Matriarchy as a

Sociocultural Form: An Old

Debate in a New Light
PAPER PRESENTED AT THE 16th CONGRESS OF THE
INDO-PACIFIC PREHISTORY ASSOCIATION, MELAKA,
MALAYSIA, 1-7 JULY, 1998.

MATRIARCHY AS A SOCIOCULTURAL FORM*

An Old Debate in a New Light

by

PEGGY REEVES SANDAY

In the following I argue for a reconfiguration of the term

matriarchy not as a construct based on the gendered
division of political power, but one based on gendered
divisions in the sociocultural and cosmological orders.
Aware of the disdain that the term matriarchy evokes in the
minds of many anthropologists, I suggest that matriarchy
has never been theorized in and of itself. From the start its
meaning was fashioned by analogy with “patriarchy” or
“father right.” Because patriarchy developed as a code
word for male tribal leadership, matriarchy was restricted to
female-oriented social rule. In the nineteenth century, the
term was mired in the conceptual swamp of evolutionary
theorizing about a primordial matriarchy. In the 20th century
the term suffered from the fortunes of sexual politics in
which matriarchy came to be associated with exclusive
female rule in response to the definition of patriarchy in
similarly exclusive terms. In reconfiguring the term
matriarchy I exclude any consideration of universal stages
of cultural evolution. I also exclude the concept of female
rule, on the grounds that a more appropriate term exists,
found in the ancient Greek sources, namely gynecocracy
after the Greek gyne, woman, + kratos, rule.

The key to my reconfiguration is in the meaning of the -

archy stem [from the Greek arche] found in Liddellʼs Greek-
English Lexicon (l961Y252). Under the first of two broad
categories of meaning presented, arche is defined as:
“beginning, origin; lay a foundation; source of action; from
the beginning, from the first, from of old; the original
argument; first principle, element; practical principle of
conduct; principles of knowledge.” (1) Combining these
concepts with the matri- prefix (after Latin mater, mother
cf. OED) suggests a different approach to the definition of
matriarchy as compared with the one traditionally followed
using the second category of meaning, which alludes to
“sovereignty” or “empire.”

Based on the first meaning of arche together with the

theoretical and ethnographic grounds discussed below, I
suggest that the term matriarchy is relevant in societies
where the cosmological and the social are linked by a
primordial founding ancestress, mother goddess, or
archetypal queen. To qualify as “matriarchal” such mythical
or real figures must embody and articulate first principles
which are socially channeled in principles of practical
conduct. Thus, in these cases the archetypal qualities of
feminine symbols do not exist solely in the symbolic realm
but are manifested in social practices that influence the
lives of both sexes, not just women. These practices involve
women (usually in their roles as mothers) in activities that
authenticate and regenerate or, to use a term which is
closer to the ethnographic details, that nurture the social
order. By this definition, the ethnographic context of
matriarchy does not reflect female power over subjects or
female power to subjugate, but female power (in their roles
as mothers and senior women) to conjugate-to knit and
regenerate social ties in the here-and-now and in the
hereafter. Because this approach stresses the connection
between the archetypal (or cosmological) and the social,
rather than between power and politics it can not be
interpreted as the female equivalent of patriarchy.

My approach is inspired by long time fieldwork in a

Minangkabau village, a matrilineal people located in West
Sumatra, Indonesia. I was drawn to West Sumatra for the
first time in l981 by the female-centered nature of the
Minangkabau social system described by Tanner (l974; see
Tanner and Thomas 1985 for a later description.) Although
Tanner does not label the Minangkabau a matriarchy, I
learned much later (in the mid-nineties) that the
Minangkabau play a prominent role in the history of
thinking about matriarchy. The first article on the subject of
matriarchy written by an anthropologist (Tylor l896) relies
on ethnographic observations from West Sumatra
published by a Dutch colonial official in l871.

Tylorʼs description of the Minangkabau “matriarchal family

system” conforms with information I collected on l9th
century social organization in West Sumatra. Today,
Minangkabau intellectuals use the term “matriarchaat,” the
Dutch term for matriarchy, to describe their social system.
The term also crops up in philosophical treatises on
Minangkabau natural law penned by a famous
Minangkabau philosopher (cf Nasroen l957.)(2) When the
Minangkabau use the term matriarchaat they refer to the
economic advantage women enjoy due to matrilineal
descent and matrilocal residence, not female political
domination. However, fieldwork on the meaning of
matriarchy in village life yielded a far more complex picture
(see Sanday 2002.) With respect to the relationship
between the sexes most people separate male and female
spheres of influence suggesting that males and females
complement one another–like the skin and nail of the
fingertip-as one individual liked to tell me.

The theoretical arm of my project is motivated by the

absence of appropriate “experience distant” terms
adequate for characterizing the power of Minangkabau
women. None of the current terms for female-oriented
social systems (matri-centered, matri-focal, or any of the
other versions of matri-) do justice to my observations in
West Sumatra. Such terms subsume womenʼs activities in a
male-dominated sociopolitical sphere. As the reading of
ancient Greek plays (Sophoclesʼ Antigone is one notable
example) tell us and as Annette Weiner (l976) establishes
in her pathbreaking Trobriand ethnography, the
sociopolitical never stands alone. Seen in the context of
Weinerʼs analysis of Trobriand women, Antigone is not an
idle woman obsessed with a brotherʼs death, but a voice
reflecting the power of tradition. By giving as much weight
to the cosmic as to the social order, Weiner shows that
Trobriand women have power which is publicly recognized
on both the sociopolitical and cosmic planes. Cast in these
terms, Antigoneʼs life and death struggle against her uncle
Kreon is a struggle between laws dictated by an
overarching cultural order which Antigone upholds and
laws at odds with that order formulated by a man obsessed
with political power. Antigone is willing to risk death at the
hands of her power-hungry uncle rather than abandon her
cosmologically authenticated role to bury the dead. If she
follows her uncleʼs dictates Antigone knows that she, her
brother and her family lose much more than life itself, they
lose their place in eternity.

This is not to suggest that either Sophoclesʼ ancient

Thebeans or Weinerʼs Trobrianders should be characterized
as matriarchies. We donʼt know enough about the ancient
Thebeans to venture even a guess. Weiner ‘s (l976)
argument with respect to the Trobrianders demonstrates
the role women play in the overarching cultural order (the -
archy portion of my argument), but doesnʼt speak to the
matri- portion because although she has much to say about
the brother/sister tie as central in the Trobriand social and
cosmological orders she offers little information on the
mother/daughter tie.

I call the Minangkabau social system a matriarchy for

several reasons, which both subsume and go beyond local
meanings regarding the Minangkabau matriarchaat. These
reasons can be summarized as followed: There is an
archetypal maternal symbol, a dominant symbol in
anthropological terms, who condenses in her being
primordial principles of conduct. According to these
principles, the mother/child bond is sacred, part of natural
law. Being grounded in natural law, customs associated
with matrilineal descent are treated as an inalienable part of
the foundation of Minangkabau identity. The overarching
defining principles of conduct in family, clan, and village life
pivot around men and women connected through females
to a common ancestress. This is not to say that all
matrilineal societies should be labelled matriarchal. Nor
does this view imply female dominance or male
subordination. Although Minangkabau men figure
prominently as leaders in some realms of social/public life,
their titles are inherited through females and their political
activities are grounded not just in the matrilineal principle
but in womenʼs ceremonies as well. Women are leaders in
the public realm by virtue of the life cycle ceremonies
around which tradition pivots and on which face-to-face
political action depends. Womenʼs life-cycle ceremonies oil
the traditional political machinery by bringing members of
the different clans together. Women nurture and uphold
tradition (called adat ) in todayʼs world by giving male and
female leaders and opinion makers a stage on which to
function and an audience for whom to perform. Because
women follow the old ways in their ceremonies, men have a
raison d’etre for following these ways also. Together, men
and women keep the traditional social order going despite
the tremendous pulls of the modern world and the nation-
state in other directions.

MATRIARCHY IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL USAGE

Although most anthropologists associate the term

matriarchy with the work of J. J. Bachofen (l861) and L. H.
Morgan (l851; 1877), E. B. Tylor (l896) was the first to apply
this term in an article entitled “The Matriarchal Family
System.” Tylorʼs (l896: 82) concern in this article was “with
the history and meaning of the great ancient maternal
system,” which he says McLennan (l865) “first brought
into prominent notice” in his “Primitive
Marriage.”According to Tylor, McLennan inspired a major
scholarly controversy because he proposed a theory which
was intended to upset “the received patriarchal view” set
forth in Maineʼs (l861) earlier Ancient Law. Tylor sided with
McLennan saying that McLennan “brought forward a
collection of evidence as to ancient and modern peoples
accustomed to trace their descent not on the fatherʼs but
the motherʼs side” (1896Y81). In Tylorʼs view this finding
upset Maineʼs postulation of a primordial patriarchal
system, which at the time had the status of common
knowledge in Western Europe.

McLennanʼs arguments were not new as Tylor recognizes

(ibid.) referring to Bachofenʼs conclusions. McLennan
himself acknowledged his debt to L. H. Morgan citing a
letter published by Morgan in l860 and circulated by the
United States Government in which Morgan wrote:

Among the Iroquois….[t]he children are of the tribe of the

mother, in a majority of the nations; but the rule, if anciently
universal, is not so at the present day. Where descent in the
female line prevailed, it was followed by several important
results, of which the most remarkable was the perpetual
disinheritance of the male line. Since all titles as well as
property descended in the female line, and were hereditary,
in strictness, in the tribe itself, a son could never succeed to
his fatherʼs title of Sachem, nor inherit even his medal or his
tomahawk (quoted in McLennan 1970 [1865]:51).

Tylorʼs contribution to the controversy was to introduce the

term “matriarchal,” which he saw as the female parallel to
Maineʼs usage of the term “patriarchal.” For example, Tylor
says (p. 84):

All, then that can be properly meant by saying that a

patriarchal tribe follows male and a matriarchal female
kinship, is that their social arrangements, such as
membership of the family and clan, succession, and
inheritance, are framed on the one line rather than the
other.

Tylor cautions (p.90) the reader that matriarchy does not

mean that “women govern the family,” but that actual
power is rather in the hands of their brothers and uncles on
the motherʼs side. Being true to his parallel use of the two
terms, and wanting to avoid the conflation of matriarchal
with female rule, Tylor suggests that “[o]n the whole, the
terms ‘maternalʼ and ‘paternalʼ seem preferable” (ibid.).

Although Bachofen is the most frequently cited figure in the

matriarchy debate, the term does not appear in his work.
Bachofenʼs (l967 [l861]) analysis builds on two analytically
distinct concepts:

n. mother right (maternal law) from the

German–mutterrecht–which forms the main part of the
title of Bachofenʼs famous book, Das Mutterrecht, and
applies to customs giving women qua mothers and
their daughters certain rights (including descent in the
female line), which anthropologists came to call
matrifiliation;

2.gynecocracy (rule by women) from the

German–gynaikokratie— which stems from the Greek
gyne, woman, + kratos, rule, and which appears in the
subtitle of the German edition of Das Mutterrecht (1861)
but was translated as “matriarchy” in the English edition
(Bachofen l967.)

One can only speculate as to why Bachofenʼs English

translator substituted the word matriarchy where Bachofen
had written gynecocracy. The explanation may lie in the
fact that when the translation was published in l967
popular usage made matriarchy a synonym of gynecocracy.
It is also the case that Bachofen himself frequently (but not
always) conflated customs subsumed under the term
“mother right” with gynecocracy as if to say that no society
could possibly develop female-oriented customs if not
ruled by women.(3) Georgoudi (l992Y450-451) notes that
Bachofen often used the terms “maternal law” and
“gynecocracy”

side by side, without establishing any firm distinction

between them. It is clear, however, that in his mind these
two compound terms referred to a series of social and
juridical facts exhibiting two inextricable characteristics:
the superiority of women over men in the family as well as
in society; and the exclusive recognition of maternal
kinship, or, in the jargon of anthropology, matrilinear
filiation, which meant that only daughters could legally
inherit property.

Georgoudi (p. 451) points out that the term matriarchy was
forged in the late nineteenth century by analogy with
patriarchy. She suggests that the term caught on (“among
Bachofenʼs admirers as well as his foes”) because it had the
advantage of suggesting both mother-right and
gynecocracy. If this is the case then the term matriarchy as
presently used obscures some of Bachofenʼs original ideas.
The early twentieth century saw the demise of the term
matriarchy, a victim both of the tendency to confuse it with
exclusive female rule and the exhaustion of the
evolutionary paradigm. In l924, Rivers (p. 85) described the
terminological box into which the term matriarchy had been
stowed:

I now come to a subject which, though not really difficult,

has yet been the occasion of an extraordinary amount of
misunderstanding, the subject of mother-right and father-
right. These institutions are often known as the
matriarchate and patriarchate respectively. But these
inappropriate terms are rapidly going out of use, owing to
the general recognition of the fact that there is no question
of rule by women in the great majority of states to which the
name matriarchate has been applied….

Summarizing matriarchyʼs fate vis-a-vis the evolutionary

paradigm, in this article Rivers (l924Y96) noted that the
doctrine of the universal priority of mother-right had been
abandoned a decade before in Britan and even earlier in the
U.S. While he agreed with this result, Rivers cautioned the
reader that it would be wrong to revert to Maineʼs doctrine
of the priority of father-right, which he noted was still
prevalent “in writings on the history of political institutions.”
According to Rivers, Maineʼs theory was “even more
untenable” than pronouncements concerning the priority of
mother-right (p. 98.)

Rivers, a British anthropologist, argued for more

particularistic ethnographic practice in which institutions
were treated not as the result of a simple process of
evolution but the consequence of the blending and
interaction of cultures with complex structures (l924Y97). In
America, this paradigm had already been founded by Boas,
who with his students turned away from grand theorizing
and “conjectural history” to grand descriptions such as
found in the work of Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture)
and Margaret Mead (Sex and Temperament) or to highly
specific, locally based historical reconstructions. The
particularistic approach however was not universally
adopted by anthropology with respect to the matriarchy
debate.

The topic of matriarchy was revisited briefly by Schneider in

Matrilineal Kinship, the book he edited with Kathleen
Gough published one-hundred years after the publication
of Bachofenʼs Das Mutterrecht. In the Preface, Schneider
echoes the words of Rivers.

Thus Bachofenʼs contention that matriliny (descent through

women) and matriarchy (rule by women) were but two
aspects of the same institution was accepted only briefly.
For as evidence was sought in terms of which his
contention could be evaluated it became clear that the
generalized authority of women over men, imagined by
Bachofen, was never observed in known matrilineal
societies, but only recorded in legends and myths. Thus the
whole notion of matriarchy fell rapidly into disuse in
anthropological work (l961:viii).
In his theoretical Introduction, Schneider reverted to the
generalizing mode Rivers warned against. In a
quintessential collapse of the social order to the
sociopolitical authority of men, Schneider claims that there
are three conditions which “are constant features of
unilineal descent groups” regardless of whether they be
based on male (patrilineal) or female (matrilineal) descent
principles (p.5).

The role of women as women [is] defined as that of

responsibility for the care of children….the role of men as
men is defined as that of having authority over women and
children (except perhaps for specially qualifying conditions
applicable to a very few women in society). Positions of
highest authority within the matrilineal descent group will,
therefore, ordinarily be vested in statuses occupied by men
(p. 6).

Thus, even though Schneider admits that the brother-sister

pair is stronger in matrilineal descent groups and women
play more of a role in social life than they do in patrilineal
descent groups he sees women as subordinated to men by
virtue of the givens of their biological gender. Casting this
conclusion in broader historical terms, one is reminded
once again of Maineʼs prior assumption of a universal
“patriarchal” order.

In the early seventies the notion of primordial matriarchies

at the dawn of human history was revisited by feminist
activist theorists. Their rhetoric recreated matriarchy as the
female equivalent of patriarchy. If patriarchy, which
feminists were working against, was male rule, then
matriarchy was female rule and had to be reinstated. As
Maineʼs notion of a universal primordial patriarchal law had
been the argument a century earlier, feministsʼ notion of
matriarchal law became the watchword of the day. Once
again anthropologists were drawn into the argument and
once again they introduced ethnographic evidence to
support their generalizations, this time in opposition to the
claims of matriarchy. Whereas anthropologists like Morgan
and Tylor had argued for the priority of universal matriarchy,
feminist anthropologists now argued for universal male
dominance in response to such claims. In their widely
influential edited volume, Rosaldo and Lamphere (l974Y2)
stated that the evolutionary theories of Bachofen and
Morgan positing “an earlier stage of human development”
in which ” the social world was organized by a principle
called matriarchy, in which women had power over men”
could be dismissed on both archeological and
ethnographic grounds. Going one step further, they made
their famous (but later retracted) statement: “It seems fair
to say then, that all contemporary societies are to some
extent male-dominated, and although the degree and
expression of female subordination vary greatly, sexual
assymmetry is presently a universal fact of human and
social life” (Rosaldo and Lamphere l974Y3; but see also
Rosaldo 1980 and Lamphere l995).

In her contribution to the Rosaldo and Lamphere volume,

Bamberger (l974Y263) revisits the matriarchy argument
more directly to claim that “the existence and constitution
of female-dominated societies can only be surmised”
because neither archeologists nor social anthropologists
have “uncovered a single undisputed case of matriarchy”
(p. 266). While Bamberger (pp. 266-267) admits to casting
doubt “on the historical evidence for the Rule of Women,”
she says her project is not to challenge “whether women
did or did not hold positions of political importance at some
point in prehistory, or even whether they took up weapons
and fought in battle as the Amazons allegedly did,” but to
investigate the meaning of what she refers to as “the myth
of matriarchy” found in ancient and modern societies. She
defines this myth as stories “claiming women did these
things, which they no longer do.” Bamberger sees these
stories as posing “as interesting a problem as any
generated in the nineteenth century about the credibility or
viability of matriarchy as a social system.” Why do we find
in so many societies stories about the time when females
ruled? she asks. Her answer lay in the “insistent message
of the myth,” which justifies

male dominance through the evocation of a vision of a

catastrophic alternative-a society dominated by women.
The myth, in its reiteration that women did not know how to
handle power when in possession of it, reaffirms
dogmatically the inferiority of their present position (p.279.)

Thus, in Bambergerʼs view, the myth of matriarchy lobbies

for male dominance.
There are many stories of female dominance around the
world that donʼt necessarily follow the pattern that
Bamberger suggests. In some cases these stories reflect
real female power; in others the stories are not about chaos
and disorder caused by women but tell of chaos and
disorder befalling males who dislodge women from their
natal home. The variety of themes that exist is the subject
of a very interesting collection of commentaries on myths of
matriarchy by anthropologists working in one very small
part of the world: the Southwestern Pacific (cf Gewertz
l988.) One crucial difference between Bambergerʼs
account and those included in this volume is variation in the
ethnographic context of the stories.

In his contribution Michael Allen describes his field work in

a society very much like those Bamberger associates with
myths of matriarchy, but in which no myths of matriarchy
exist. Contrary to Bamberger he suggests that these myths
develop where females have significant power.
Summarizing his major theme, he says (l988Y80):

…such myths do not simply validate or give legitimacy to

extreme forms of male hegemony, but rather…they provide
a rationale for those relatively weakly articulated patriarchal
social systems in which the principal male power symbols
not only incorporate a less than fully articulate female
component, but in which the men precariously attempt to
assert dominance over women who are in fact the
possessors of substantial power.
The key, he says, is not in so much in the existence of
female power but in menʼs “political dependence on
appropriating the valued products of female labor.” The
myths, he concludes, “indicate an exploitative element in
gender relations” (l988Y91-92).

Also based on fieldwork, in the same volume Martha

Macintyre reports myths of the disorganization and chaos
created by husbands and fathers who try to disrupt the
mother/daughter tie in a “matrilineally produced universe.”
For example, the main message in one of the stories she
collected about an unhappy wife cut off from her mother is
that “bereft of the power that is transmitted matrilineally-
supernatural fecundity” this woman is deprived of
reproductive powers which makes her barren and affects
the fertility of the gardens (l988Y189.) In this case social
disorder is created by men who go against tradition.

Working in Eastern Indonesia, an area where a pervasive

system of complementary dualism projects male/female
pairs onto the symbolic universe, in the same volume Janet
Hoskins (l988Y34) suggests the term “diarchy” as a
substitute for “matriarchy,” which she defines narrowly as
female rule. She proposes this term because it reveals a
more complementary relation between the sexes, one “of
shared powers and oscillations in control, structured by a
doctrine of interdependence and mutuality” (ibid.) While I
agree with her analysis of the shared nature of power and
her evidence of the archetypal male/female couple, I
cannot accept diarchy as an appropriate term for the
Minangkabau case. I retain the root matri- rather than turn
to the closely related root di- to distinguish between the
focus on the ancestral heroine (or the mother) and the
symbolic representation of male/female dualities described
by Hoskins.

The cases described by Allen, Macintyre, and Hoskins

(along with other articles in the Gewertz volume) raise a
point almost always neglected in traditional discussions of
matriarchy and patriarchy. Whether a society be
“matrilineally produced,” “patriarchally” organized, or
marked by complementary dualism the opposite sex always
plays a crucial role. No sociopolitical order is single sexed.
Even where males dominate, women are always heard from.
Whatever the nature of the dynamic duo of male and
female, whether the terms of the sex pair be posed in
dialectical tension, benign opposition, or harmonious
synthesis each member of the pair gives legitimacy to the
other. Considerations of matriarchy, patriarchy, or diarchy
should not be about which sex rules but how gender is
represented in archetypal scenarios and reflected in social
practices. Certain questions need to be asked: which sex
bears the symbolic and social burden for conjugating the
social universe? Which sex is imbued (naturally or socially)
with the reproductive powers that recharge the sources of
supernatural fecundity? What is the gender of the dominant
symbols tying the archetypal to the social? How do males
and females complement one another in the political arena
and how is this arena tied to the cosmological order? As an
examination of Antigone and the Trobriands suggests, in a
strongly tradition-based society ultimate authority does not
rest in political roles but in a cosmological order. If this
cosmological order pivots around female oriented symbols
and if this order is upheld by ritual acts coordinated by
women whose social salience is also grounded in this order
we can speak of matriarchy.
FOOTNOTES

* The argument of this paper is greatly expanded in my

ethnography of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Women
at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Sanday 2002.)

n. The second set of meanings listed are more commonly

found in contemporary usage: “first place of power,
sovereignty; empire, realm; magistracy, office.”
s. For usage by a Dutch scholar see Westenenk, L.C., De
Minangkabause Nagari, page 161, Batavia l915. For
usage by a Minangkabau scholar see Prof. Mr. M.
Nasroen, Dasar Falsafah Adat Minangkabau, Bulan
Bintang:Djakarta, 1957, page 34. Throughout my stay
in West Sumatra spanning the l980ʼs and l990ʼs I
encountered this term in the villages, usually employed
by an adat expert.
t. Bachofen may have been inspired by ancient Greek
sources which sometimes talked of “woman-rule”
when describing female-oriented customs (see Strabo
Vol 2Y115 trans Jones l923.)

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