An Ancient Matriarchy?

Matriarchy, according to the dictionary, means mother-rule. The Mother the head of the family. The children inherit the mother’s name. The property is bequeathed from mother to daughter, with a small inheritance for the sons. The wife, no doubt, swears to love and cherish her husband, and the husband swears to honor and obey his spouse. It doesn’t sound so very different from what already is: except that when Tommy Smith marries Elsie Jones, he becomes Mr. Jones; quite right, too, in nine cases out of ten. 

And this is the matriarchy we are drifting into. No good trying to stem the tide. Woman is in flood.

But in this matter of matriarchy, let us not be abstract. Men and women will always be men and women. There is nothing new under the sun, not even matriarchy. Matriarchies have been and will be. And what about them, in living actuality? —It is said that in the ancient dawn of history there was nothing but matriarchy: children took the mother’s name, belonged to the mother’s clan, and the man was nameless. There is supposed to be a matriarchy today among the Berbers of the Sahara, and in Southern India, and in one or two other rather dim places.

Yet, if you look at photographs of Berbers, the men look jaunty and cocky, with their spears, and the terrible matriarchal women look as if they did most of the work. It seems to have been so in the remote past. Under the matriarchal system that preceded the patriarchal system of Father Abraham, the men seem to have been lively sports, hunting and dancing and fighting, while the women did the drudgery and minded the brats. 

Courage! Perhaps a matriarchy isn’t so bad, after all. A woman deserves to possess her own children and have them called by her name. As for the household furniture and the bit of money in the bank, it seems naturally hers. 

Far from being a thing to dread, matriarchy is a solution to our weary social problem. Take the Pueblo Indians of the Arizona desert. They still have a sort of matriarchy. The man marries into the woman’s clan, and passes into her family house. His corn supply goes to her tribe. His children are the children of her tribe, and take hername, so to speak. Everything that comes into the house is hers, her property. The man has no claim on the house, which belongs to her clan, nor to anything within the house. The Indian woman’s home is her castle. 

So! And what about the man, in this dread matriarchy? Is he the slave of the woman? By no means. Marriage, with him, is a secondary consideration, a minor event. His first duty is not to his wife and children—they belong to the clan. His first duty is to the tribe. The man is first and foremost an active, religious member of the tribe. Secondarily, he is son or husband or father. 

The real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-house where only males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on; then he is also away hunting, or performing the sacred rites on the mountain, or he works in the fields. But he spends only certain months of the year in his wife’s house, sleeping there. The rest he spends chiefly in the great khiva, where he sleeps and lives, along with the men, under the tuition of the old men of the tribe. 

The Indian is profoundly religious. To him, life itself is religion: whether planting corn or reaping it, or scalping an enemy or begetting a child; even washing his long black hair is a religious act. And he believes that only by the whole united effort of the tribe, day in, day out, year in, year out, in sheer religious attention and practice, can the tribe be kept vitally alive. Of course, the religion is pagan, savage, and to our idea immoral. But religion it is, and it is his charge. 

Then the children. When the boys reach the age of twelve or thirteen, they are taken from the mother and given into the charge of old men. They live now in the khiva, or they are taken into the sacred camps in the mountains, to be initiated into manhood. Now their home is the khiva, the great sacred meeting-house underground. They may go and eat in their mother’s house, but they live and sleep with the men.

And this is ancient matriarchy. And it is the instinctive form society takes, even now, it seems to be a social instinct to send boys away to school at the age of thirteen, to be initiated into manhood. It is a social instinct in a man to leave his wife and children safe in the home, while he goes out and foregathers with other men, to fulfill his deeper social necessities. There is the club and the public-house, poor substitutes for the sacred khiva, no doubt, and yet absolutely necessary to most men. It is in the clubs and public-houses that men have really educated one another, by immediate contact, discussed politics and ideas, and made history. It is the clubs and public-houses that men have tried to satisfy their deeper social instincts and intuitions. To satisfy his deeper social instincts and intuitions, a man must be able to get away from his family, and from women altogether, and forgather in the communion of men. 

Of late years, however, the family has got ahold of a man, and begun to destroy him. When a man is clutched by his family, his deeper social instincts are all thwarted, he becomes a negative thing. Then the woman, perforce, becomes positive, and breaks loose into the world. 

Let us drift back to matriarchy. Let the woman take the children and give them her name—it’s a wise child that knows its own father. Let the woman take the property—what has a man to do with inheriting and bequeathing a grandfather’s clock. Let the woman form themselves into a great clan, for the preservation of themselves and their children. It is nothing but just. 

And so, let the men be free again, free from the tight littleness of family and family possessions. Give woman her full independence, and with it, the full responsibility of her independence. That is the only way to satisfy women once more: give them their full independence and full self-responsibility as mothers and heads of the family. When the children take the mother’s name, the mother will look after the name all right. 

And give the men a new foregathering ground, where they can meet and satisfy their deep social needs, profound social cravings which can only be satisfied apart from women. It is absolutely necessary to find some way of satisfying these ultimate social cravings in men, which are deep as religion in man. It is necessary for the life of society, to keep us organically vital, to save us from the mess of industrial chaos and industrial revolt. 

–Excerpted from “Assorted Articles” by D.H. Lawrence (1928)