Re: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past
Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2020 8:36 am
Part 2 of 4 (HIGHLIGHTS)
[Cultural Anthropology and Gender]
Most cultural anthropologists today forswear the tendency to draw easy equivalences between the practices of living peoples and our prehistoric ancestors. Even attempts to compare a wide swath of living cultures in search of their common features are increasingly out of fashion among anthropologists.
Still, anthropologists continue to speculate about prehistory through the use of ethnographic material … Without going to the extreme of suggesting that all human societies are blindly marching through a predetermined historical trajectory (with some … getting stuck in the early stages), it is still reasonable to hypothesize that there may be certain regularities in human social relations, ones we can uncover by looking at as many different societies as we can. Granted that tribal groups are not fossils from the Stone Age, they nevertheless have more in common with how we believe our prehistoric ancestors lived (namely, in small groups, subsisting by hunting and gathering or horticulture) than we do...
Existing ethnographies have been composed with a huge variety of agendas in mind, including everything from converting the primitive heathens to Western values to learning from the wise natives how to reform corrupt Western culture… many groups are now gone, and therefore we must rely on whatever existing records we have, no matter how poor, if we wish to learn anything at all from them. But even investigations undertaken now, presumably with a heightened methodological sophistication, must be carried out by many people. No one person could do the fieldwork necessary to have a firsthand appreciation of a large number of peoples…
[C]ollecting data on some predetermined item like cross-cultural religious practices assumes that there is something like "religion," as the researcher defines it, among the people under observation. Looking for religion is a near guarantee that one will find it, even if it's not there. The opposite holds true as well: walking into another society with the expectation that the people there may think about everything from ontology on up in a way completely foreign to you is likely to produce an ethnography full of fascinating exotica accompanied by reflections on the irreducible uniqueness of human cultures and thought systems…
For quite some time, it was thought that a full and accurate picture of a group's gender roles could be attained as soon as there were enough female ethnographers in the field, dutifully quizzing female informants. Early male ethnographers rarely asked about women's roles, and when they observed women in other lands, what they saw was influenced by their biases and expectations…
But the introduction of female fieldworkers into the discipline did not, as expected, suddenly throw a great light upon women's lives. If anything, the opposite occurred. The more cultural anthropologists looked at gender, the less, it seems, they were able to see ... or at least to agree upon. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to determine just what women's status was in any one group, not to mention across many cultures. [One anthropologist, Martin King Whyte, developed fifty-two different scales -- including such items as female infanticide, authority over children, menstrual taboos, control of property, sexual double standards, etc. -- against which women's status relative to men's could be measured. But applying these scales to ninety-three culture groups, Whyte came to the daunting conclusion that "we can find no evidence for the existence of any general 'status of women' complex that varies consistently from culture to culture." In a phrase, he argued, "there is no such thing as the status of women" (Status of Women, 10, 116, 169).] …
Two ethnographers reporting on the same group can -- and sometimes have -- come back saying opposite things. Often it seems to come down to the attitude of the observer: does she want the glass to be half full, or half empty?...
Whether out of loyalty to their informants or fear of ethnocentrism, many feminist anthropologists have been loath to see and name sexism in other cultures in places where they would find it in their own. Or conversely, they emphasize women's status and autonomy in other cultures in forms they would not recognize as such on their own turf. Anthropologist Alice Schlegel assures us, for example, that corn-grinding by Hopi women is not "the onerous and time-consuming task it would appear to be" since "women sing corn-grinding songs as they work to lighten the task and express its life-giving contribution." Perhaps we should not automatically assume that this is an instance of sexism, but it should at least raise a red flag in our minds. American slaves sang songs too (much to the satisfaction of their masters, who interpreted this as a sign of contentment), but this cannot justify the conclusion that slavery was not really an oppressive institution. Even if we had reports from slaves themselves in which they swore that they considered themselves fortunate in their lot, we would have to regard those reports with suspicion. Similarly, we should regard with suspicion women's statements from ethnographic contexts that appearances of sexism notwithstanding, they find their lives to their liking…
Au courant goals in the anthropology of gender are to "favor specific histories, debunk essentializing categories" and turn attention to "the subtleties, complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities of gender relations in different contexts."
[T]his is not the level at which the myth of matriarchal prehistory operates. It is a very general story, based on generalizing premises. One could, of course, reject the story on that basis alone, and many anthropologists (feminist and otherwise) do. But it seems more fruitful to give feminist matriarchalists the benefit of the doubt, and ask if the ethnographic record, mixed and contradictory as it is, lends support to their claims.
[Archaeology and Gender]
Archaeologists look first and foremost at the actual remains of prehistoric cultures: those things that can be dug up out of the ground, held in one's hands, and seen with one's eyes. Material evidence like this could provide an impressive amount of information about prehistory if our ancestors planted their remains to send us a message about their cultures: a sort of time capsule. But what we actually find -- "the accidentally surviving durable remnants of material culture" -- is more of a scattershot affair and, unfortunately, most remains are not detectably gendered…
Though almost everyone seems game to find gender in the archaeological record, no one is quite sure how it should be done, or even if it can be done. Skeletons can be sexed as male or female (within a margin of error), and then examined in order to draw tentative conclusions about women's and men's diet, life expectancy, and patterns of work based on bone degeneration, tooth wear, and mineral content in the bones themselves. Grave goods, if they differ between female and male skeletons, may also offer clues to prehistoric gender, and some paintings and sculptures give clear evidence of sex. But beyond this, it is impossible (at least without historical or ethnohistorical support) to know which artifacts go with which sexes. Even the most basic questions -- who makes those weapons? who uses those grinding stones? -- cannot be answered definitively through the preliterate material record alone. And so archaeologists typically rely on ethnographic analogies to other cultures to help them interpret the gendered significance of their material finds. For example, spear points are generally attributed to men, since in most human societies we know of, men are responsible for hunting…
Gimbutas was a grand theorist. She was not interested in reconstructing one possible account of one particular archaeological site; rather she was intent on telling the historical truth about a huge swath of human prehistory.
Gimbutas's defenders have suggested that her work has been dismissed by archaeologists because she portrayed prehistory as goddess-worshipping and matricentric. And yet earlier archaeologists made extensive claims for prehistoric goddess worship -- and even for a female priesthood -- while retaining a high standing in their field. More likely, Gimbutas's status in archaeology was peripheral because she represented a way of approaching prehistory that her colleagues had repudiated: she was considered passe, embarrassingly so. Like someone's eccentric uncle Henry, Gimbutas was infrequently criticized, and more often stolidly ignored by her archaeological colleagues, who did not wish to disown her but, on the other hand, didn't want to be publicly associated with her. As archaeologist Bernard Wailes reports, "Most of us tend to say, oh my God, here goes Marija again."…
Some feminist matriarchalists have explicitly defended the investigation of prehistory as a political exercise. Eschewing "objectivity" as neither possible nor desirable, they wish to work their "life experiences, histories, values, judgments, and interests" into their research as legitimate interpretive tools … Hodder claims that "the ultimate aim" of archaeology "can only be self-knowledge. In projecting ourselves into the past, critically, we come to know ourselves better."…
But it is an entirely different thing to suggest that because the past can be known only imperfectly, through the agency of biased individuals, that therefore one account of the past is as good or bad as another… Feminist matriarchalists do not wish to claim that all accounts of prehistory are relative, that there is no basis for choosing among competing accounts apart from individual preference and political usefulness, because then they would have to admit that androcratic interpretations of prehistory that stress the inevitability and universality of patriarchy are as valid as their own…
What is required then is some way of adjudicating competing truth claims about prehistory, a way of building rigor into accounts of prehistory. In judging the adequacy of feminist matriarchalist accounts of prehistory I will be working from a few simple standards ... First, an adequate account of the past must offer data in its support. Second, it must seek to interpret all the data, and not merely that which is convenient to or supportive of the theory. Third, it must strive to have conclusions follow evidence, rather than the other way around. And finally, it must be possible to show that an account is wrong or implausible: in other words, it must be falsifiable. This last standard of adequacy for an account of human prehistory is the most important one, and to a large extent subsumes the others. A theory may be interesting and provocative, even true; but if there is no way to tell whether or not it is true -- that is, no way to disprove it -- it can only be a conversation piece. It is no more likely to be accurate than any of dozens of imaginative and even compelling stories told about prehistory, stories that draw their persuasive power not from what we see in the prehistoric record but from our own culturally limited notions of what we wish or believe prehistory to have been like. [Problems with falsifiability arise perhaps most strongly when feminist matriarchalists reconstruct prehistory by offering evidence from memories of past lives, channelled information from disembodied spirits, or questionable sources of information such as the "collective unconscious" or "cellular memory," as they sometimes do… if what the collective unconscious tells you turns out to be different from what it tells me, who will -- who can -- referee our debate? There is simply no agreed upon method for adjudicating competing truth claims amongst different dreams, past lives, or disembodied spirits.]...
[Other Societies, Early Societies]
There are many claims that feminist matriarchalists make for prehistoric societies that can be tested against the ethnographic and archaeological records… they can be collected into four broad categories: reproduction and kinship, goddess worship, women's economic roles, and interpersonal violence… Here, confining ourselves to ethnographies from contemporary and historical societies and nonrepresentational material evidence from prehistoric societies, we will judge the plausibility of such central feminist matriarchalist claims as men's ignorance of their role in conception, the correlation between goddess worship and women's social status, women's invention of agriculture, and the peacefulness of prehistoric societies…
[Reproduction and Kinship]
According to feminist matriarchalists, the miracle of childbirth -- especially miraculous when no male role in conception was recognized -- caused all women to be viewed with respect and honor…
The idea that prehistoric peoples might not have recognized paternity was first proposed in the nineteenth century… W. E. Roth in 1903, who said the Tully River Blacks of North Central Queensland believed pregnancy resulted from a woman roasting black bream over a fire, catching a bullfrog, responding to a man's verbal instruction to become pregnant, or dreaming of having a child placed in her womb. Bronislaw Malinowski's reports from the Trobriand Islands engendered even more excitement back home in Europe. As Malinowski stated categorically in 1927, "The views about the process of procreation entertained by these natives ... affirm, without doubt or limitation for the native mind, that the child is of the same substance as its mother, and that between the father and the child there is no bond of union whatever."
Most contemporary anthropologists agree that these "proofs" of the ignorance of paternity were actually errors in ethnography. In the Trobriands, even Malinowski's own findings left room for suspicion: he reported that Trobrianders believed sexual intercourse was necessary for pregnancy (a woman's womb had to be "opened" so that a spirit child could enter); that children were thought to resemble their fathers as a result of the father's continued sexual intercourse with the mother; that the children of unmarried women were deemed illegitimate; and that pigs were thought to be conceived through their sexual intercourse with one another. Later ethnographers of the Trobriand Islanders came back with reports that differed from Malinowski's. For example, H. A. Powell was told that conception was a result of semen "coagulating" menstrual blood, clearly indicating the necessity of sexual intercourse. When Powell told his informants that this was different from what Malinowski had been told, they maintained that Trobriand beliefs had not changed, but rather that Malinowski had been listening to "men's talk," reserved for formal situations, whereas "women's and children's talk" -- intended to convey helpful information to youngsters -- had always maintained a connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. [Annette Weiner, claimed that the official denial of physiological paternity in the Trobriands was a social mechanism directed toward "preventing shame and open conflict" under the circumstance of widely practiced extramarital sex.]
Indeed, what seems to be more often in doubt across the ethnographic record -- even in the interesting cases of Australia and the Trobriands -- is how or whether mothers are related to their own children… women were not thought to reproduce parthenogenetically, magically creating children out of their own substance (the scenario most often envisioned by feminist matriarchalists for prehistoric peoples). Instead it was thought that women were impregnated by "spirit children" and that thereafter the mother "was merely the incubator of a spirit-child."
This should be a familiar theory to Westerners, since it was articulated by no less a light than Aristotle. Aristotle claimed that the form and essence of a child are given by the father and remain uncontaminated by the woman, who merely supplies the material substance for the child and contains it during pregnancy. We tend to think of the equal contribution of mother and father to their children's biological makeup as the truth of the ages, but it is a very recent discovery…Anthropologist Carol Delaney has shown that in present-day Turkey, Aristotelian beliefs about reproduction continue to flourish. As one villager explained, "If you plant wheat, you get wheat. If you plant barley, you get barley. It is the seed which determines the kind of plant which will grow, while the field nourishes the plant but does not determine the kind. The man gives the seed, and the woman is like the field." Or as one Albanian informant explained the facts of reproduction to ethnographer Rene Gremaux, "The woman is a sack for carrying."…
[A] notable commonality among all this variety is the insistence that there is a necessary relationship between sexual intercourse and conception… it is simply not believed that women bear children without any male participation whatsoever. It is also doubtful on commonsense grounds that human beings would be wholly ignorant of paternity. As Edmund Leach points out, "human beings, wherever we meet them, display an almost obsessional interest in matters of sex and kinship," and "presumably this has always been the case." Even evidence from the material record suggests that prehistoric peoples were aware of the relationship between sexual intercourse and conception. Paleolithic cave paintings depict animals mating, pregnant, and giving birth in such a way that these events seem connected. And a plaque from Catalhoyuk carved in gray schist shows "two figures in an embrace on the left and a mother and child on the right"…
It seems quite likely then that prehistoric peoples were aware of the male role in reproduction. Some feminist matriarchalists could agree to this quite readily, saying that prehistoric peoples were aware of biological paternity but simply chose not to grant it much significance. This is a hypothesis that cannot be disproven, but there is no ethnographic evidence for it whatsoever. Wherever we have encountered human groups, we have found individual men forming paternal relationships with the children of their wives or other female partners. Additional relationships between particular men and children definitely occur, but that between fathers and their children seems primary. [I was unable to find any ethnographies of groups that do not give fathers -- whether biological or adoptive -- strong and frequently decisive roles in relationship to their children. Many groups leave much of the basic caretaking work to women but still regard men as significantly and legitimately concerned with their children's welfare and able to make decisions on their behalf.] …
If it is possible for us and for many generations of our ancestors to systematically disadvantage women in spite of (or perhaps because of) their unique and essential mothering capabilities, why should it not have been equally possible for our prehistoric ancestors to do the same? In fact, ethnographic evidence suggests that childbirth does not regularly work to women's advantage. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner has noted that women tend to lose rather than gain status when placed in reproductive roles, and to be permitted greater liberties and occupy more powerful public positions when virginal or menopausal… [As Timothy Taylor notes, "child-rearing is hardly ever recognized as a job in market economic terms".] …
Anyway, given what we know of human nature, it would seem doubtful that childbirth would cause men to revere or even respect women in any pure or uncomplicated manner. When one group of people has a monopoly on a much-valued resource, the reaction of the have-not group is not typically one of worshipful awe. More often, the reaction is one of jealousy and resentment, and a wish to gain their own access to the coveted resource…
There is in fact some ethnographic evidence of men trying to gain some share of women's childbearing and other reproductive functions through ritual efforts, a practice that might be understood as womb envy… [Singer and Desole make a rather persuasive case for regarding subincision as an effort to make human penises resemble those of kangaroos. They note that Australian aboriginal cultures stress erotic pleasure, and that in such a context, "the prolonged copulation of the kangaroo, up to two hours," would not go unnoticed. They also point out that subincision greatly enlarges the width of the penis, causing it to look more like a kangaroo's.] …
Significantly, however, none of these ethnographic examples of male imitation of female reproductive powers is accompanied by any rise in women's status. Hiatt reports that the Australian aboriginal men who imitate childbirth regard themselves as superior to women and children; Meigs says that Hua women have no political voice and cannot own land or control the products of their own labor… And going on these particular ethnographic examples, it would seem that if prehistoric men did envy women's reproductive abilities, it would have worked to women's detriment.
One also has to ask how much prehistoric peoples valued reproduction. If it were extremely difficult to propagate, if tribes were in constant danger of dying out, it might be the case that fertility and childbirth would be highly valued. But it is doubtful that children were such a scarce commodity in prehistoric times. Prior to the Neolithic revolution, we have every reason to believe that prehistoric peoples, like contemporary hunting and gathering peoples, were more interested in restricting their fertility than enhancing it. Contraception, abortion, and infanticide are all practiced in hunting and gathering groups, and in horticultural societies as well, with infanticide rates ranging from 15 to 50 percent. Skeletal evidence suggests that childbirth was dangerous for mothers and children alike. Infant mortality rates were high at Catalhoyuk, for example, and women there and elsewhere died very young by our standards (on average in their late twenties, earlier than men) in part because of high maternal mortality. [Anthropologists estimate life expectancy at birth for tribal peoples as being anywhere from seventeen to thirty-three, figures also typical in most parts of the world through the nineteenth century, and in many parts of the world yet today (see Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza, Great Human Diasporas, 8). This is in sharp contrast with the picture painted by feminist matriarchalists. Mary Mackey's novels of prehistoric matriarchy are filled with queens, priestesses, and elders in their fifties and sixties, some over ninety years old, not to mention the more commonplace mothers and grandmothers whose age must average between thirty and fifty, even if they had their children at a very young age… it is still difficult to reconcile "the good life" which feminist matriarchalists attribute to Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples with the fact that few women would live to see four decades.] It seems unlikely under these conditions that pregnancy and childbirth were invariably regarded as miraculous and welcomed as the gift of a munificent goddess…
The matricentrism of prehistoric societies is said by feminist matriarchalists to be apparent in their "sensitive and careful burial of the dead, irrespective of sex, with a relatively uniform grave wealth." This evidence, if accurate, does not support assertions of matriarchy or even of sex egalitarianism… But what insight would this future archaeologist get about, say, gender relations in the contemporary United States? I am told by several cemetery directors that it is rare to see any distinctions between male and female burials apart from the type of clothing placed on the corpses… On the basis of contemporary U.S. cemeteries, we might conclude that twenty-first-century Americans lived in a sexually egalitarian society where there were only minor distinctions of wealth.
Some feminist matriarchalists have ventured to find evidence of matrilineal and matrilocal social structure in the overall layout of prehistoric graveyards. This has been especially true of Catalhoyuk… According to James Mellaart, the site's first excavator, men were buried under a small platform whose location was variable, while women were buried under a large platform that was always in a fixed spot in the room. Children were sometimes buried with women under the large platform or under additional platforms, but never with men.
Feminist matriarchalists have suggested that the woman under the large platform was the head of the household, while the man under the small platform was her brother or son. But there are other equally valid ways of interpreting the burial pattern at Catalhoyuk. If these were sleeping platforms, perhaps women's platforms were larger because women were expected to share their beds with more people (say, their children). Or maybe the dead were not placed under the spot where they customarily slept. Perhaps the large, fixed platforms belonged to the men, and they buried their wives and children under them to feel close to their deceased family members, or even to underscore the fact that in death -- as in life -- these people were considered their property. In actuality, very few skeletons recovered from Catalhoyuk were found complete, and it is possible that individual skeletons were not buried in a single location, but split up and "shared out among various buildings or platforms within a building"…
Further complicating the matter is the fact that the evidence from Catalhoyuk is apparently not as Mellaart presented it. Though adult men and women do seem to be buried in separate areas, it is now clear that children were sometimes buried with men and that women were buried in other locations besides under the large platform Mellaart identified as theirs. The current excavators of Catalhoyuk are speculating that burials in any one room were those of extended family members, and that buildings were abandoned upon the death of the senior member of that family. Based on the one room that has been fully excavated as part of the new work at Catalhoyuk, principal investigator Ian Hodder concludes that this senior member was probably a man.
Another matter of interest pertaining to the graves at Catalhoyuk is the disproportionately high percentage of female skeletons. Some feminist matriarchalists have explained this by saying that men, who were less important to the life of the community, did not always merit burial within the inner sanctum of the home. Archaeologist Naomi Hamilton has made the veiled matriarchalist suggestion that there were fewer men among the skeletons because women were killing male babies to oppose "an ideology of women as mothers and carers [sic] of males" and to create "their own majority" during a time when women's "social power was being eroded." This is a highly implausible scenario without any known ethnographic parallel, and one which presupposes that something detrimental was happening to women's status at Catalhoyuk -- something that hadn't already happened under earlier conditions. A rather obvious explanation for the disproportionate number of female skeletons is that men were not dying at home, but elsewhere, and that no one thought to (or was available to) bring their bodies back to the village. We know that the people of Catalhoyuk engaged in long-distance trade, and if men dominated this activity -- as men have tended to do in the ethnographic contexts of which we are aware -- they had plenty of opportunities to die away from their small sleeping platforms. The evidence of grave patterning does not, by itself, allow us to determine what gender relations the people of Catalhoyuk had in mind when they buried their dead as they did.
Matriliny and matrilocality certainly could have occurred prehistorically, if not at Catalhoyuk, then elsewhere. These kinship and residence patterns are attested ethnographically (though considerably less often than patriliny and patrilocality). However, they are associated with only "modest benefits for women," if any at all. [Of the 1,179 societies in the HRAF files compiled by Murdock, 75 percent are patrilocal while only 10 percent are matrilocal (Divale and Harris, "Male Supremacist Complex," 521). I am using the term "patrilocal" to include residence with the husband's family and "matrilocal" to include residence with the wife's family.] Indeed, in most societies we know of, matricentric and patricentric customs are mixed together. For example, the matrilineal Nairs "worship only male ancestors"; the patrilineal Mundurucu settle matrilocally, while the matrilineal Trobrianders settle patrilocally; in Wogeo, New Guinea, potential marriage partners are selected matrilineally, but succession of political office and inheritance of property are patrilineal. We also have reports of adjoining groups who practice different means of reckoning kinship and yet are virtually identical in all other relevant respects (such as religion, means of subsistence, form of habitation, and -- significantly -- relative gender status). Impressively, kinship can even be matrilineal in groups that insist that women are only passive carriers of men's seed, and patrilineal in groups that swear that men have no procreative role…
Some feminist matriarchalists like to imagine that marriage did not exist prehistorically, but some form of marriage is so consistently found cross-culturally that it is extremely likely that prehistoric peoples practiced it. And if the ethnographic record is any guide, marriage was probably not especially beneficial for women. One of the few things we can say with confidence about marriage cross-culturally is that it is overwhelmingly a heterosexual institution… It is within the institution of marriage, then, that women are most clearly defined as women, in opposition to men…
What is key to the feminist matriarchalist vision of prehistoric marriage is not its heterosexuality or lack thereof, but that marriage (if the institution existed) did not restrain women's autonomy, sexually or otherwise. However, one of the things marriage seems to do most efficiently -- cross-culturally speaking -- is to restrict women's choice in sexual partners (and men's too, though generally to a lesser extent). Within marriage, the demand for female sexual fidelity is quite common, as is the belief that a wife is the sexual property of her husband, who can use or transfer his rights in her as he sees fit… If one agrees that the ethnographic record provides clues to prehistoric life, we have to assume that marriage in prehistoric societies did not routinely enhance women's sexual freedom…
[b][Goddess Worship as Evidence of Matriarchy]
[F]eminist matriarchalists feel that the prevalence of goddess worship in prehistory confirms the gynocentric nature of these societies. As Judy Mann puts it, "if the goddess is female, then females are goddesses." [Ruby Rohrlich concludes that in early Sumer, women were "involved as warriors and generals" since in Sumerian myth Inanna slayed "the dragon Kur" ("State Formation," 90). One might as easily state that women in the first two millennia CE seem to have reproduced parthenogenetically, as reflected in the myth of the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus.] …[/b]
[F]eminist matriarchalists almost always posit a form of goddess monotheism for prehistory…Goddess monotheism has not been documented any place on the globe. Historical religions, from classical antiquity to the present day, are home to many different goddesses if they include female deities at all… [It has been quite conclusively shown that "Mother Earth" was a creation of European ethnographers rather than native peoples (see Gill, Mother Earth; Gill, "Making Them Speak"; Swain, "Mother Earth Conspiracy" … Rachel Fell McDermott suggests that this tendency to view the Hindu goddesses as representatives of "an overarching female power" did not develop until the sixth century CE, before which time a more traditional form of polytheism probably prevailed.] …
Another troubling fact about goddesses as we know them ethnographically and historically is that they do not always resemble the image that feminist matriarchalists stipulate for prehistoric cultures: the loving mother, the giver and taker of life, the embodiment of the natural world. Some goddesses are incredibly violent -- and not in a way that suggests the benevolent function of watching over the natural cycles of death and rebirth…
[G]oddesses are often known to support patriarchal social customs. Goddesses may have nothing whatsoever to do with women's religious needs, representing instead men's fantasies of "the Eternal Mother, the devoted mate, the loving mistress," or even the fearful nature of women's power (should it be allowed to wriggle out from under strict male control). [Goddesses sometimes function as warnings to men of the dangers women pose. For example, scholars of Hinduism have drawn a distinction between "small" goddesses, who are "beneficent and auspicious" -- and, not incidentally, "controlled by males" -- and "big" goddesses, who, since they are celibate, are independent of males and who are dangerous, death-dealing figures. As John Stratton Hawley concludes, "it is hard to consider Hindu visions of how the sexes may interact at the divine level without developing a powerful sense of men's fear of women. Such fear is often expressed as the desire to control" ("Goddess in India," in Hawley and Wulff, eds., Devi, 14).] Goddesses may be strongly, if ambivalently, distinguished from human women, and the differences between the two repeatedly emphasized: that is, goddesses "accentuate what womanhood is not"… devotees also report that there is "an unbridgeable chasm between goddesses and human women, since female bodies are irremediably permeated by evil and pollution." As one male pilgrim told Humes, "the difference between the Goddess and women is like the difference between the stone you worship and the rock on which you defecate." Goddess worship has been reported for societies rife with misogyny, and at times goddesses even seem to provide justification for beliefs and practices that are antiwoman…
[W]hat [matriarchalists] are proposing for prehistory is… goddess worship that is culturewide, exclusive, and consistently supportive of women's power and independence. They thereby put themselves in the very difficult position of arguing for a type of goddess worship that has never been seen, either historically or ethnographically…
Feminist matriarchalists are basically going on instinct in believing goddesses to be positively related to the status of women -- and instinct, in this case, does not prove to be a very good guide… They imaginatively place themselves in cultures that worship goddesses and cannot believe that "with such a powerful role-model," girls and women would not "naturally consider it their right and duty to fully participate in society and to take the lead in government and religion."…
[T]hough Jennifer and Roger Woolger admit that for women in Athens "there was little choice between being a homebound matron, a hetaera or high-class prostitute, or a slave," they nevertheless argue that "the mere existence of the various cults to goddesses as individual as Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, and Athena provided many rich possibilities for women's psychic and spiritual life… Gerda Lerner argues that "no matter how degraded and commodified the reproductive and sexual power of women was in real life, her essential equality could not be banished from thought and feeling as long as the goddesses lived and were believed to rule human life." This is a peculiar way of assessing women's status… "Free" women in classical Greece were lifelong legal minors who were mostly forbidden to leave their homes and who were not even their husbands' preferred sexual partners. What exactly is the point of celebrating this ancient culture's goddess worship and contrasting it to our own culture's lack of the feminine divine? [Feminist matriarchalists are not directly contradicting themselves when they revel in the goddess worship of classical Greek culture, for they regard classical goddess worship as "the afterglow of Old European times" (Haarmann, "Writing in the Ancient Mediterranean," in Marler, ed., Realm of the Ancestors, 108-109). What they celebrate in classical religion is not the goddess worship of a patriarchal culture, but the persistence of matriarchal religion into patriarchal times. Thus it is possible to condemn Athenian patriarchy but still notice its '''softer,' more creative, more 'feminine' underside" (Eisler, "Rediscovering Our Past," in Marler, ed., Realm of the Ancestors, 341).] …
Feminist matriarchalists sometimes retreat to the argument that such societies were "less male-centered than those which worshipped ... an omnipotent male deity, exclusively," even if they were not absolutely female-centered. [The Catholic priests who authored the Malleus Mallificarum, and thus kicked off several centuries of witch-hunting that preferentially targeted women, were "ardent worshippers of Mary" (Heine, Matriarchs, 143).] But some scholars of religion argue precisely the opposite of this thesis. Indeed, this is what a Marxist analysis of religion would predict: goddess worship would compensate women for what they lack in real economic and social power and would serve to keep women from rebelling against their actual low status. In examining the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, Ena Campbell notes that although Guadalupe "has eclipsed all other male and female religious figures in Mexico," she is worshipped more by men than women and is used in recompense for women's "actual position in the social scheme." Comparing data from Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Campbell concludes that "mother goddess worship seems to stand in inverse relationship with high secular female status." Thus, far from being a sign of special respect accorded to women, goddess worship would, in the absence of other evidence, be expected to correlate with a poor state of affairs for women…
In The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies, anthropologist Martin King Whyte attempted to uncover the determinants of women's status. Of the items he investigates having to do with religion, only one of them -- equally elaborate funerals for women and men, as opposed to women having none or less elaborate ones than men -- is shown to correlate with women's status at all, and that only weakly… It seems that people can worship gods or goddesses, have priests or priestesses, remember ancestresses or ancestors, without it having any particular effect on how ordinary women are treated. There is no warrant for the feminist matriarchalist assumption that prehistoric goddess worship, insofar as it existed, conferred greater respect upon women or insulated them from misogyny or subordination to men…
[Work and the Status of Women]
[O]nce agriculture was invented -- by women -- their added labor is said to have enhanced women's status further, giving them control over the group's produce and property…
Virtually all societies of which we are aware do stipulate different work for individuals based on their sex or gender, usually along the lines that feminist matriarchalists note: in foraging societies, men hunt and women gather; in horticultural societies, men continue to hunt or fish, but also clear and prepare land for farming, while women tend fields, carry wood and water, and care for children; in more intensive agricultural economies, the same pattern continues, with men doing proportionately more farm work and less hunting and fishing… Grave goods provide some support for the notion that these same divisions existed prehistorically. Generalizing for the Middle Neolithic in Europe (Gimbutas's "Old Europe"), Sarunas Milisauskas describes the contents of men's graves as "flint tools, weapons, animal bones, and copper tools" while women's included mostly pottery and jewelry. [It is possible of course that these items did not belong to the deceased, but were bestowed on them as part of funerary customs (see Hodder, Reading the Past, 53; Hayden, "Observing Prehistoric Women," in Claassen, ed., Exploring Gender through Archaeology, 37). Thus they may not reflect a sexual division of labor at all.] …
[T]hese patterns recur frequently, and anthropologists typically explain them in terms of what they say is a nearly universal desire to have women's work be compatible with caring for small children: women should perform only "tasks that are not dangerous, do not require distant travel, and are interruptible."...