Matriarchy

Matriarchy is a social organizational form in which the mother or oldest female heads the family. Descent and relationship are determined through the female line. It is also government or rule by a woman or women. While those definitions apply in general English, definitions specific to the disciplines of anthropology and feminism differ in some respects.

Quotes

• In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been...ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.
• Survival is the characteristic property of power. To those who think I am suggesting that we have a war between the sexes, I say: but we've always had one...Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture?

• Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler

• The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.
  • Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who lived in Hiroshima when it was hit by an atomic bomb, survived, chose to move to Nagasaki, which was then hit by another atomic bomb, and survived that, too, living until 2010, all according to Steven Pinker.
  • Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (N.Y.: Viking, hardback 2011 ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3, p. 684.