The Matriarchists: Before, During and Beyond
Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex advocated that the grounding of reproduction of the species in the body of women was oppressive, and something that technology would liberate women from once it evolved to take childbearing away from women’s wombs. But others, such as Roxane Dunbar, in her classic and widely-read essay, “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution,” which appeared in the 1970 collection edited by Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful, argued that being programmed for the role of maternity made women as mothers develop “a certain consciousness of care for others, self-reliance, flexibility, non-competitiveness, cooperation and materialism” (Dunbar 490). In addition, Dunbar argues, women have inherited and continue to suffer exploitation which forces us to use our wits to survive, making the development of maternal consciousness not something to be abolished and replaced with machinery but to be developed in ourselves to undermine the tendencies of capitalist society, and even developed and practiced in men to bring about revolution. She also had great hope that the struggle for universal child care, represented in various bills brought to Congress in 1971, would be key in destroying the patriarchal family and hence capitalism that was based upon that unit. Here I explore the community of women based on rediscovering the power of motherhood in previous and other cultures, drawing from other pivotal essays in the Sisterhood is Powerful collection as well as early writers and theorists such as The Matriarchists and Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, whose The Great Cosmic Mother offered a different historical framing of the power of motherhood hence facilitating an envisioning of pathways to regaining our power. My hope is that by reconnecting with some of this history, and the importance of the power of motherhood to a significant strand of Second Wave thinkers, we can forestall throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the current historical period.
The theoretical thinkers and leading activists who would have been most confused by the revisionist impression that the Second Wave was anti-motherhood and that this issue remained to be developed only later by third and fourth waves would possibly have been Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin, authors of The Answer is Matriarchy, a 12-page paper published in 1978. The two of them had founded a group, The Matriarchists, and had been publishing a newspaper by the same name since the early part of the decade. They wrote position papers, and established a Foundation for the Matriarchy which organized a conference, The Forum on the Future, held in NYC in 1977. Speakers included Flo Kennedy, TiGrace Atkinson, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Midge Costanza, a Carter adviser at the White House, as well as Kate Millett who wrote about the strength of women in the roots of societies and cultures based in motherhood in her landmark 1970 book, Sexual Politics. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution came out after the newspaper and position papers, as well as the consciousness raising groups the women had run, in 1976. Rich examined the patriarchal systems and political institutions defining motherhood, writing as well as a poet from her own experience. Z Budapest had taped a greeting for the conference which was not aired. The leaders had bodyguards to prevent obstruction and wore t-shirts with words in rainbow block letters, “Matriarchy is the Answer.”
Not a mainstream organization, The Matriarchists had been stirring the intellectual pot quite vigorously with an impressively substantial ripple effect. Available on inter-library loan from the University of California at Los Angeles, or in the reading room of the Yale University special archives, the groundbreaking paper has fallen into obscurity and had not been heard about by the founders of the Matriarchal Studies Association in the eighties. This is only another piece of evidence of how the women’s movement eats its own mothers, or buries its own forerunners.
An account of the organization and its activities can be found in the chapter “My Matriarchy Period” in the memoir by Barbara J. Love available on Amazon, There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist (Love 189-192). There she describes how Liz Shanklin had mesmerized others to see the world view of Matriarchy, “a society based on harmony, cooperation, love and nurturance, as opposed to Patriarchy, a warrior society characterized by domination, greed and destruction” (189). They had endless conversations, Love says, learning to view things through the matriarchal lens. Thousands of women supported them, came to their events, and read their newspaper.
Although she can be seen in the film Lesbian Feminism (Amazon Media Project, 1974) imploring us to think in terms of an international matriarchalist movement in which nurturing values came first, Elizabeth Shanklin, the serious developer and promoter of the ideas, died alone and was buried in Potter’s Field at 87, on February 19, 2021, amidst the homeless, stillborn babies, and victims of AIDS and the pandemic. In the film aired at the 1974 event Woman to Woman organized by Brazilian lesbians Norma Pontes and Rita Moreira in NYC, Shanklin had argued:
“Suppose we became a nurturant culture, in other words suppose it became possible for women as mothers, and for men, if they supported this program, suppose it became possible for us to gain control of the institutions that create this environment, and make them supportive of life, nurturant of life. If we did that, then we would be a nurturing culture, we would not be oriented toward domination of other cultures. And we would not be oriented towards war or militarism. Now what would happen on a planet with a culture surrounded by other militaristic cultures? We would be destroyed….it seems to me we have to think of an international matriarchal movement, we have to reach out to women around the world and work together to gain control of this cancerous militaristic patriarchy.” (accessed Feb 6, 2023, YouTube)
As explained in an obituary by Linda Clarke sent to me in a personal communication by JA Myers on January 30, 2023, Shanklin had been immersed in the study of matriarchy and had the revolutionary vision that men had to develop their potential to nurture others. She argued that mothering done exclusively by women is detrimental to the species; that “the social importance of motherhood and children is too great a responsibility to be left to women only; men must evolve, or the species will not survive” (Clarke). She found “maternal practice is urgently necessary for social transformation” (Clarke). For Shanklin, Clarke explains, matriarchy “was not merely a mirror image of patriarchy in which women dominated men. Matriarchy was a mother-centered society based on maternal values where nurturing and preserving all people, all life on the planet, determined its reason for being; the only form of society that could be genuinely peaceful” (Clarke). Shanklin, Clarke continues, recognized the power of motherhood and went on from being a radical feminist who, like others of her ilk, recognized corporate crime, racial hatred and contempt for womankind, to work in the Green Party and in unions after she retired.
In coverage of the NYC event by brooke in off our backs, she explains that Shanklin, a coordinator of the NY Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, and a former member of NOW and The Feminists, and Barbara Love, co-author of Sappho Was A Right-on Woman, in their organization supported world-wide matriarchy, were against equality through the ERA, and felt “women should be liberated to mother” (The Matriarchalist, Vol 1, Issue 2). She quotes the paper/pamphlet “Matriarchy Is the Answer” originally appearing as a chapter in Ginny Vida’s book Our Right to Love. By matriarchy, they meant “a non-alienated society, in which women, those who produce the next generation, define motherhood, determine the conditions of motherhood, and determine the environment in which the next generation is raised” (brooke). They meant matriarchy, a society in which all relationships are modeled on the nurturing relationship between a mother and her child. They thought every other political movement was an unconscious movement towards matriarchy.
brooke criticizes one of the speakers, Steinem, for rehashing Firestone, but the points were made that feminism is anti- private property since women were the first private property , and that women are challenging the idea of possession of children and of childhood itself; other speakers included Wilmette Brown for Black Women for Wages for Housework. Brown defined the women’s movement as including the struggle of our mothers in their homes to produce us; Beulah Sanders, former National Welfare Rights Organization leader, and Maria de los Angeles, an Ecuadorian, were also incorporated; the latter was from Grass Roots Women.
The pivotal exposition in “Matriarchy Is the Answer” was reproduced by Joyce Treblicot in her anthology Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory. There Shanklin and Love define matriarchy as “a society in which production serves the interests of reproduction; that is, the production of goods is regulated to support the nurturance of life” and they specify that matriarchy in fact “provides through the liberation of the maternal function from subservience to warrior institutions, the basis for the elimination of the patriarchal state” (Treblicot 279). By matriarchy they meant a society in which “the maternal principle, the nurturance of life, informs all social structures; this implies the elimination of all patriarchal institutions: economic, political, social and educational” (Treblicot). They argued this because they saw each institution of patriarchy as having an exploitative function, and they saw Matriarchy as providing the only reassurance for a genuinely harmonious society, with women as bearers of the next generation necessarily having the power to nurture–expanding the concept of nurture beyond feeding and clothing and cleaning children, to supporting the expression of the unique will of each child. They argued that the bearers of the next generation in order to be nurturant “must have the power to determine the economic, political, educational and social environment in which the next generation is socialized and nurtured…” In other words, rather than giving up motherhood, mothers must determine the social structures of society.
Not surprisingly, the impetus behind the proposal of the solution of Matriarchy was the burgeoning Lesbian Feminist movement. As Jill Johnston who wrote for the Village Voice explained, lesbian single mothers were Amazons in that they were warriors surviving without men. As she discusses in another film by Norma Pontes and Rita Moreira, the lesbian film makers from Brazil living in NYC in this period, Lesbian Mothers (1972, accessed February 6, 2023)
“I had no models for being a lesbian you see, but we go
so much by history, available contemporary and ancient history,
and there were no available models. We didn’t know that…..
`Gertrude Stein was a lesbian, I mean we knew but we didn’t….
`know,we didn’t know that Virginia Woolf was a very much
incipient lesbian, there was this very vague legend about this woman
who lived centuries ago called Sappho, so without any models we
became the unhappy heterosexual models that occupied the stories in the movies…”
She talks about not breaking up her marriage as a political action but as a survival action.
“in order to survive I broke up with the father of the children and then I had the children alone and I was in these desperate circumstances that many women describe, you know like on welfare, and living in tenements, the old man running away and not giving you any money and you can’t work because the children are small or you can work but who are you going to leave them with, you know it’s a very desperate situation…”
Recognizing such dire straits led lesbian mothers to realize that this was the situation of women, for eons, and caused lesbians to look back to whenever it was the male first developed, and to conjecture that it must have been a very long time since the first males appeared to the development of patriarchy. With the flashing slogan, Always Remember We’ve Got the Eggs across the screen, the discussion in the film on lesbian mothers turns to parthenogenesis, the rare mechanism by which the egg in the women’s body starts dividing. The egg, with the double set of chromosomes, looks like a fertilized egg. It is a fertilized egg, but occurs naturally within the woman’s body with no sperm.
The Great Cosmic Mother
Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, the authors of this book looking to the past to become emboldened as mothers in the present involved in creating the future, met through Women Spirit Rising, a women’s land in Oregon, in 1976 when they first started collaborating on this project that was published many times in many languages in many countries. They were discussing the ancient religion of the Great Cosmic Mother through visual artifacts. Although we don’t have the people anymore from the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras, the reasoning was that we do have the primal images documenting the matriarchal religious aspects that existed. Rediscovering vast mother images, they wrote as mothers and dedicated the book to one of their sons lost in an auto accident.
The book is organized into several parts. Part One is about women’s culture, how we were all created female, Marx and the Matriarchy, the original black mother, and women as the first species. Part Two covers women’s religion, the first female cosmology; then the book moves on to patriarchal reactions like witch burnings. The book concludes with a 20-page bibliography, arguing and supporting the basic premise that we were all created female over two billion years ago ruled by the moon. Although not alone in arguing this–see also Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex–they say that originally we were marine life reproducing parthenogenetically as one massive body with no specific sex organs. Then the sea environment was minimized in the course of evolution and lunar rhythms entered the woman’s body. The penis did not appear until the age of the reptiles, when males were created by females to perform a specific function; at first they were only produced annually, like drones, only in the hive to sterilize the queen and then killed by the sterile female workers. Even though the female has been around longer, this sexual reproduction some argue was necessary for more complex evolution. Men discovered the pre-existence of the female, but did not want the knowledge spread; even Darwin was behind the theory. The first eight weeks, the embryo is bisexual, and then the clitoris and the penis are originally the same organ formed by the same tissue. But in the presence of androgens , complex folds and layers of labia are formed; the penis is the simpler technology. Males are originally protected by and as female but have to develop masculine hormones to protect themselves later against the chemical warfare by female hormones within the womb; they are a deviation from the primary female pattern but this information was buried by male scientists and the female came to be seen as a passive vehicle only, when the reverse was the reality in evolution. Freud dismissed the clitoris as an undeveloped penis and the buried findings were not developed or integrated into psychological theory. Yet males can be reduced to reproductive functions only, not the females, which is why these early images of the Great Mother, the remnants of matriarchal symbolism, are so important to reset and reactivate our psyche. (fmi see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76K-ZN3hYbc, accessed Feb 10 2023)
Conclusion
Whether looking forward to propose an international matriarchy, or looking backward to our roots for inspiration, a significant portion of second wave theory took note of motherhood as a defining nexus of socio-cultural orientation. Sociologist Nancy Chodorow, for example, in The Reproduction of Mothering, avowed that leaving early childhood in the hands of women as mothers structures the very sex roles that we all experienced as so crippling. She advocates the involvement of men in early childhood in order to set the psyche free of such roles. Although some pivotal early essays such as Beverly Jones’ “The Dynamics of Marriage and Motherhood” saw the most automated appliance in a household to be the mother and articulated how this was nightmarish (Jones 56), others such as Jean Tepperman in “Two Jobs: Women who Work in Factories” noticed that motherhood gave a strength of defiance against the structure of work. Mothers were not ignored; the President of NOW Jacqueline Ceballos was an Ecuadorian mother of four. Carol Glassman thoroughly explored the issues mothers face in her essay “Women and the Welfare System” also in Morgan. Let us not eclipse either the theoretical work about mothers, or the activism of mothers, in those early years.
References
brooke. “a feminist future?” off our backs, vol. 18, no. 10, pp 10-12 (accessed Jan 31 2023).
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. .
Clarke, Linda. Obituary, Elizabeth Shanklin. Veteran Feminists of America, 2021. https://veteranfeministsofamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Liz-Shanklin-Obituary.pdf (Accessed Aug. 10, 2023).
Dunbar, Roxanne. “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution.” Sisterhood is powerful: an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, edited by Robin Morgan, Vintage Books, 1970.
Glassman, Carol. “Women and the Welfare System.” Sisterhood is powerful: an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, edited by Robin Morgan, Vintage Books, 1970, pp. 102-114.
Jones, Beverly Jones. “The Dynamics of Marriage and Motherhood.” Sisterhood is powerful: an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, edited by Robin Morgan, Vintage Books, 1970, pp 46-61.
Love, Barbara J. There at the Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist, Lulu.com, 2021.
Sjoo, Monica and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. Harper Collins, 1987.
Tepperman, Jean. “Two Jobs: Women who Work in Factories.” Sisterhood is powerful: an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, edited by Robin Morgan, Vintage Books, 1970, 115-123. Treblicot, Joyce, editor. Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory. Rowman & Allenheld, 1984 (Accessed through Routledge and Littlefield archive Jan 31 2023).
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