History Compass 3 (2005) NA 179, 1–10

The Feminist Appropriation of Matriarchal Myth

in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Cynthia Eller
Montclair State University

Abstract
Beginning in 1861 with the publication of Das Mutterrecht (Motherright) by the Swiss
legal scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, there has been a continuous interest in the
theory that prehistoric societies were matriarchal or at least woman-centered,
only to be disrupted by the assumption of male power, usually around 3000 BCE.
This idea has been enormously appealing to feminists, particularly in
late-twentieth-century America. In some feminist circles, what I have called the
myth of matriarchal prehistory has reigned as political dogma; in others it has
provided food for thought; while in yet others it has served as the basis of a new
religion. This article describes the ways in which first and second wave feminists
respectively have adapted matriarchal myth to their political needs and disseminated
it to a wider audience.

From classical Greece to communist China, from South America to Indonesia

and many places in between, people have speculated on the possible existence
of cultures ruled by or centered upon women. The ancient Greeks imagined
these matriarchal societies to be contemporaneous with their own, but
thought that they occupied different geographical spaces (a space that kept
retreating from Athens as purported Amazon homelands were found not to
contain Amazons at all). More often, however, ideas about matriarchal
societies have been historical in nature: they are based on the presumption
that present male-dominant cultures were preceded by matriarchal ones. This
notion – what I have called the myth of matriarchal prehistory – is
implausible from the perspective of history and archeology. There are no
known societies that, upon rigorous examination, can be regarded as
definitively woman-centered and goddess-worshipping, let alone matriarchal.
And material evidence from prehistoric eras, such as the prevalence of female
figurines, the richness of female grave goods (or the equivalence of male
and female grave goods), and absence of defensive fortifications or substantial
weaponry do not prove that ancient societies were woman-centered,
goddess-worshipping, or even peaceful. The thesis that human societies
were matriarchal in organization up until a cataclysmic patriarchal takeover
around 3000 BCE does not stand up under reasonable scrutiny.1 Still, the
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myth of matriarchal prehistory is an excellent thought experiment in the

analysis of power differentials between men and women, and more broadly,
the source and nature of gender differences. It is this, I argue, that accounts
for the myth’s popularity among feminists.
The intellectual history of matriarchal myth is both deep and broad, but
it has a particularly interesting chapter that begins in 1861 and leads up,
through odd twists and turns, to its popularity among American feminists
in the late 20th century. The year 1861 saw the publication of Das Mutterrecht
(Motherright) by the Swiss legal scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen.2 Following
independently and rapidly on its heels in 1865 came the publication of John
Ferguson McLennan’s Primitive Marriage.3 From this beginning there has
emerged nearly 150 years of theorizing on the existence of prehistoric
female-superior or gender-equal societies believed to have been destroyed
some time between 3000 and 1000 BCE by conquering patriarchs.
The basic narrative structure of this story has since been reiterated by
novelists, poets, communists, fascists, psychotherapists, and by scholars in
disciplines as various as cultural anthropology, the classics, archeology,
women’s studies, and the history of religions. However, the most popular
manifestation of matriarchal myth has unquestionably occurred within the
feminist movement, where stories of a matriarchal past have served to explain
the origin of patriarchal societies and to imagine them as a thin veneer
covering the true, original nature of human society, in which women
demand enormous respect, if they are not actually in positions of social
power on the basis of their sex alone. In some feminist circles, the myth of
matriarchal prehistory has reigned as political dogma; in others it has provided
food for thought; while in yet others it has served as the basis of a new
religion . . . or, a very, very old religion, the presumed goddess religion
dating to prehistoric matriarchal times.
The myth of matriarchal history has an obvious appeal for feminists, for
it states unequivocally that patriarchy is not universal in time and space, that
it is neither inevitable nor is it the only way in which humans have organized
themselves. Still, many (mostly male) narrators of matriarchal myth have
argued that patriarchy is preferable to matriarchy, that it is an evolutionary
advance that was necessary for the development of the human species. Even
those who have maintained the superiority of patriarchy, however, have
exhibited nostalgia for the matriarchal era or pleaded for a future that could
find a happy medium between the two extremes. And many other narrators,
both female and male, have embraced the revolutionary potential of
matriarchal myth, using it to leverage a broader space for political activism
and feminist hope.
The earliest explicitly feminist appropriation of matriarchal myth was
initiated by a man: Friedrich Engels. In his classic Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State, first published in 1884, Engels combined the recently
deceased Marx’s notes on anthropological texts with his own reading of
matriarchal myth, particularly the work of American anthropologist Lewis
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Henry Morgan (Ancient Society, published in 1878).4 Morgan, unlike

Bachofen and McLennan before him, included means of subsistence as an
important marker of relations between the sexes, sometimes approaching
the sort of material determinism Engels would have chosen himself. Engels’s
Origin was an account of “the world historic defeat of the female sex,”
something he maintained was simultaneously part of an unfortunate economic
revolution that would propagate itself throughout subsequent stages of
human history – until its reversal with the forthcoming communist
revolution. In contrast to earlier narrators of matriarchal myth, who almost
always treated woman-centered societies as a stepping stone on the way to
superior, male-dominant societies, Engels saw not progress, but regress in
this sequence of events. Like Judeo-Christian accounts of history, in Engels’s
Origin human society started out wonderfully, took a very wrong turn, and
was now presented with an opportunity to crawl back out of the slime in
which it had immersed itself . . . in this case instituting a long lost equality
between women and men.
Engels’s account of human history was picked up most readily by August
Bebel, German labor leader and author of the extremely popular Die Frau
und der Sozialismus (published in more than a dozen languages and under
alternative titles such as Women Under Socialism and Woman in the Past, Present,
and Future). Bebel was a committed feminist. However, matriarchal myth
did not appear in the first edition of Die Frau und der Sozialismus; it was only
tacked onto the text after Engels had published his Origin. Bebel’s work
soared on other wings – principally the latter two stages in matriarchal myth,
namely an analysis of women’s status in male-dominant societies and a plea
for sexual equality in a future communist society. Meanwhile, Engels himself,
for all his preaching in the Origin, was comparatively disinterested in gender
as the lever of human history; it was but an element in the larger story of
the economic stages of human civilization. Socialist feminists of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for their part, gradually distanced
themselves even from Engels’s relatively tame version of matriarchal myth
on the grounds that it confused a secondary matter – feminism – with a
primary one: socialism. Indeed, socialist feminist leaders polished up their
socialist credentials by insisting that focusing on gender injustice was a
distraction from the more important work of fomenting the worker’s
revolution.5 In this, none was more influential than Clara Zetkin, a German
socialist leader who began her political career by lecturing on Bebel’s Die
Frau und der Sozialismus. As she attained greater prominence though, Zetkin
divorced herself more and more from an overtly feminist stance. As she
commented in an 1895 letter to Friedrich Engels,“despite my great respect
for him [Bebel] . . . I cannot shake the impression that with him a little of the
author of Women, of the defender of the oppressed female sex, has gotten
the best of the Marxist.”6 It was thus left to others to more explicitly make
the case for a connection between matriarchal myth and a feminist political
agenda.
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4 . Feminist Appropriation of Matriarchal Myth

This was done by first-wave feminists who began in the late 1880s and
early 1890s to put matriarchal myth to explicitly feminist use, an effort that
continued through the first two decades of the twentieth century. For the
most part, these feminists were not in dialogue with Engels or Bebel, but
with Victorian-era anthropologists like McLennan and Morgan. They
questioned only a little of what the Victorian anthropologists proposed as
an accurate history of relations between the sexes. However, they reversed
the story’s polarities entirely. The matriarchal era, which for most Victorian
anthropologists was regarded as a backward time characterized by excesses
of sexual abandon, was for first-wave feminists an idyllic time for all humans,
characterized by the monogamy and chastity that were considered appropriate
for Victorian-era women. The patriarchal era, which most Victorian
anthropologists viewed as a powerful step up the ladder of social progress,
was for first-wave feminists an alarming fall from grace which could only
be repaired by the reinstitution of matriarchal norms in modern-day society.
Two prominent Americans, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn
Gage, were among the first to draw feminist lessons from matriarchal myth.
In 1888 and 1891 respectively,7 they wrote and spoke publicly about the
“matriarchate,” arguing that a society ruled by women would be a society
centered around motherhood: and owing to the beneficent “natural”
proclivities of mothers, such a society would be a good place to be.
Contrariwise, a society in which women were kept under male control and
in which mothers did not exert any significant social power would be a
rotten place to be. Indeed, it was in such a society that Stanton and Gage
believed themselves to be living. Stanton and Gage were both completely
explicit in claiming that prehistory was characterized by the “supremacy”
of women: that women were “the rulers” and men their social inferiors.
For the most part, Stanton and Gage concentrated on the simple moral
lessons contained in matriarchal myth: that women could hold social power,
that men and women could be equal, that patriarchy was not inevitable.
Insofar as they addressed questions about the origin of matriarchy and the
patriarchal takeover, they mainly repeated arguments made earlier by
Victorian anthropologists: Matriarchy developed from early humans’
recognition of the primary bond between mother and child (perhaps
exaggerated by an ignorance regarding the part men played in human
reproduction); and patriarchy was the result of large-scale agriculture and
warfare, which emphasized male strength (and possibly men’s discovery that
women couldn’t reproduce without male assistance). It was left to feminists
in the early twentieth century to expand upon earlier versions of matriarchal
myth in a substantive way.
There were two principal modifications that feminists made to matriarchal
myth in the early twentieth century. First, they more fully incorporated
Darwinian arguments into matriarchal myth than had their anthropological
predecessors; and second, they put far more emphasis upon the notion of
goddess worship as a defining feature of matriarchal societies. Darwin was,
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of course, no feminist. But first-wave feminists adapted his theory of sexual

selection – that sex-specific traits develop to enhance reproductive fitness –
to claim that female humans were designed by nature to choose from among
many possible mates only those that would improve the human race.
Patriarchy, with its monopoly on female sexuality, had attempted to undo
the dictates of nature. For the good of all then, patriarchy must be ended
and humanity returned to its natural state so that women could properly
guide the future of the race.8
The emergence of the Goddess as the principal deity of prehistory and as
sign of a forthcoming return of women-centered societies was more subtle
in first-wave feminist thought than were their appeals to Darwinian theory,
but it was a harbinger of things to come as feminists sought to make greater
use of matriarchal myth over the course of the twentieth century. Matilda
Joslyn Gage, with her invective against established patriarchal religions, was
one of the first to insist that matriarchal societies were also
goddess-worshipping societies in which women were priestesses, and in
which gods and men were, at best, their sons and lovers. This theory came
to full flower in the work of British suffragette Frances Swiney, who invented
her own theosophical religion called “The League of Isis.”9
Following the achievement of women’s suffrage in Britain and the United
States, feminist use of matriarchal myth tapered off, emerging only fitfully
in the work of isolated Jungians and Marxists.10 Little would have suggested
the revival matriarchal myth was soon to enjoy as second-wave feminists,
mostly in America, discovered the theory and found in it a compelling
explanation of sexism and the path to its end.
Interest in matriarchal myth among second-wave feminists began in the
early 1970s, and was first articulated mainly by those already prominent as
feminist activists: women such as Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Gloria
Steinem, and Phyllis Chesler. In general these were brief mentions rather
than full narrations of the myth of matriarchal prehistory. Their principal
goal was to explain the nature – and tenuousness – of patriarchal authority. A
handful of less prominent feminists, most notably Elizabeth Gould Davis
(The First Sex), argued at length for a lost Atlantis of female power, more
in the manner of her first-wave predecessor, Frances Swiney. It remained
however for the emerging feminist spirituality movement to place matriarchal
myth at the center of a feminist self-understanding and worldview.
At first, it was individual Wiccans such as Zsuzsanna Budapest and Morgan
McFarland, high priestesses of a new blending of feminism and neopaganism,
who attached importance to a matriarchal past. As the idea of past
matriarchies became more intriguing to a larger feminist population, feminist
anthropologists weighed in on the question of whether or not prehistory
was matriarchal. Most argued that it had not been matriarchal, or at least
that there was no evidence to support such a claim. However, a few – mostly
influenced by socialism, and particularly by Engels’s Origin – began to
construct tentative models of human economic evolution that incorporated
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a shift from gender equality (or female superiority) toward male dominance,
a concomitant of capitalism. This thesis never caught on to any remarkable
extent within the field of anthropology, anthropology having rather decisively
washed its hands of the matriarchal thesis in the early twentieth century.
In the feminist spirituality movement, it was another story. A matriarchal
myth unfolded that placed its primary emphasis on the religious beliefs of
prehistoric human societies. The question of women’s rule, so pivotal for
first-wave feminist matriarchalists, was softened, if not exactly downplayed
in spiritual feminist versions of matriarchal myth. Where first-wave feminists
can be said to have rank-ordered the priorities of matriarchal myth as first,
woman rule, and second, goddess worship, the reverse was true for
second-wave feminists. The Goddess came first, women as her priestesses
came second, and women as rulers of society – or simply as its guides and
consciences – came last. At the same time, the emphasis on women as
mothers became less pronounced. The worship of Goddess as Mother was
paramount, but her human followers need not be mothers themselves. In
spiritual feminist hands, the matriarchal era was glorified not only for its
peacefulness, but for its harmony with nature; and not for its moral rectitude,
but for the precise opposite: its sexual license.
The first entrant in the late twentieth-century feminist resurrection of
the ancient Goddess, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, went largely
unnoticed, probably because the author, Marija Gimbutas, did not then
consider herself a feminist. Of more immediate interest in the 1970s was
Merlin Stone’s book, When God Was a Woman, published in 1976, two
years after the publication of Gimbutas’s Gods and Goddesses (later released
under the title Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe). Stone, an art historian,
was less interested in the European Neolithic and more interested in the art
and myth of more recent, though still ancient empires in the Middle
East. Through an examination of statuary and other art forms, Stone argued
that an earlier goddess worship in “the cradle of civilization” had been
forcibly repressed and replaced with the worship of a male god. This, she
maintained, dealt a terrible blow to ancient women’s autonomy and dignity,
an assault that continues to the present day. In the monotheistic Western
religions, claimed Stone, the jealous demands of the male god work to keep
ordinary women subordinate to ordinary men. In the 1970s, Mary Daly also
began decrying the worship of a male god, viewing it as the linchpin of
patriarchal authority. Though Daly was less concerned with any putative
past goddess worship, her work combined with that of Stone to make a
powerful critique of patriarchal religion, leaving feminists hungry for an
alternative.
The feminist appropriation of matriarchal myth finally hits it stride when
the political implications of the thesis laid out by Stone, Gimbutas, Daly,
and others merged with the actual worship of a female deity (or deities) in
the feminist spirituality movement. This practice had been initiated by
Witches and neopagans, whose fledgling religious movement was
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enthusiastically embraced by feminists intent on finding a substitute for the

male god whom they believed was responsible for the tenacity with which
male dominance clung to human society. In terms of the history of
matriarchal myth, this was of enormous importance: goddess worship was
no longer historical and theoretical; it was contemporary, and it quickly
captured the hearts and spirits of numerous women who decided to give it
a try, to see what difference it might make to address and envision god as
female. In other words, spiritual feminists added to the already clear feminist
appeal of matriarchal myth – that it limited male dominance to a brief
historical phase – a more powerful and more timeless attraction: that of
conducting ritual, sharing sacred time with others, and asking favors and
being blessed by the Goddess, who is both idealized self and idealized
feminine. With its openness to religious creativity and its profound
acceptance of female being – whatever its participants perceived that to be
– feminist spirituality went well beyond treating matriarchal myth as a helpful
idea.
The feminist spirituality movement was at its most popular, or at least its
most prolific, from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, when spiritual
feminist magazines, newsletters, festivals, books, and ritual ware – from
special female-only tarot cards to goddess candles – abounded. The year
1979 heralded a trio of publications that introduced a great many women
to goddess religion. The first was Zsuzsanna Budapest’s Holy Book of Women’s
Mysteries, Part 1, a book of rituals, magical recipes, and essays on Witchcraft
and the history of goddess worship that publicized Budapest’s pioneering
work in feminist spirituality and found an audience particularly in the lesbian
feminist community. The second was Drawing Down the Moon, by Margot
Adler, a radio journalist and Witch. Drawing Down the Moon was a study of
the many diverse forms of neopaganism emerging in America, but it reported
sympathetically on the growth of feminist Witchcraft and spirituality. The
third, and undoubtedly the most influential, was The Spiral Dance by
Starhawk. An introduction to Witchcraft practice and thealogy, The Spiral
Dance hearkened back to prehistoric religion as the true genealogy
of Witchcraft, which was, for Starhawk, a feminist religion. A persuasive
and poetic writer, Starhawk reached a large popular audience.
Once women discovered the Goddess and her purported genesis in
prehistoric female-centered societies, they were especially enthusiastic about
any and all artifactual evidence that appeared to suggest goddess worship.
Not only did this evidence contribute to their belief in prehistoric
matriarchies, it quickly found places on their altars. Fortunately, evidence
of prehistoric goddess worship was easy to find once spiritual feminists went
looking for it. Archeological interest in female figurines was long-standing,
and many explanations had been proffered for their presence in both
Paleolithic and Neolithic sites. For awhile around mid-century, the most
common explanation archeologists offered for the presence of female figurines
was worship of a goddess and/or the practice of a “fertility cult.” In this
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they were largely following the lead of classicists and anthropologists, who
had theorized the prehistoric worship of goddesses before much of any
archeological evidence had been unearthed. Particularly influential were Sir
Arthur Evans, who excavated the Minoan site of Knossos on Crete, and
James Mellaart, who excavated Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia. Both found female
figurines, not in enormous quantity, but of unusually fine craftsmanship,
and both reported their finds as evidence of goddess worship in the cultures
that created them.
By the 1970s, archeologists were backing away from claims of “fertility
cults” and prehistoric goddess worship. The growing trend in their discipline
was toward tremendous interpretive restraint – partly as a backlash against
the interpretive enthusiasm that had characterized the previous generation
of archeologists. But one maverick archeologist continued to find evidence
of ancient goddess worship. This archeologist was the aforementioned Marija
Gimbutas, born in Lithuania, trained in Germany, fluent in a myriad of
Slavic and Romance languages, and as familiar with linguistics, folklore, and
mythography as she was with archeology. Gimbutas’s own excavations had
yielded literally hundreds of female figurines (and many others that might
have been female), most very stylized and fitting into a definite set of
types. Together with the finds of other archeologists, this artifactual evidence
cried out for explanation, and Gimbutas was ready to offer it. No doubt
buoyed by the attention she received from spiritual feminists, Gimbutas
grew progressively bolder in her claims, believing she had decoded the
religious symbolism of Neolithic times. She found epiphanies of the Goddess
in everything from female figurines to wavy lines and chevrons incised on
pottery. Eventually, Gimbutas was to claim that these patterns were more
than symbolic; she argued that they composed an actual written language,
the earliest the world had known, born from cultures that reverenced
women.
In 1987, with the publication of The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler,
matriarchal myth reached a pinnacle of influence among feminists. Eisler’s
narrative of the downfall of prehistoric egalitarian societies at the hands of
marauding patriarchs was a captivating read, and though she had obviously
taken lessons from spiritual feminists who came before her, Eisler emphasized
the historical accuracy of her story and the clear message it contained for all
who would embrace its truths rather than encouraging her readers to actually
begin creating rituals for the Goddess. In so doing, Eisler built a bridge
between women who were practicing neopagans or Witches, and women
who were simply intrigued by Eisler’s vision of a world where women were
most definitely not in the backseat.
Gradually, matriarchal myth found its way into the cultural mainstream
via rock songs, slide shows, art exhibitions, adult education courses, and
fictional treatments of prehistoric societies based on the vision of thinkers
like Gimbutas and Eisler. By the 1990s, the matriarchal origins of human
society was a theory that many young people encountered in the classroom,
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as high school and college teachers presented the prehistoric worship of a

Great Goddess, and the high status of women as her priestesses, as historical
fact.
As we enter a new century, matriarchal myth no longer enjoys the high
status within the feminist movement that it once held, nor is it as central to
feminist spirituality. This seems to be due not to any disproof of the theory
of matriarchal prehistory, but more to a greater confidence on the part of
feminists, that their cause is just and their success possible; and on the part
of spiritual feminists, that their religion is authentic, whatever its genealogy.
Ironically, matriarchal myth no doubt played a role in increasing feminists’
confidence in themselves, though it is this same confidence that has made
matriarchal myth a less pivotal force in feminist lives and thinking.

Notes
1 The inadequacy of the historical evidence offered in support of matriarchal myth is demonstrated
at length in C. Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (Boston, Beacon Press, 2000).
2 Das Mutterrecht, a large volume only available in German at the time of its initial publication in

1861, was not reprinted until 1897. A Bachofen “reader,” including an excerpted version of Das
Mutterrecht was later published in Stuttgart in 1926; this reader was translated and published in
English in 1967, and is still the only portion of Bachofen’s oeuvre that is available in English.
3 McLennan and Bachofen had dramatically different approaches to matriarchal myth, and indeed

agreed on very little about the nature of relations between women and men in prehistoric times.
Bachofen envisioned a female-superior matriarchy characterized by worship of goddesses and the
“female principle,” while McLennan did not go far beyond claiming that prehistoric peoples did
not understand the male role in reproduction and therefore traced descent through females alone.
Bachofen’s sources were practically all from the classics, Greece and Rome, while McLennan’s
were almost entirely ethnographic. Apart from the fact that both men agreed they were
“discovering” the same phenomenon, and that their peers and successors regarded them as pioneers
of the same theory, it would be hard to regard them as having much of anything to do with each
other.
4 Morgan’s initial interest was in kinship terms and what they purportedly revealed about prior

social arrangements (for example, if a group called all adult males by the term “father,” this was
for Morgan evidence that at one time every man in a given tribe was potentially each child’s actual
father, no doubt as a consequence of promiscuous sexual relations within the group). His first
book, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, published in 1871, was based on
results of a questionnaire on kinship terms distributed to anthropologists and missionaries around
the globe.
5 See, for example, E. Marx-Aveling and E. Aveling, Thoughts on Women and Society (New York,

International Publishers, 1987 [1887]).

6 Clara Zetkin to Friedrich Engels, quoted in A. Lopes and G. Roth, Men’s Feminism: August Bebel

and the German Socialist Movement (Amherst, NY., Humanity Books, 2000), p. 219.
7 M. J. Gage, “The Matriarchate,” The Open Court, 2, 1888, pp. 1480 – 1; E. C. Stanton, “The

Matriarchate or Mother-Age,” The National Bulletin (of The Woman’s Tribune), 1 (5), February
1891, pp. 1–7.
8 Some feminists emphasizing sexual selection as a source of female power were frankly racist,

especially the British feminist Frances Swiney, who advocated a eugenics program designed to
keep the Anglo-Saxon race “pure.” See F. Swiney, The Awakening of Women or Woman’s Part in
Evolution (London, William Reeves, 1908 [1899]), p. 121.
9 See L. Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885 –1914 (London,

Penguin, 1995), p. 217.

10 See, for example, M. E. Harding, Woman’s Mysteries (London, Rider Books, 1991 [1955]);

E. Reed, Problems of Women’s Liberation, enlarged edn (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1970).
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Swiney, F., The Awakening of Women or Woman’s Part in Evolution (London,William Reeves, 1908).

© Blackwell Publishing 2005 History Compass 3 (2005) NA 179, 1–10