Was It A Woman's World?
About dominant women, goddess-worship, and our perspective on the ancient past.
In my previous post, I discussed my primary aim with this blog: to open up new perspectives on our deep history to be able to better see ourselves in the present. In my effort to piece together bits of this strange and, I feel, vastly under-explored puzzle, I was glad to come across the work of Heide Goettner-Abendroth and her field of matriarchal studies, which I found to be a generally plausible and productive way of looking at things. This approach attempts to understand ancient cultures by comparing archaeological finds with anthropological studies and direct testimony from still-existent and recently extinct non-patriarchal indigenous societies.
What has been found by this method, according to Goettner-Abendroth, is that pre-patriarchal societies generally shared the characteristics of:
Matrilinear kinship (kinship traced through the mother line);
Balanced economic reciprocity (aka gift economy, in which goods are not accumulated individually but continually distributed by the women); a
Society of consensus (an egalitarian society, based on local clan politics with male delegates as clan spokesmen at larger regional gatherings); a
Sacred culture (a worldview centered on rebirth and a divine feminine principle understood as immanent rather than transcendent, that is, the whole world itself is the divine feminine, with the masculine as part of it)
When I discovered that my friends knew very little or nothing of this research, not even the "goddess-aware" women or the most progressively intellectual men, I originally set out to write this article as a sort of public service quick summary of the most important discoveries and conclusions from this field. However, I soon got caught up in the questions of why my friends didn't know about this information and why it is generally not included in those blockbuster, grand historical narratives, like Yuval Harari's Sapiens, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, John Vervaeke's Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, etc.
What I realized is probably indicative of my own ignorance more than anything, but so be it — it was simply how little time has really passed, in the greater scheme of things, since women (re)gained access to the public domain. As a Scandinavian male millennial, born in the early 1980s towards the end of the so-called second wave of feminism, I've tended to just take for granted that women have the same rights as men, mostly forgetting that this only came about during my grandmother's and mother's generations, and is a cultural shift that is very much still in development.
Through converging evidence from archeology, sociology, linguistics, genetics, and more over the last century, it has become clear that patriarchy — the concept of biological fatherhood, ancestry traced through the father line, and men acting as heads of the household — came about through two different cultural paths, one in the Eurasian steppes and the other in Mesopotamia. Beginning about 6000 years ago, it gradually spread from those regions to the rest of the world, reaching places like Japan and Northern Europe about 2000 years ago. The beginning of the end of this period of total male dominance, surely one of the strangest, darkest, and most remarkable periods in our entire human history, then came about in the mid-19th century when women began to be allowed to vote, to educate themselves, and to own some property again.
This means that if we compress the 50,000 years since our Upper Paleolithic transition (the time we've spent on earth as cognitively modern human beings) into one year, it was between a month-and-a-half to two weeks ago that women first became subordinated to men, and only yesterday that they began revolting against their subservience. Most of that power-reclamation process has occurred much more recently, however — sometime in the late night and early morning hours! Perhaps we can even consider the Western postmodernist movement as a waking up disoriented and with a thundering headache the morning after the all-night rager that ensued when the women who had been locked in the basement came storming out into the living room again.
The other surprising discovery for me was how closely this change in the status of women and the balance between the genders is connected to the re-emergence of The Goddess. Before I go deeper into the ancient past, I think it’s worth dwelling for a moment there.
The suffragist movement that formed in the mid-to-late 1800s, when women began forcing their way into higher education and politics, corresponds with the European transition from bourgeois romanticism to early modernism. This was the time of the Brontë sisters' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, (1847), Ibsen's A Doll House (1879), and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878), and the painters J.M.W. Turner and Eugene Delacroix.
Interestingly, it was also when hieroglyphs and the cuneiform script were first deciphered, and the first translations of ancient Egyptian and Sumerian texts came out. Europe at that time still largely thought of the bible as the oldest book in the world, and the apostle Paul's words to the Ephesians were a standard ingredient in wedding ceremonies: "Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. Therefore, as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things."
The new Egyptian and Sumerian texts not only brought the realization that much of the bible was a rehashing of earlier pagan culture, but also news of the powerful goddesses Isis and Hathor in Egypt and Inanna in Sumer, who had seemingly ruled the roost in ancient times. In 1849, German Classicist Eduard Gerhard proposed a revolutionary theory suggesting that these various ancient goddesses were actually representations of a single, monotheistic female deity. This theory gained momentum among French and German classicists, who began connecting Greek religious practices with those of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. In 1890, James George Frazer published the enormously influential The Golden Bough, which redefined anthropology and challenged Christian religious authority by suggesting that Christianity was merely one manifestation of universal patterns of myth and ritual centered on dying and resurrecting god-kings. It presented a stark and unflattering portrayal of male authority through its central image of the priest-king who gained and held power solely through violence and constant vigilance, suggesting that male power was inherently precarious and based on strength rather than divine right or moral superiority. Then, in 1901, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered numerous female figurines at Knossos, Crete, further nurturing the idea of an ancient Goddess with a subordinate male god who was both her son and lover.
This chart shows the number of countries that accepted women's right to vote each year:
New Zealand was the first in 1893, before the Scandinavian countries became the next early adopters, with Finland in 1906, Denmark in 1908, and Norway in 1913 (which could be explained by the roots of patriarchy being relatively shallow in Scandinavia, having also arrived there rather late). In 2015, Saudi Arabia became the most recent country to allow women voting rights, albeit for municipal council elections only since it is based on Sharia law and tribal customs and has no national elections, leaving the misogynistic first place now shared between the two peas in a pod, Taliban Afghanistan and the Vatican. At the beginning of this chart, women were making less than 50% of men's wages on average; now, the average pay gap has shrunk to around 12% in the Western world, and in Luxembourg, women have even begun earning more than men on average.
It was as recently as 1988 that American women were allowed to take out a business bank loan without a man's signature, a consequence of the dramatic rise in women-led businesses, from 402,000 in 1972 (4% of all U.S. firms) to 14 million in 2025 (40% of all firms). This same exponential curve can be seen in academia. Universities admitted the first few women in the late 1800s; 100 years later, in 1980, there were as many female as male university graduates, and now, women are earning more than two-thirds of all master's degrees in the U.S.
At the end of WWII, at the base of the sharp upward rise in the chart above, the first generation of financially empowered and educated women had matured and begun publishing works that expanded the focus from economic and political rights to also include new perspectives on history, culture, sexuality and spirituality:
Mary Ritter Beard (1876 – 1958) published Woman as Force in History in 1946, the first work to attribute general historical value to all women, and not only to those few exceptions who had performed well in the traditional domains of men (such as Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, etc.).
Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) published The Second Sex in 1949, laying the theoretical groundwork for second-wave feminism.
Robert Graves (1895 - 1985), heavily influenced by his then-wife Laura Riding, published The White Goddess in 1948, describing a universal triple goddess (maiden, mother, and crone) who had ruled the world during a matriarchal period that was then suppressed by patriarchy, which profoundly inspired and influenced the next decades of wiccan, new age, and goddess-centered spirituality.
In the second generation of women with higher education we find women like Gerda Lerner (1920 – 2013), one of the founders of the academic field of women's history, Merlin Stone (1931-2011), who wrote When God Was A Woman, and Marija Gimbutas (1921 - 1994), who in 1956 published her groundbreaking study of the societal roles of women from the Palaeolithic through the Neolithic periods, and her theory about the origins of patriarchy. From Lerner and Gimbutas, we finally arrive at the present day and the third generation of female scholars, such as Rebecca Solnit (1961 —) (who coined "mansplaining"), Naomi Klein (1970 —), bell hooks (1952 — 2021), Ruth-Bader Ginsburg (1933 — 2020), and the one who I'd like to focus on with this blog, Heide Goettner-Abendroth (1941 —) and her matriarchal studies.
The evolutionary way of thinking that dominated anthropology and archaeology in the 19th and first half of the 20th century framed Western civilization as something like the growing end of a tree that had progressed from more primitive to more civilized, from a deep pagan past, through Christianity, and finally into rationality and pure science. James George Frazer in The Golden Bough, for instance, seems to have considered the fertility rites of the past as essentially naive and misguided attempts at making synthetic fertilizer, which had been invented just a few years prior to the publishing of his book.
As this perspective began to wane with the postmodernism of the 1970s and 80s, the new approach that came along said that prehistoric cultures should be examined as complex, sustainable social systems with their own internal logic and values. Without the impairing belief that all earlier societies were more primitive versions of our own, there was more freedom to interpret what was actually being found in the ground, and new discoveries and great leaps in understanding were quickly made. One strand of this was the environmentally conscious, new-age goddess movement, exemplified by the author Starhawk, whose 1980s books combined feminist spirituality, environmental activism, social justice, practical magical techniques, and permaculture principles.
The overlapping of these ideas and objectives has notably been critiqued by Cynthia Eller, who, in her book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000), refuted the idea that there had been such a thing as a matriarchy. This feminist view of the past that Eller takes issue with I recently saw succinctly presented in a social media post by a semi-famous internet personality, who, in a statement about female sexuality, wrote: "Anyone who looks at ancient history knows that women were the ruling class."
While Eller’s point about the harmful effect of inventing a past that never existed is valid for the feminist movement as a whole, she’s had to oversimplify and misinterpret her fellow female academics to get it to work with them, since they don’t actually claim that women ever dominated men. Marija Gimbutas, who might be called the academic grandmother of this research, rejected the word matriarchal to describe these earlier cultures, writing that the Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had "a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.”
Heide Goettner-Abendroth agrees with Gimbutas that these cultures did not have a gender hierarchy, yet still prefers the word matriarchal to describe them, writing that the words matrilineal, matrifocal, matricentric, and also matristic (which Gimbutas preferred), are reductive and “neglects the variety of relationships within these complex social structures between women and men, elders and youth, sisters and brothers, and so on.” She also rejects gylanic, proposed by Riane Eisler in her book The Chalice & the Blade (1987) by combining gy from Greek gyne (woman) and an from Greek andros (man), as an artificially constructed and meaningless word. Goettner-Abendroth then finds an etymological way to keep matriarchy by separating its definition from that of patriarchy, explaining that the Greek word archē can mean either "domination" or "start, beginning, origin," and that while patriarchy leans on the first definition to mean "dominance or rule of the fathers," matriarchy should lean on the second definition to mean "in the beginning, the mothers."
Although this workaround didn't quite land for me, I initially disregarded the whole word problem as trivial splitting of hairs and secondary to the research itself. However, considering it further, I came to wonder if it could have something to do with the still-missing wider acceptance and assimilation within mainstream culture.
Goettner-Abendroth wants to stick with matriarchy for two reasons; because it is a well-known word that’s been thrown around since the 1850s (albeit with a number of different meanings), and more importantly because it has a political dimension, in that the study of a non-patriarchal past helps remedy “women's internal colonization within society by various forms of a global patriarchy that assigns to women only object status”.
From the beginning, but particularly from the early 1900s onwards, the women's suffrage movement leveraged symbolism in the form of parades, protests, and images to advance its cause. In Britain, the militant suffrage organization the Women's Social and Political Union employed artists to design posters, banners, and postcards that depicted their struggle as a righteous battle for justice, and staged protests that often turned violent and landed many of its members in prison, where some were force-fed — events that were then rendered in suffrage art to further stoke the passion. Spectacle played such a central role in this campaign that The Common Cause, a British suffrage magazine, proclaimed the whole thing to be "agitation by symbol."
Perhaps we can also see our contemporary goddess worship movements and the narrative of a previous harmonious matriarchal social model as a more sophisticated or sublimated form of this symbolic agitation? The divine goddess held a different role and position for the people in ancient times than it does for us today, where at least a good chunk of her role has been to subvert patriarchal paradigms and reimagine female agency. Our narrative of the mother goddess and the harmonious matriarchal social model she presided over provides a counter-mythology and a reorientation of our cultural memory. This divine feminine is become an alternative to the hierarchy and exploitation of the patriarchal Hero’s Journey, and serves both as an idealized lost heritage and a blueprint for a new egalitarian future. I wonder if this politicization and commodification of The Goddess have become a hindrance to us at this point, if it’s standing in the way of a deeper understanding and integration of pre-patriarchal reality and a further integration and harmony between the genders.
Whatever people's relationship to the divine used to be before patriarchy, men and women must have had a shared understanding of it. Perhaps now in 2025, in some parts of the world, for some people, at least, women’s inherent value is becoming so obvious that it also becomes possible not to have to assert it so strongly. I wonder such a less partisan gaze can allow us to see more of our matriarchal past, and perhaps even something new about the patriarchy that came after.
In my next posts I will be exploring the characteristics of those older gylanic societies that Gimbutas and Goettner-Abendroth studied, and take a look at the circumstances that brought about patriarchy.
Thank you for your attention!