Some examples of matriarchies in the Americas are:
a. The Iroquois (Matrifocal and Matrilocal as well) b. The Hopi c. The Wayuu in La Guajira, Venezuela.
While the closest things to matriarchies in the old world are perhaps the Scythians, Mosuo and the Pre-Indo-Europeans, yet none of these are true matriarchies, rather, they perform in an egalitarian manner. So why is it that the Old World never fully developed matriarchal societies?
This is an anthropology question, rather than one for historians:
r/AskAnthropology
. . . would be where you'd find people with knowledge of human society that is _not_ recorded in historical records, and who focus on human social behavior. This is generally not found within the domain of academic historians, and even among anthropologists the study of matrifocality has had a "chequered career".
For what it's worth, I'd be suspicious of your premise as to the relative frequency of matrifocality as a social structure. Whenever you speak of relative frequency, you have to have some confidence that you've got a relatively complete picture of the societies; hard to think that we have that. You'd also want to be comparing societies at comparable levels of technological development-- hunter/gatherers to hunter/gatherers, pastoralists to pastoralists.
We do have suggestions that matriarchy was more common in European prehistory, and matronymic naming conventions and matrilineal descent shows up too.
See:
Brøgger, Jan, and David D. Gilmore. “The Matrifocal Family in Iberia: Spain and Portugal Compared.” Ethnology, vol. 36, no. 1, 1997, pp. 13–30.
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!