Has there ever been any human society in which women held practical, daily, diverse and undisputed power over men?

by DigitalNomads

This is a genuine question that has been bugging me for years. Please help me settle it for good.

Alright, we have two things to consider here: first, the vast geographical diversity of human socio-political experience from Asia to Africa, Europe and the Americas; and second, the thousands of years of fully or partly-recorded civilisational history.

Within these two dimensions we have literally thousands of human societies, from every imaginable religion, politics, economy, sociality, and physicality (colour, hight, genes… etc.),

So… this could be seen as a comprehensive, lengthy and diverse scientific experiment to determine if the female gender can ever reverse gender rules and dominate over men.

My question is: has this ever happened in a practical, daily, and structural way?

Thank You

(x-posted from your thread in /r/AskAnthropology)

This is a very old and well-worn topic in anthropology. I believe what you're talking about can be summed up in the word "matriarchy" (rule by women), and it's helpful to start by unpicking where the concept comes from. As we all know, most recent and historic societies are patriarchies. They are characterised by the systematic and pervasive male privilege in almost all aspects of life, from the political and economy sphere down to individual households. And as long as patriarchy has existed, people have speculated about its inverse, a society where women held all those positions of social dominance. A matriarchy.

Anthropologists in the 19th century, in particular Lewis Henry Morgan, took this hypothetical inversion further, and theorized that matriarchy was the original condition of primitive human societies. Ur-matriarchies were supposed to be peaceful, egalitarian and communal. It was only with the introduction of agriculture and private property than men gained the upper hand, and instituted systems of hierarchical dominance.^* This theory in turn heavily influenced Engels, and so passed into the Marxist canon.

Why the theoretical tangent? Well, when assessing the evidence for matriarchy it's important to consider how theoretically charged the concept is and how the very idea of "female dominance" seems to spark the popular imagination (at least in patriarchal societies!) If you just google it, matriarchies pop up left, right and centre: the Iroquois, the Mosuo, Neolithic Europe, you name it. But if you dig a bit deeper you will find that none of these supposed examples really embody female dominance. They are societies were identity and property is passed down through the female line (matrilineal), or societies centred on the female ancestral household (matrifocal), or simply societies where men hold no power over women. These are all common forms of social organization, but in many cases men in those societies still hold positions of privilege, particularly when it comes to politics, and, crucially, you never find the women holding those same privileged positions instead. What happens is that because matriarchy is such an attractive concept, people tend to seize on any deviation from what is considered to be the patriarchal norm and as an example of "primitive matriarchy". But on balance there is a consensus amongst anthropologists that there are no known instances of a matriarchy.

Contemporary anthropologists of gender would ask why we are looking for one in the first place, though. The concept of a matriarchy is a purely hypothetical one, based on an inversion of widespread patriarchal social forms. But why should we expect the "opposite" of patriarchy to be a straightforward inversion? Certainly that is not what the empirical data suggests an absence of male privilege looks like, or even what a degree of female privilege looks like. It might be useful to think of matriarchy, or the opposite of patriarchy, to be gender egalitarianism, which is a much more widespread phenomenon.

^* On a complete tangent, my favourite exposition of this theory is the Dark Eden novels by Chris Beckett, which imagine it unfolding on an individual level.