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The Myth Of Matriarchal Prehistory
''The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future'' is a 2000 book by Cynthia Eller that seeks to deconstruct the theory of a prehistoric matriarchy. This hypothesis, she says, developed in 19th century scholarship and was taken up by 1970s second-wave feminism following Marija Gimbutas. Eller, a professor of religious studies at Claremont Graduate University, argues in the book that this theory is mistaken and its continued defence is harmful to the feminist agenda. Thesis Eller sets out to refute what she describes as feminist matriarchalism as an "ennobling lie".Quoting Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The real political question ... as old as political philosophy ... swhen we should endorse the ennobling lie." She argues that the feminist archaeology of Marija Gimbutas had a large part in constructing a late twentieth-century feminist ''myth of matriarchal prehistory.'' She questions whether Gimbutas's archaeological findings adequately suppor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matriarchy
Matriarchy is a social system in which women hold the primary power positions in roles of authority. In a broader sense it can also extend to moral authority, social privilege and control of property. While those definitions apply in general English, definitions specific to anthropology and feminism differ in some respects. Matriarchies may also be confused with matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal societies. While there are those who may consider any non-patriarchal system to be matriarchal, most academics exclude those systems from matriarchies as strictly defined. Definitions, connotations, and etymology According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED''), matriarchy is a "form of social organization in which the mother or oldest female is the head of the family, and descent and relationship are reckoned through the female line; government or rule by a woman or women."''Oxford English Dictionary'' (online), entry ''matriarchy'', as accessed November 3, 2013. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matrifocal Family
A matrifocal family structure is one where mothers head families and fathers play a less important role in the home and in bringing up children. Definition The concept of the matrifocal family was introduced to the study of Caribbean societies by Raymond Smith in 1956. He linked the emergence of matrifocal families with how households are formed in the region: "The household group tends to be matri-focal in the sense that a woman in the status of 'mother' is usually the de facto leader of the group, and conversely the husband-father, although de jure head of the household group (if present), is usually marginal to the complex of internal relationships of the group. By 'marginal' we mean that he associates relatively infrequently with the other members of the group, and is on the fringe of the effective ties which bind the group together". Smith emphasises that a matrifocal family is not simply woman-centred, but rather mother-centred; women in their role as mothers become key t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Books About Feminism
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Goldberg
Steven Goldberg (born 14 October 1941) is a native of New York City and chaired the Department of Sociology at the City College of New York The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a public university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, Cit ... (CCNY) from 1988 until his retirement in 2008. He is most widely known for his theory of patriarchy, which attempts to explain male domination through biological causes. Books * '' The Inevitability of Patriarchy''. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1973. * ''When Wish Replaces Thought: Why So Much of What You Believe Is False''. Buffalo, New York: Promethius Books, 1991. * ''Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance''. Chicago, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1993. * ''Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences''. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2003. References * Further rea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
When God Was A Woman
''When God Was a Woman'' is the U.S. title of a 1976 book by sculptor and art historian Merlin Stone. It was published earlier in the United Kingdom as ''The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites''. It has been translated into French as ''Quand Dieu était femme'' (SCE-Services Complets d'Edition, Québec, Canada) in 1978, into Dutch as ''Eens was God als Vrouw belichaamd – De onderdrukking van de riten van de vrouw'' in 1979, into German as ''Als Gott eine Frau war'' in 1989 and into Italian as ''Quando Dio era una donna'' in 2011. Stone spent approximately ten years engaged in research of the lesser-known, sometimes hidden depictions of the Sacred Feminine, from European and Middle Eastern societies, in preparation to complete this work. In the book, she describes these archetypal reflections of women as leaders, sacred entities and benevolent matriarchs, and also weaves them into a larger picture of how our modern societies grew to the present imbalanced state. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Third-wave Feminism
Third-wave feminism is an iteration of the feminist movement that began in the early 1990s, prominent in the decades prior to the fourth wave. Grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, Gen X and early Gen Y generations third-wave feminists born in the 1960s and 1970s embraced diversity and individualism in women, and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist. The third wave saw the emergence of new feminist currents and theories, such as intersectionality, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and postmodern feminism. According to feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, the "confusion surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature." The third wave is traced to the emergence of the riot grrrl feminist punk subculture in Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990s, and to Anita Hill's televised testimony in 1991 (to an all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee) that African-American judge Cla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Inevitability Of Patriarchy
''The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Domination'' is a book by Steven Goldberg published by William Morrow and Company in 1973. The theory proposed by Goldberg is that social institutions that are characterised by male dominance may be explained by biological differences between men and women ( sexual dimorphism), suggesting male dominance ( patriarchy) could be inevitable. Goldberg later refined articulation of the argument in ''Why Men Rule'' (1993). The main difference between the books is a shift of emphasis from citing anthropological research across all societies, to citing evidence from the workforce in contemporary western societies. "In his first book, the emphasis was on anthropological research evidence showing that no society had ever existed in which women ruled. In his more recent book the emphasis shifts to contemporary societies and the evidence that within the workforce vertical job seg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heide Göttner-Abendroth
Heide Göttner-Abendroth (born February 8, 1941 in Langewiesen, Germany) is a German feminist advocating ''matriarchy studies'' (also ''modern matriarchal studies''), focusing on the study of matriarchal or matrilineal societies. Life Göttner-Abendroth was born during World War II, and at the age of 12 moved with her parents from East Germany to West Germany. She has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Munich (1973) and worked as a teacher in philosophy at Munich University from 1973-1983. She became active in second-wave feminism from 1976 and came to be considered one of the pioneers of women's studies in West Germany at the time. Göttner-Abendroth describes increased conflict with other academics over her theories. This struggle for mainstream academic acceptance of matriarchal studies is the subject of Edition Amalia's ''Die Diskriminierung der Matriarchatsforschung: Eine moderne Hexenjagd'' (2003), a collection of essays from various scholars within the emerging fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matriarchal Religion
A matriarchal religion is a religion that focuses on a goddess or goddesses. The term is most often used to refer to theories of prehistoric matriarchal religions that were proposed by scholars such as Johann Jakob Bachofen, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Marija Gimbutas, and later popularized by second-wave feminism. In the 20th century, a movement to revive these practices resulted in the Goddess movement. History The concept of a prehistoric matriarchy was introduced in 1861 when Johann Jakob Bachofen published ''Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World''. He postulated that the historical patriarchates were a comparatively recent development, having replaced an earlier state of primeval matriarchy, and postulated a "chthonic-maternal" prehistoric religion. Bachofen presents a model where matriarchal society and chthonic mystery cults are the second of four stages of the historical development of religion. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matrilineality
Matrilineality is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's lineage – and which can involve the inheritance of property and/or titles. A matriline is a line of descent from a female ancestor to a descendant (of either sex) in which the individuals in all intervening generations are mothersin other words, a "mother line". In a matrilineal descent system, an individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as their mother. This ancient matrilineal descent pattern is in contrast to the currently more popular pattern of patrilineal descent from which a family name is usually derived. The ''matriline'' of historical nobility was also called their enatic or uterine ancestry, corresponding to the patrilineal or "agnatic" ancestry. Early human kinship In the late 19th century, almost all prehistorians and anthropologists believed, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Dashu
Maxine Hammond Dashu (born 1950), known professionally as Max Dashu, is an American feminist historian, author, and artist. Her areas of expertise include female iconography, mother-right cultures and the origins of patriarchy. She identifies as a lesbian, her views on transgender rights and gender identity are a contentious issue and resulted in her being excluded from the Modern Witches Confluence. In 1970, Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives to research and document women's history and to make the full spectrum of women's history and culture visible and accessible.Women Library Workers (1983), volume 8. The collection includes 15,000 slides and 30,000 digital images. Since the early 1970s, Dashu has delivered visual presentations on women's history throughout North America, Europe and Australia. Dashu is the author of ''Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700–1100'' (2016), the first volume of a planned 16-volume series called ''Secret History ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beacon Press
Beacon Press is an American left-wing non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It is known for publishing authors such as James Baldwin, Mary Oliver, Martin Luther King Jr., and Viktor Frankl, as well as ''The Pentagon Papers''. History The history of Beacon Press actually begins in 1825, the year the American Unitarian Association (AUA) was formed. This liberal religious movement had the enlightened notion to publish and distribute books and tracts that would spread the word of their beliefs not only about theology but also about society and justice. The Early Years: 1854–1900 In the Press of the American Unitarian Association (as Beacon was called then) purchased and published works that were largely religious in nature and "conservative Unitarian" in viewpoint (far more progressive, nonetheless, than many other denominations). The authors were often Unitaria ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
