In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

180 8 Matriarchal Myth in the Late Nineteenth Century Why Then? Why Not Before? Nothing, perhaps, gives a more instructive insight into the true condition of savages than their ideas on the subject of relationship and marriage; nor can the great advantages of civilisation be more conclusively proved than by the improvement which it has already effected in the relation between the two sexes. —John Lubbock PRECONDITIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATRIARCHAL MYTH It is a matter of historical record that in the early 1900s, matriarchal myth lost most of the ground it had gained among anthropologists in the late nineteenth century; but what is perhaps more curious is why it ever attained such currency in the first place. As we have seen, this was no marginal or passing fad, but a theory that sprang up in several places virtually at once (with Bachofen in Switzerland , McLennan in Britain, and Morgan in the United States) and that received an enthusiastic reception not only in the anthropological circles it called home, but also across the humanistic and social scientific disciplines, some of which carried it forward into the twentieth century. The matriarchal thesis even caught on outside the academy, mainly via Engels, Bebel, and first-wave feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who took it into the heart of nineteenthand twentieth-century political movements. What confluence of factors in the late nineteenth century suddenly gave matriarchal myth such widespread appeal? It is not as though the idea of matriarchy had never crossed human minds before . As we have seen, from antiquity on, Amazon legends were a popular form of literature and even of imaginative ethnography. But up until the late nineteenth Matriarchal Myth in the Late 19th Century 181 century this interest in powerful women and gender reversals faced two insurmountable constraints. First, until Lyell’s acceptance of the doctrine of human antiquity in 1859, the six-thousand-year biblical timescale for “Man” was the reigning theory. A few individual thinkers, such as Voltaire in the eighteenth century, had questioned the biblical timescale aggressively, but no academic discipline had risked its reputation by denying it wholesale. Prudence dictated acceptance of the dual scriptural claim that human history went back six thousand years and that it was a history of male domination. If women ruled, then, they could only do so in some place outside the West, where they existed as perversions (or degenerations) of the cultural order set in place by no less a personage than God himself. And if there were places where women ruled, they had not been found. Prior to the flowering of the matriarchal thesis, there had of course been reports of Amazons and matriarchies , but none were corroborated. Both of these constraints were lifted in the late nineteenth century: prehistory expanded to such a degree that virtually anything could have happened before written records, and ethnographies of different people and their strange customs proliferated, opening up the possibility that men were not everywhere or at all times dominant. Of these two, the discovery of human antiquity was undoubtedly the more important. The idea of prehistory barely existed in Europe prior to 1859. With the Bible taken as a historical text, some information about human history was provided from creation through to civilization. And extensive records began with classical antiquity, which meant that of six thousand years of human history, nearly half were relatively well known even apart from biblical narratives. After the discovery of human antiquity, in contrast, prehistory mushroomed by several orders of magnitude. Suddenly there were hundreds of thousands , even millions of years of human life about which we were ignorant. As archaeologists like to point out, if the history of humanity were a book 400 pages long, beginning with “the first time a human ancestor stood upright on the African savanna,” the only part of the book we could read—that is, the only part of human history covered by written texts—would be the last half of the last page. This leaves more than 99 percent of human existence in the vast realm of prehistory , home of bones, tools, and only very late in the game, artwork and habitations . For late nineteenth-century thinkers, this was an enormous blank canvas positively begging to be blocked out and painted. The story of human life on earth, formerly given only to sequels, was abruptly subject to a prequel of truly astonishing length. The effect this had on matriarchal myth was profound. Scattered, fanciful legends...

Share