story-of-Butch-Lesbian-Freedom-Fighter.   

[15] I experience this way of working in my human rights law role.  I have at times gone for walks in the woods or made space and time to touch trees and water to ground with the earth and ask questions about my responsibilities – especially in an early phase of the work, ‘Am I doing the right thing in remaking the world in this way?’  Making sure that I was comfortable with how my work would affect people who want and know they need support as well as those who simply hate psychiatry and want to be free of it.  I have had the sense of working with the strands of history, weaving them dynamically in strong, thick cords held between my hands – making history by acting at a level where small actions have large results because we had a global platform and were engaged in a high level ‘constitutional’-type lawmaking process.  It is only now that I articulate what I did as in the text here (‘change the energies and dynamics’), at the time I had the sense of acting based on core premises of advocacy and principles of engagement I articulated and adhered to, not knowing how far I could get but aiming to avoid positive harm and feeling that articulation of our rights within the framework of international law in a global platform was itself an advance and could not be put back in the bottle once done.

[16] This relates back to footnote 9 above.  I recently wrote the book Reimagining Crisis Support: Matrix, Roadmap and Policy, which began my intersectional steps beyond the discourse of human rights law into a living and contemplative approach to what we need personally and socially in accepting, confronting, withstanding, making our way through a personal life crisis however it manifests.  My aim there was to show how elements of the disability human rights framework that require support to be made available for decision-making and for living in the community are suitable for a neutral, non-judgmental and non-medical approach to support in personal crisis and can ground policy to eliminate all the avenues, legal and social, that currently lead to institutionalization and compulsory ‘treatment’ in psychiatry.  See https://www.reimaginingcrisissupport.org.  I also gave a presentation to a radical lesbian feminist group on the broader topic ‘On Not Throwing Anyone Away’ that may be of interest: https://tastethespring.wordpress.com/2021/06/07/2259/.