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.
  • Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness. Chicago Review Press. 4 September 2018. p. 393. ISBN 978-1-64160-039-2. 

• 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?
  • Phyllis Chesler, Chesler, Phyllis (4 September 2018). Women and Madness. Chicago Review Press. p. 399. ISBN 978-1-64160-039-2. 

• Matriarchy is a stage on the way to patriarchy, to man’s fullest realization of himself; he goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it. Though it’s true that woman’s lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good; for despite all the nostalgia it is not hard to prove that matriarchy was never an answer to women’s fundamental oppression. Basically it was no more than a different means of counting lineage and inheritance, one which, though it might have held more advantages for women than the later patriarchy, did not allow women into the society as equals. To be worshipped is not freedom. For worship still takes place in someone else’s head, and that head belongs to Man. Thus throughout history, in all stages and types of culture, women have been oppressed due to their biological functions.
  • Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 74.