The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Why an invented past won't give women a future" "Over the last few months, this untaught history had become a lump in my throat, a forgotten piece of my female heart that had begun to beat again. Now here in the stone circle I felt it even more, like a sad, sad sweetness, like a sorrow and a hope melded into one."—Sue Monk Kidd The real political question . . . as old as political philosophy . . . [is] when we should endorse the ennobling lie. . . . We . . . need to show not that . . . [these lies] are falsehoods but [that] they are useless falsehoods at best or—at worst—dangerous ones."—In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992) by Kwame Anthony Appiah |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future is a 2000 book by Cynthia Eller that seeks to deconstruct the theory of a prehistoric matriarchy. This hypothesis, she says, developed in 19th century scholarship and was taken up by 1970s second-wave feminism following Marija Gimbutas. Eller, a professor of religious studies at Claremont Graduate University, argues in the book that this theory is mistaken and its continued defence is harmful to the feminist agenda.
Contents |
Thesis
Eller sets out to refute what she describes as feminist matriarchalism as an "ennobling lie".
She argues that the feminist archaeology of Marija Gimbutas had a large part in constructing a late twentieth-century feminist myth of matriarchal prehistory. She questions whether Gimbutas's archaeological findings adequately support the claim that these societies were matriarchal or matrifocal. She says that we know of no cultures in which paternity is ignored and that the sacred status of goddesses does not automatically increase female social status. Eller concludes that inventing prehistoric ages in which women and men lived in harmony and equality "is a burden that feminists need not, and should not bear." In her view, the "matriarchal myth" tarnishes the feminist movement by leaving it open to accusations of "vacuousness and irrelevance that we cannot afford to court."
Criticism
Eller's book has been criticised by feminist historian Max Dashu for "mischaracterising" the theories of Gimbutas and other key anthropologists, and for labeling them as "matriarchalist" despite most of these scholars rejecting ideas of matriarchy (female rulership) in favour of matrifocal or matrilineal societies. Dashu wrote that Eller "makes no distinction between scholarly studies in a wide range of fields and expressions of the burgeoning Goddess movement, including novels, guided tours, market-driven enterprises. All are conflated all into one monolithic 'myth' devoid of any historical foundation."
Editions
- The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future, Beacon Press (2000), Template:ISBN.
See also
- Matriarchal religion
- Heide Göttner-Abendroth
- The Inevitability of Patriarchy
- Third-wave feminism
- When God Was a Woman
- Steven Goldberg
