Matriarchy and the Volk (original) (raw)

The Feminist Appropriation of Matriarchal Myth in the 19th and 20th Centuries

History Compass, 2005

Beginning in 1861 with the publication of Das Mutterrecht (Motherright) by the Swiss legal scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, there has been a continuous interest in the theory that prehistoric societies were matriarchal or at least woman-centered, only to be disrupted by the assumption of male power, usually around 3000 BCE. This idea has been enormously appealing to feminists, particularly in late-twentieth-century America. In some feminist circles, what I have called the myth of matriarchal prehistory has reigned as political dogma; in others it has provided food for thought; while in yet others it has served as the basis of a new religion. This article describes the ways in which first and second wave feminists respectively have adapted matriarchal myth to their political needs and disseminated it to a wider audience.

4. Challenging Patriarchy: Marriage and the Reform of Marriage Law in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic

Marriage Discourses, 2021

If it were not for husband and wife," the German social historian and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897) wrotein1855, "one could think people on earth [are] destined for freedom and equality. However,b ecause God created women and men, he made inequality and dependence basic elements of all human development."¹ Gender accordingt oR iehl not onlyconstituted ideas of inequality and domination but contributed significantlytothe construction of humanity, to the construction of the modern state. Gender was, he argues, not onlyone of the most powerful producers of inequality,b ut the most powerful. This meant that the existenceo ft he traditionalf amilyw as defendedj ust as much as the traditional position of women, indeed that the subordination of women in marriage was regarded as ap aradigm of human inequality and subordination pare xcellence. As ac onsequence, the exclusion of married women from the state necessarilyresulted from their subordination in the family.The patriarchallyorganized familyt hus was not onlyamirror imageb ut alsoabasic element of the state. No wonder that women within the context of the Enlightenment started to question whya ll humans, includingw omen, were not equal and whyn ot in the family. "Wife, marriagea nd love exhibit the brand of slavery," expressed the feminist and philosopher Louise Dittmar (1807-1884) in 1849. "The man is master over his wife, the absolutem onarch with unlimited power to give orders in his realm, and not even lip-service is paid to constitutional guarantees that mayb ea pplied to wives,"² argued HedwigD ohm(1831-1919) almost forty

DO THE IDEAS OF THE ‘MYTHS OF MATRIARCHY’ PREVAIL IN THE MODERN WORLD?

Hossain, D. M. (2013), Do the Ideas of the ‘Myths of Matriarchy’ Prevail in the Modern World?, Journal of Arts, Science and Commerce, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 115-120. (India)

Myths about women exist in the society. In many cases, these myths depict women as mysterious, deceptive and instigators of sins. This article concentrates on whether these ideas about women portrayed in the prehistoric myths still exist in the modern world. In order to fulfill this objective, the article takes Joan Bamberger's (1974) discussions on the myths of matriarchy in different tribes of South American Indians. The common characteristics of these myths were identified and the modern situations were analysed on the basis of those characteristics. The article concludes that though these myths represent the prehistoric world, some of these ideas are still prevailing in the world.

Father is Always Uncertain: J. J. Bachofen and the Epistemology of Patriarchy

Monatshefte 116, no. 1, 2024

J.J. Bachofen characterizes his 1861 Das Mutterrecht as a feat of historiography. He has purged his analysis of anything that is not an “objective” depiction of the past: in other words, of anything fictional. But according to Bachofen’s own account, fiction is also what instigates history, what divides the historical from the prehistorical. Only with the advent of “father right,” and its world of invented relations, does the kind of analysis that Bachofen produces become conceivable. My article probes this tension, arguing that we should read Das Mutterrecht as a text concerned not only with the distribution of power between the sexes, or the trajectory of human culture, but also with the impossibility of absolute knowledge under patriarchy. Bachofen depicts the epistemology of patriarchy as precarious and ungrounded. In this way, I argue, he complicates the current understanding of nineteenth-century history as a discipline of inviolable masculine authority.

Knocking Down Straw Dolls: A Critique of Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future By Max Dashu (2000

This article surveys literature on history, archaeology, and ethnography, from Lafitau, Morgan, Marx and Engels to Matilda Joslyn Gage and Barbara Mann, Bachofen to Jacquetta Hawkes. It also proposes that patriarchy is a historical development, questions functionalist interpretations of myths (or oral histories) of male takeovers. It looks at the furor over the work of Marija Gimbutas, Eller's charges of "essentialism" and "goddess monotheism," and theories about whether patriarchal social organization originated among foragers or agriculturalists. All the heated rhetoric about "matriarchy" avoids the real issue, which is the existence of cultures that did not enforce a patriarchal double standard or make females legal minors ruled by fathers, brothers, and husbands. Matricultures still exist today in some parts of the world, albeit under threat as all Indigenous cultures are. Whatever terminology we choose to use for them is not the point; it is that they existed and have existed in the past.