Matriarchy

Matriarchy is a proposed historical period of women’s rule that The Second Sex examines and ultimately rejects as a golden-age myth. The distinction is decisive: women may have enjoyed sacred prestige, or motherhood may have become central to a community’s future, without women becoming men’s political equals or autonomous subjects. The book instead traces how settled agriculture, land, descent, and property changed the terms of social life while preserving male authority.

Emergence of Maternal Prestige

The account connects women’s exceptional prestige to the transition from nomadic life to settled agriculture. Before institutions and law, communities had no property or inheritance system to ratify sexual inequality; totems were asexual, and the text describes male superiority in that setting as immediate rather than institutionally established. With farming and settlement, land became something people could appropriate and transmit. Posterity acquired new importance, and motherhood became a sacred function because the community imagined its continuity through its descendants.

This heightened status did not necessarily make a wife the possession of all men or reduce marriage to promiscuity. In the communal arrangements described, men and women had religious, social, and economic existence as members of a group, while marriage remained a secular incident rather than a mystical bond. A wife continued to belong to her clan. The clan’s shared territory and identity, extending across generations, made descendants and the land they would inherit central to collective life.

The Golden-Age Hypothesis and Its Limits

Accounts preserved in later patriarchal myths and traditions suggest earlier periods when women held more visible or prestigious roles. Women appear surrounded by taboos as sacred beings, associated with magical power, included in prayers, and sometimes serving as priestesses or governing a tribe. Memories of maternal power also persist in figures such as Niobe and Medea, while Andromache and Hecuba have a prominence in Homeric poetry that women hidden in the later Greek gynaeceum no longer possessed. Such evidence lends support to the hypothesis of an ancient reign of women, associated with the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen and adopted by Friedrich Engels as the great historical defeat of the female sex.

The book nevertheless argues that this apparent golden age was not female sovereignty. To be revered as Earth, Mother, or Goddess was not to stand as man’s equal: woman remained the Other, outside the sphere of reciprocal human authority. Political and social power, the account insists, remained in male hands. The sacred prestige attached to women therefore cannot by itself establish that women ruled society.

Women as Intermediaries in Male Relations

The argument turns on a distinction between two kinds of otherness. Men may recognize other men as subjects with whom they form reciprocal relations; women, by contrast, are treated as the absolute Other and as goods possessed by men. Marriage may connect groups, but the book argues that the reciprocal relation is established between men by means of women, who serve as its occasion rather than as independent participants. Women have consequently not formed a separate group that can assert itself autonomously against a male group.

Lineage does not overturn this structure. Whether descent is patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or less clearly defined, women remain under male guardianship. A woman’s father or brother may exercise authority before marriage, while her husband may exercise it afterward; in a matrilineal system, maternal descent can extend the authority of her father or brother without giving her possession of the law. Nor does the presence of a woman chief or queen prove women’s sovereignty: a female ruler’s position does not necessarily alter the lives of women more generally. In practice, women usually move to live under their husbands’ roofs, an arrangement the text reads as evidence of male domination.

The everyday family and its material obligations also complicate any simple account of matriarchy. Even where a child belongs to its mother’s clan, the husband may feed and raise the child, and shared residence, work, interest, and tenderness bind spouses and parents. Marriage rites reflect an unstable balance between religious and economic arrangements: a husband may acquire a wife through exchanges between clans, while her brothers may receive goods or labor in return. As men’s attachment to their sons grows, they have an incentive to affirm themselves as fathers rather than through their nephews. The book presents this development as one route by which societies tend toward patriarchy.

Prestige, Dependence, and the Book’s Conclusion

Women’s sacred importance remains compatible with their subordination because the prestige itself is assigned and interpreted by men. Men may kneel before a Mother Goddess, but the account argues that the goddess’s meaning is still made within male consciousness. The apparent power of the female divine figure thus does not make her an independent subject; what men have elevated, they can also recast or destroy. Maternal fertility may sustain the community, yet the book confines women’s social role to maintaining life, while men claim activities that open the group outward through hunting, fishing, and war.

The treatment of matriarchy supports the book’s larger criticism of explanations that make women’s condition timeless or natural. The central issue is not whether women once enjoyed special prestige, but whether they could establish reciprocal authority and act as a collective subject. The account says they did not: women have been dispersed among men, without an independent history, religion, or solidarity of labor, and their ties to fathers and husbands bind them closely to the very group that subordinates them. Matriarchy therefore names, at most, a remembered or imagined arrangement of female prestige; it does not describe a historical transfer of sovereignty from men to women.