TL;DR

  • World myths often depict female creators, fueling theories of ancient matriarchy (female rule or centrality).
  • J.J. Bachofen (1861) proposed a universal “Mother Right” stage, influencing Engels, feminists, and even some Nazi ideologues, though often based on interpretations of myth.
  • 19th/20th-century anthropologists debated this; figures like Morgan supported it, while Maine, Westermarck, and later Malinowski critiqued it, finding no clear evidence of female political rule.
  • Second-wave feminism revived interest (e.g., Gimbutas’ “Old Europe”), but faced scholarly criticism emphasizing lack of proof and alternative interpretations (e.g., Bamberger’s myths justifying patriarchy).
  • Modern research focuses on tangible female contributions (grandmother hypothesis, cooperative breeding, language origins via motherese, potential roles in innovation/agriculture) and primate analogies (bonobos) rather than literal matriarchy. Consensus: No proven matriarchal societies, but women were crucial culture-shapers.

Female Creators in Myth and Cosmology#

Across world mythologies, women often appear as primordial creators or culture-bringers. In Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime narratives, for example, ancestral sisters are credited with establishing law and ceremony. The Wawilak Sisters of Arnhem Land “laid down much of the law and ceremony” for the first people, teaching them the moral code that endures to this day. As they journeyed, these sisters named the land and created sacred rituals, essentially founding key elements of culture in Yolngu tradition. Similar themes emerge elsewhere: in Navajo cosmology, Changing Woman is a central figure who gives birth to twin culture heroes and helps shape the world of the “Earth Surface People,” introducing order and new beings into creation. In Shinto lore of Japan, the sun goddess Amaterasu not only embodies the life-giving solar force but is mythically the ancestress of the imperial line; the first Japanese emperor is said to be her descendant, marking a divine female origin of social authority.

These myths articulate a vision of women as generators of life and law. Many early societies personified the earth or fertility as female – from the Great Mother goddesses of Old Europe to the “first woman” figures in indigenous legends. Prehistoric art hints at similar ideas: the prevalence of Paleolithic “Venus” figurines has led some scholars to hypothesize an ancient cult of a Mother Goddess, suggesting that early humans revered a female creative principle as the source of culture and community. While interpretations vary, such mythic and symbolic evidence set the stage for later theorists who imagined that women once actually held dominant roles in society, giving rise to the earliest human institutions.

Bachofen’s Mutterrecht: A Matriarchal Prehistory#

The modern scholarly idea of women as originators of civilization began with Johann Jakob Bachofen’s seminal 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (“Mother Right”). Bachofen, a Swiss jurist and classicist, proposed that human society had passed through an early gynecocratic (female-ruled) stage before patriarchy. He argued that in the primitive era of humanity, promiscuous relationships prevailed (“Hetärismus”), which meant paternity was uncertain, so descent and inheritance could only be traced through the mother. According to Bachofen, this gave rise to a universal period of mother-right (Mutterrecht) in which women – as the only verifiable parents – enjoyed high honor and authority. He believed that “the first human societies were matriarchal and characterized by widespread promiscuity, which was reflected in the worship of female deities” He treated mythologies as if they were fossil records of social evolution, insisting that myths are “living expressions of the stages in a people’s development”. For example, he saw the Greek tragedy of Orestes – where Orestes is tried for killing his mother Clytemnestra – as symbolizing the overthrow of mother-right by father-right in antiquity. (In the play, the new gods Apollo and Athena side with Orestes, legitimating the principle that the father’s line matters more than the mother’s, thus allegorically representing patriarchy’s triumph.) Bachofen also drew on reports of foreign customs (for instance, he noted maternal kinship among the Lycians of Asia Minor) and on archaeological female symbols. From all this, he constructed a grand evolutionary scheme of cultural phases: from chaotic Hetärismus arose a matriarchal, earth-and-fertility-centered era (exemplified by agriculture and goddess worship), which in turn was eventually replaced by patriarchal order.

Notably, Bachofen idealized the matriarchal age as one of peace and social harmony. In his view, “the matriarchal period of human history was one of sublime grandeur” in which women’s values reigned: mothers inspired “chastity and poetry,” pursuing peace and justice while taming the “wild, lawless masculinity” of men. He believed this feminine principle sanctified the family and society until it was supplanted by a more aggressive male principle. Bachofen’s evocative (if speculative) work portrayed the shift to patriarchy as a profound revolution. He wrote, for example, that in Greek myth it took a divine intervention – the coming of new patriarchal gods – to “accomplish the miracle of overthrowing mother-right” and establish father-right.

Bachofen’s theories were bold and unorthodox for their time. His reliance on intuitive readings of myth and his assertion that legends preserve a “realistic, if distorted” picture of prehistoric social reality disturbed more empirically minded scholars. The eminent Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck, in The History of Human Marriage (1891), rejected Bachofen’s method, being “disturbed by Bachofen’s idea that myths and legends preserve the ‘collective memory’ of a people”

Nonetheless, Das Mutterrecht planted a seed that would heavily influence generations of thinkers (for good or ill). As one historian notes, Bachofen “created a theory of human and cultural development” with women at its center, and though initially neglected, his ideas were later taken up across the ideological spectrum in Germany – by socialists, fascists, feminists, and anti-feminists alike.

Evolutionary Anthropology and the Matriarchy Debate (1860s–1900s)#

Bachofen’s thesis arrived just as anthropology and social theory were developing evolutionary frameworks for human institutions. In the late 19th century, a number of prominent scholars either embraced or argued against the notion of an archaic matriarchate while constructing grand theories of societal progress.

On one side, Bachofen found enthusiastic supporters among early anthropologists and social theorists who were searching for universal stages of cultural evolution. The American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan – famed for his study of the Iroquois – independently concluded that prehistoric society was originally organized around matrilineal clans. In Ancient Society (1877), Morgan documented how many indigenous peoples traced kinship through the mother and proposed that primitive humanity practiced group marriage, making motherhood the only certain parenthood. He saw in the “classificatory” kinship systems of Native Americans a clue that, in early times, “descent in the female line” was the norm before the rise of monogamy and paternal descent. Morgan’s evidence-based approach (drawing on ethnographic data from the Iroquois, Polynesians, etc.) gave some empirical heft to Bachofen’s intuitions. It convinced him that the patriarchal, monogamous family was a relatively late development in human history, preceded by a long era of what he termed the maternal clan organization.

British anthropologist John Ferguson McLennan likewise argued in 1865 and 1886 that early societies had maternal descent; he coined the term “exogamy” and suggested that wife-capture and female scarcity led to customs that indirectly imply a prior mother-right system. McLennan ultimately credited Bachofen for identifying maternal lineage as original. Even the famous author of The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer, was fascinated by the idea – he set himself the task of compiling global evidence for matriarchy, attempting to bolster Bachofen’s claims with comparative folklore and myth.

Perhaps most influentially, Friedrich Engels – the Marxist theorist – adopted the notion of primordial matriarchy and wove it into historical materialism. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels drew heavily on Morgan (whom he praised for discovering the “prehistory” of the family) and on Bachofen’s insights. Engels asserted that the downfall of mother-right was intimately connected to the rise of private property. In tribal communistic society, he argued, women had a relatively high status, but as wealth accumulated and paternity became important for inheritance, men seized control. Engels famously wrote: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex… die Frau wurde entwürdigt, geknechtet, … bloßes Werkzeug der Kinderzeugung.” According to Engels, this “defeat” of women ushered in the first class inequality (between sexes), which was then compounded by class stratifications. He linked the emergence of patriarchy to the advent of heritable property and monogamous marriage designed to ensure paternity certainty.

Engels’ dramatic formulation gave the matriarchy hypothesis wide currency in leftist and feminist circles. It also firmly tied the belief in a prehistoric matriarchy to certain political interpretations: for Marxists, primitive mother-right represented an early form of communal, egalitarian society that was undone by the rise of class society. This politicization sometimes overshadowed empirical evidence. As anthropologist Robert Lowie later remarked, Engels and others were so captivated by Morgan’s and Bachofen’s vision that “the historical reality of an epoch of matriarchy” was often assumed rather than demonstrated.

Meanwhile, other scholars strongly challenged the idea of primordial matriarchy. The English jurist Sir Henry Maine, as early as 1861, insisted that the basic social unit of earliest society was the patriarchal family, not a matriarchal clan. Maine, coming from a background in ancient law (and influenced by the classical image of the patria potestas in Rome), argued that paternal authority and agnatic kinship were primeval. He viewed theories like Bachofen’s as speculative “romances” contrary to both Roman legal history and the Bible. In 1891, Westermarck’s extensive study of marriage similarly concluded that while maternal kinship was common in many cultures, there was no solid evidence of a past era where women ruled over men; he aimed to “reestablish Maine’s patriarchal theory of human origins” and dismissed Bachofen’s mythic evidence. By the turn of the 20th century, a significant number of anthropologists were skeptical that any society had ever been a true matriarchy (in the sense of political governance by women) – a skepticism that would only grow stronger with more ethnographic data.

Early 20th-Century Developments: From Goddess Worship to Critique#

Around the dawn of the 20th century, the matriarchy hypothesis was both refined by new evidence and attacked by emerging social scientists. On the supportive side, Classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists applied Bachofen’s ideas to ancient Greek culture. Harrison believed that pre-Hellenic Greece had been characterized by goddess-centered religion and perhaps matrilineal social customs. In works like Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912), she argued that many Olympian myths and rituals (the cult of Demeter, the story of the Amazons, etc.) preserved traces of an earlier matriarchal or at least “matrifocal” epoch. Her interpretation of Greek art and myth posited an emotional, communal, female-centered substratum beneath the later male-dominated pantheon. Harrison even described the culture of archaic Greece as one of “mother-right” overturned by later invasions, aligning with Bachofen’s evolutionary narrative. This provoked pushback from more conservative classicists: scholars like Lewis Farnell and Paul Shorey criticized Harrison sharply, often in terms colored by the gender biases of their time. They derided her matriarchal ideas as fanciful and accused her of indulging in what one called “sex-freedom Hellenism,” linking her academic theories to the scandalous notion of women’s emancipation. Such reactions show how the debate intersected with contemporary attitudes – Harrison’s work was effectively attacked as a feminist subversion of classical scholarship at a time when the suffragist movement was in full swing.

Perhaps the most ambitious extension of the “women as founders of culture” thesis in this era was Robert Briffault’s The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927). Briffault – a French-born British anthropologist – amassed an encyclopedic collection of ethnographic examples to argue that nearly all fundamental aspects of civilization originated in the maternal sphere. He asserted that early human social life was shaped by women’s contributions: in his view, the family itself was “the product of the female’s instincts” and women were the first to create social bonds. Briffault defined the primeval matriarchy not necessarily as women governing men politically, but as women being socially central and culturally creative. He speculated, for instance, that the first rituals and religious cults were developed by women – noting the widespread prominence of lunar goddesses and menstrual taboos, he concluded that women as “the first hierophants of lunar cults” held early spiritual authority. He also formulated “Briffault’s Law,” which in its popular form states: “The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.” In other words, durable family or social units form around the needs and choices of females. (Briffault clarified he was describing animals, not saying human society is identical to animal harems. Nonetheless, the implication was that the human family originated from maternal initiative – females allowing males into the group only when useful.)

Briffault’s work boldly claimed that women invented civilization, from marriage and cooking to law and religion. This was a direct challenge to the prevailing narrative that male activities (like hunting or tool-making) drove progress. However, mainstream anthropologists of the day were not convinced. By the late 1920s, social anthropology was moving towards functionalism and skepticism of unilinear evolution. Bronisław Malinowski, who had studied the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders, contested Briffault’s conclusions. Malinowski found that even in societies without a concept of biological fatherhood (the Trobrianders believed children were conceived from ancestral spirits), men were far from irrelevant – maternal uncles and husbands played vital roles in the social and political life of the group. He debated Briffault in the 1930s, arguing that early human families likely always involved significant male contributions, and that “mother-centered” phase was being exaggerated. In Malinowski’s analysis, no known society gave exclusive power to women; what varied was whether descent was traced through mothers or fathers, not a total “rule of women” over men.

Furthermore, some scholars offered more complex evolutionary models. The Austrian ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt in the 1930s proposed a multilinear origin of culture: he suggested there were three primary types of prehistoric cultures – matrilineal, patrilineal, and patriarchal – depending on various ecological factors. Notably, Schmidt argued that women’s role in early plant cultivation could have elevated their status and fostered goddess worship in some regions. This resembles modern theories that women likely initiated agriculture (as gatherers domesticating plants) and invented important technologies like weaving and pottery, thereby catalyzing the Neolithic revolution. While Schmidt’s work is seldom cited today, it shows an attempt to incorporate both gender and environment into the story of cultural origins, rather than positing a single universal matriarchal age.

By mid-century, the weight of new ethnographic evidence led most anthropologists to a critical stance on the matriarchy hypothesis. Surveys of tribal societies failed to find any unequivocal examples of female-dominated political systems. Anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown declared in 1924 that “the maternal clan is not the matriarchy” – i.e. matrilineal kinship should not be conflated with women wielding authority over men. In 1930, E.E. Evans-Pritchard even suggested that the whole notion of an ancient matriarchal stage was a product of male fantasy (or anxiety), not historical reality. Nevertheless, the idea of a lost female-led era remained alluring, and it would soon find new life in different ideological contexts.

Ideologies and Interpretations: Politics of a Primordial Matriarchy#

Because the question of women’s primacy in culture strikes at fundamental issues of power and identity, it has been entangled with ideology from the start. Reactions to the matriarchy thesis have often mirrored the zeitgeist of the era – from Victorian patriarchy to Nazi Germany to Second-Wave feminism.

Victorian anthropologists and social theorists who upheld patriarchal norms were among the first to resist the matriarchal model. Sir Henry Maine’s patriarchal theory, mentioned above, can be seen in part as a defense of the status quo: it aligned with the Biblical narrative of the patriarchs and with Victorian social mores that assumed male authority was natural and primeval. When Bachofen’s and Morgan’s findings began to circulate, some conservative scholars saw them as threatening. The notion that paternity was a late discovery and that early society honored women’s lineage clashed with both Christian and Victorian convictions about the God-given role of the father. As one reference work tartly put it in the early 1900s, the concept of matriarchy as a stage of development is “scientifically untenable” and the term itself is misleading. Such dismissals indicate that by that time, the academic establishment had largely rejected the idea – possibly not only on empirical grounds, but because it challenged deeply ingrained patriarchal narratives.

In the German-speaking world, Bachofen’s work experienced a revival in the early 20th century and found unlikely admirers among nationalist and fascist thinkers. This is a striking historical twist: even as National Socialism publicly exalted the Aryan male and relegated women to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church), some Nazi intellectuals were intrigued by the myth of ancient matriarchy. Scholars have noted that “matriarchal myth” had a curious political ambidexterity: it could appeal to the far left (Marxists, feminists) and the far right. In the 1920s and ’30s Germany, various völkisch (nationalist-folklore) writers appropriated Bachofen. For instance, Alfred Baeumler, a prominent Nazi philosopher, saw in the Indo-European past a synergy of masculine and feminine principles; he acknowledged a prehistoric period of gynæcocracy but cast it as a noble foil for the modern gender order. He believed (like Bachofen) that women’s independence had once been real but was rightfully overcome by male leadership – yet he also suggested that reviving the spiritual ideals of the matriarchal past could rejuvenate the nation. Another example is Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief ideologist, who in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) referred to primeval matriarchy in a convoluted way: Rosenberg envisaged a lost Aryan golden age that was not exactly matriarchal, but he did highlight the high status of women and mother-symbols among ancient “Nordic” peoples. Nazi advocates of the matriarchal theory never framed it as women ruling men; instead, they idealized “Germanic motherhood” as the nourishing core of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). In effect, they used the cachet of antiquity to glorify motherhood – but only within a strictly balanced gender order where male warriorship still prevailed.

It’s important to note that the Nazi interest in these ideas was fringe and somewhat contradictory. The Third Reich’s overall stance was that patriarchy and male dominance were natural (Hitler and Himmler certainly did not believe in female social primacy). Yet, as one scholar writes, “Bachofen’s ideas about matriarchy found champions even among the Nazi leadership, in spite of the regime’s celebration of Aryan manliness.” This paradox illustrates how mutable the matriarchal narrative can be: in Nazi hands it was twisted to reinforce a reactionary ideal of women as exalted mothers but politically subordinate. By the end of WWII, however, such notions largely disappeared from official discourse, tainted by association with Nazi occultism and volkish pseudo-history.

In the Soviet Union and other Marxist contexts, the matriarchal theory had a different career. Engels’ authority made the idea of a primordial matriarchy (and its downfall) something of a Marxist orthodoxy in the early 20th century. Soviet anthropologists and historians, following Engels, taught a sequence of societal stages: primitive communism with mother-right, then class society with father-right, and eventual future communism restoring equality. In practice, Soviet research in the 1920s–50s did look for evidence of matrilineal clans among peoples of the USSR and beyond, often emphasizing those findings that fit the Morgan-Engels framework. However, they stopped short of claiming women ruled in those groups – it was more about communal social structures than female domination. The political utility of this narrative for Marxists was clear: it underscored that modern patriarchy (and by extension, capitalism) was neither eternal nor natural, but a historical development that could be overturned. Still, by the later 20th century, even Marxist scholars like Evelina B. Pavlovskaya began to concede that the “classic matriarchy” was never a documented reality, and they shifted to talking about relative egalitarianism in early societies instead.

It was in the 1970s, amid the Second-Wave feminist movement, that the idea of a prehistoric women-centric age achieved its widest popular reach – and provoked new scholarly scrutiny. Many feminist writers, artists, and activists were inspired by the vision of an ancient Goddess culture in which women had autonomy and respect lacking in recorded history. Archaeological finds and reinterpretations helped fuel this. Notably, Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas advanced the concept of “Old Europe,” a Neolithic civilization (circa 7000–3000 BCE in the Balkans and Anatolia) that she characterized as goddess-worshiping, egalitarian, and matristic. Gimbutas’s excavations uncovered numerous female figurines and she identified symbols which she believed indicated a prevalent mother-goddess religion. In her view, these Old European societies were peaceful and woman-centered until Indo-European nomads—patriarchal warriors—invaded and imposed a male-dominated order. Gimbutas stopped short of calling these cultures matriarchal (she preferred terms like “woman-centered” or matristic), because she wasn’t claiming women held formal power over men. Nonetheless, her work was taken up by feminists as evidence that patriarchy was not always the norm.

Meanwhile, popular books by authors like Elizabeth Gould Davis (The First Sex, 1971) and Merlin Stone (When God Was a Woman, 1976) painted vivid pictures of a lost golden age of matriarchy and goddess religion. They drew on sources like Bachofen, Briffault, and Gimbutas (along with a dose of imaginative reconstruction) to argue that women were the original civilizing force – inventing agriculture, writing, medicine, and governing in peace – until men’s violence overturned the balance. These works resonated with the feminist spiritual movement, contributing to a surge of Goddess spirituality and neo-pagan practice in the late 20th century. For some, believing in a distant time when “woman was worshipped as deity” and societies were free of male domination was profoundly empowering, a mythic counter-narrative to patriarchy. In certain feminist circles, this “matriarchal prehistory” became almost a dogma, used to imagine an alternative future. As historian Cynthia Eller observes, “in some feminist circles, what I have called the myth of matriarchal prehistory has reigned as political dogma; in others it has provided food for thought; in yet others it has served as the basis of a new religion.”

However, this enthusiastic revival triggered a critical response from scholars, including many feminists, who worried about wishful thinking. As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had poured cold water on the idea of a matriarchal utopia. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir dismisses the hypothesis of an original matriarchy as “les élucubrations de Bachofen” – “the lucubrations (ridiculous ravings) of Bachofen.” She and other mid-century intellectuals (like anthropologist Françoise Héritier in France) argued that while female deities or mother-symbols are common, there is no evidence that women as a group ever ruled prehistorically. In 1974, anthropologist Joan Bamberger published a famous essay titled “The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society,” examining myths from Amazonian tribes in which women allegedly once held power. Bamberger found these stories were told by men as cautionary tales – teaching that when women had power, they misused it, thus justifying why men must rule now. Her conclusion was that the matriarchal age is a myth created by men, reflecting anxiety about female autonomy rather than historical memory. This echoed earlier functionalist interpretations: rather than being evidence of an actual past, myths of women’s rule serve current social purposes (often to reinforce patriarchy by showing the chaos of “women in charge”).

By the late 20th century, the scholarly consensus – among archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians – was overwhelmingly that no known society in human history has been a matriarchy in the strict sense of women exercising political authority over men as a general rule. Many egalitarian or matrilineal societies exist, but they are not mirror-image “women-ruled” cultures. As the Wikigender encyclopedia succinctly notes, the very term matriarchy became problematic and most academics saw Bachofen’s sequential model as “scientifically untenable.” Even proponents of female-in-prehistory theories, like Gimbutas, avoided the word matriarchy due to its implication of female dominance, opting for nuanced terms (e.g. “matrifocal,” “gynocentric,” etc.) Nonetheless, outside academia the vision of a lost matriarchal paradise had entered the popular imagination and feminist consciousness. It sparked valuable debates about the role of women in evolution and history, despite the lack of concrete proof for a “Mother Age.”

Re-focusing on Evidence: Anthropology, Biology, and Language#

In recent decades, researchers across several fields have steered the discussion toward what the empirical record can tell us about women’s contributions to the human story. Rather than asking “was there ever a matriarchy?” scholars probe how female individuals and female-led activities might have been pivotal in human evolution and the development of culture. This approach shifts from ideological extremes to a more evidence-based, and often more nuanced, understanding – one that acknowledges women as active agents in prehistory even without grand claims of female rule.

Primatology has provided illuminating (and humbling) context by examining our ape relatives. For much of the 20th century, models of human evolution were based on observations of common chimpanzees – patriarchal, aggressive, male-bonded societies where males dominate and even brutalize females. This fed the assumption that the “natural” state of hominids was male dominance and that early humans lived in man-the-hunter bands. But the discovery and study of bonobos (Pan paniscus) radically challenged this view. Beginning in the 1990s, primatologist Amy Parish and others highlighted that bonobos are female-centered: “Bonobos are female-dominated, using sexual contact between both males and females as a kind of social glue. And crucially, females form strong bonds even with females they’re unrelated to.” In bonobo groups, males are less violent and often occupy the lowest ranks, with high-ranking elder females and their alliances keeping the peace. This discovery – “an astonishing conclusion” that chimps and bonobos, despite both being equally close to us genetically, have opposite social structures – forced scientists to rethink the inevitability of patriarchy in our lineage. As science writer Angela Saini notes, bonobos showed that a matriarchal model exists in nature, raising fresh questions about human ancestry: Could our early hominin societies have been less male-dominated than those of chimpanzees? Might cooperative female networks have been key? While humans are not bonobos, this insight opened minds to variability. It also lent credence to hypotheses (like those of Chris Knight, discussed below) that emphasize female coalition and sexuality in human evolution, and it provided a kind of natural analogy for how female leadership can function in a primate group.

Evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology have similarly begun to credit women’s roles in the deep past. One influential idea is the “grandmother hypothesis,” proposed by Kristen Hawkes and others, which suggests that human longevity (specifically menopause and long post-reproductive lifespan in women) evolved because grandmothers contributed crucially to the survival of grandchildren. According to this hypothesis, in early Homo sapiens communities, older women who could no longer bear children would help provision and care for their grandchildren, allowing their daughters to have the next baby sooner. This grandmothering practice would increase the overall reproductive success of the group. It implies that the presence of supportive, knowledgeable women was a driving force in human life history evolution – essentially, the human “condition” of multi-generational families and cooperative childrearing owes a debt to prehistoric grandmothers. Recent studies have indeed found evolutionary benefits to living near grandmothers (e.g., a decreased child mortality). Such findings shift the narrative: instead of man-the-hunter as hero of evolution, we have woman-the-alloparent (co-mother or grandmother) as a unsung hero ensuring our species’ success.

The theme of cooperative breeding – that humans are “the caregiving ape,” relying on many helpers to raise each child – has been championed by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Hrdy argues that early human mothers could not have weaned and raised offspring with large brains and long childhoods alone; they needed assistance from kin (including grandmothers and older children). This fostered unprecedented levels of empathy, communication, and social intelligence among our ancestors. Interestingly, this line of reasoning loops back to the origin of culture: if human infants are born needy and social, and if mothers recruit help, then the very basis of social cooperation and perhaps language might lie in mother-child (and mother-kin) interactions. Indeed, a recent scholar, Sverker Johansson, building on Hrdy’s work, suggests that the evolution of language may owe much to female cooperation. He notes that theories focusing on male mating competition don’t fit the evidence: “One common hypothesis, that language evolved through sexual selection – men competing for the attention of women – can be dismissed. Women and men talk equally well. And that means that an explanation for language has to be gender-neutral or near enough.” Instead, Johansson posits that language arose to facilitate group-wide cooperation in childrearing and other social tasks. He introduces what he calls the “chimp test”: any theory of language origin must explain why other primates (like baboons or chimps), which also have group living, didn’t evolve language. His answer is that early humans had a unique situation – perhaps related to difficult childbirth and the need for midwifery. He points out the fact that human babies, due to bipedalism and big brains, often required assistance during birth, and newborns are helpless. Thus, midwives and grandmothers turn out to be key in his scenario. In Johansson’s view, language may have developed first among females (mothers and other caretakers) as a system of communication to help each other (“Push now!” “Bring water!” or to soothe infants). Over many generations, these maternal vocalizations could become more elaborate and shared by the whole community. This resonates strongly with the “mother tongue hypothesis” previously suggested by anthropologist Dean Falk, who proposed that the very first words emerged from mother-infant “baby talk.” According to Falk, when early hominin mothers had to put their babies down to forage, they reassured and calmed them with melodic vocalizations (a precursor to lullabies or soothing speech). These emotive sounds – essentially an ancient form of motherese – gradually acquired meaning and structure, laying the groundwork for true language. Over time, what began as a communication between mother and child extended to the broader family and band, becoming a fully-fledged language shared by all.

Such hypotheses underscore that women’s social and nurturing activities could have been driving factors in the evolution of human symbolic culture. They are grounded in realistic evolutionary biology rather than romantic myth, but they still elevate the importance of females in the story of “what makes us human.”

Another area of interest is innovation and technology: archaeologically, some of the earliest cultural inventions likely came from women. For instance, the invention of containers (woven baskets, pottery) is often attributed to gatherer-craftspeople, presumably women in many Paleolithic and Mesolithic contexts. The development of agriculture in the Neolithic is widely thought to have been initiated by female gatherers who experimented with planting seeds. The domestication of animals may also owe something to women as handlers of small game or as those tending to orphaned animals. While direct evidence is scarce, this aligns with Schmidt’s observation that “women were involved in the earliest cultivation of plants” and that this increased their social importance, perhaps giving rise to goddess worship in early farming communities. Even the control of fire and invention of cooking – crucial milestones in human culture – can be partly credited to female effort: primatologist Richard Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis” argues that mastering fire to cook food was pivotal for human evolution, and in many foraging societies, women are the primary keepers of the hearth and knowledge of plant foods. Though we can’t know which sex first boiled water or roasted yams, it is reasonable to suppose that female nutritionists played as big a role as male hunters in prehistoric cuisine.

One modern theory that explicitly places women at the center of culture’s birth is the provocative work of Chris Knight. In Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991), Knight synthesizes anthropology, evolutionary biology, and mythology to argue that the first human symbolic culture was created by women’s solidarity. Drawing on the idea of a “sex-strike,” Knight proposes that early human females synchronized their ovulation and menstruation (perhaps using lunar cycles as a clock) and collectively withheld sexual access to males at certain times, in order to compel males to cooperate in hunting and sharing meat. According to Knight’s hypothesis, this gave rise to the first rituals and taboos – for example, menstrual taboos, red-painted bodies symbolizing blood, and the ritualized division of time into “female” (forbidden) and “male” (open) phases. He envisions that during the Upper Paleolithic (around 40,000 years ago), this women-led strike-and-celebration dynamic spurred the so-called “symbolic revolution” that many archaeologists identify (the sudden proliferation of art, personal adornments, complex burial rites, etc.) In Knight’s scenario, women’s collective action forged the social contract: hunters returned with meat which was distributed during post-menstrual feasts, cementing a new level of alliance between the sexes, but on women’s terms. As one summary puts it, Knight argues that “women, via sex and the rhythm of menstruation, nurtured the primal creative impulse of civilization and they essentially created human culture” The evidence Knight marshals ranges from the commonalities of creation myths (he analyzes the Aboriginal Wawilak sisters myth, for instance, as an allegory of menstrual synchrony and the origin of ritual) to the behavior of hunter-gatherers and primates. While many anthropologists find Knight’s theory speculative, it is a serious attempt to answer how a biological ape became a cultural human – and it does so by placing a cooperative group of women at the flashpoint of that transition, inventing the rules and symbols that made society possible.

On a different note, ethnographic and sociological studies of existing societies sometimes reveal powerful female roles that might reflect ancestral patterns. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, in her cross-cultural survey Female Power and Male Dominance (1981), identified several societies (from the Minangkabau in West Sumatra to certain Native American groups) where women enjoy substantial control over property, inheritance, and ritual, though they do not formally rule over men. Sanday used the term “matriarchy” cautiously to describe such cases, defining it not as mirror-image patriarchy but as a setting where female interests prevail in social affairs. She concluded that while no known society is strictly matriarchal, there is a spectrum of female status, and some cultures can indeed be called gynocentric. Contemporary examples like the Mosuo of China (with their matrilineal households and walking marriages) or the Kabyle myth of female saints in Algeria show that female-centric social organization is not purely a fantasy – though in each case, men still hold some political or physical power, preventing a true inversion of patriarchy.

Crucially, scientific consensus today does not support the notion of a past matriarchal civilization in the literal sense. What it does support is the view that women have always been integral to the human story – as gatherers and innovators, as carriers of culture and language, and as equal partners (if not leaders) in key social transformations. As the Encyclopedia Britannica succinctly notes, “no anthropological evidence has yet been found of a society in which women, as a group, ruled men as a group.” But abundant evidence does exist of early societies with matrilineal kinship and important religious or economic roles for women, and evolutionary theory increasingly recognizes female agency (through mate choice, parenting, and cooperation) as a driver of human evolution. In short, the “mother of culture” hypothesis in its strong form remains unproven, but in a weaker form – that mothers and grandmothers, wise women and goddesses, have always been at the foundation of what makes us human – it finds considerable support.

Conclusion#

The idea that women were the originators of the human condition and founders of culture has traveled a complex journey from myth to speculation to scientific analysis. It began in the realm of sacred stories: tales of goddesses and first women who birthed worlds, bestowed laws, and taught arts. In the 19th century, scholars like Bachofen transformed those tales into a grand theory of history, envisioning an actual epoch when women’s influence was supreme and human culture was born from the mother-right. This bold thesis captivated many – Morgan, Engels, and others – who blended it with emerging knowledge to argue that early society was woman-centered until private property or new gods tipped the balance. Over time, both the evidence and the ideological winds shifted. Anthropologists collected data that refuted a simple universal matriarchy, yet the allure of the concept persisted, reshaped by each era’s preoccupations: Victorian defenders of patriarchy dismissed it; totalitarian regimes appropriated or twisted it; feminist movements reinvented it as empowering myth; and anthropologists re-examined it through the lens of primate behavior, fossils, and kinship studies.

What emerges from this history is a richer appreciation of women’s role in human evolution that does not require a literal matriarchal kingdom. Women as creators – of life, certainly, but also of subsistence strategies, languages of comfort, networks of sharing, and sacred meaning – have always been central to our species. As our understanding deepens, we find that the question is not whether women were originators of aspects of culture, but how and in what ways. Modern research suggests that developments like prolonged childhood (and hence education), cooperative breeding, and communication may have depended as much on the X chromosome as the Y. The “first woman” of myths may not have ruled alone, but she and her real-life counterparts among early Homo did help forge the human story – not in a golden matriarchy that vanished without a trace, but in the enduring, indispensable work of nurturing each new generation and sustaining the bonds that make culture possible.

FAQ#

Q 1. What is the “primordial matriarchy” hypothesis? A. It’s the theory, popularized by J.J. Bachofen in 1861 and later thinkers, that early human societies universally passed through a stage where women held dominant social, political, or spiritual power (“Mother Right”), often linked to matrilineal descent and goddess worship, before being replaced by patriarchy.

Q 2. Is there scientific proof of ancient matriarchal societies? A. No. While many myths feature powerful female figures and some societies are matrilineal or matrifocal, the scholarly consensus among anthropologists and archaeologists is that no evidence confirms a past era where women systematically ruled over men as a group. The concept is now seen more as a historical theory or myth itself.

Q 3. If matriarchy wasn’t real, how do scholars view women’s roles in cultural origins today? A. Research now focuses on specific, evidence-based contributions: the “grandmother hypothesis” (female longevity aiding offspring survival), women’s likely roles in inventing agriculture or early tech (pottery, weaving), the importance of mother-infant communication in language origins (motherese hypothesis), and female social strategies suggested by primatology (e.g., bonobo studies). Women are seen as central agents in evolution and culture, but not necessarily as rulers of a lost matriarchal world.

Sources#

•	Creation myth of Wawilak Sisters (Yolngu, Australia) – female ancestors establishing law and ritual
•	Navajo origin myth – Changing Woman as a creatrix figure
•	Japanese imperial myth – sun goddess Amaterasu as ancestor of the first emperor
•	Encyclopedia summary of Bachofen's theory and its reception
•	Engels citing Morgan on mother-right and the "world-historic defeat" of women
•	Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy debate in 19th c. anthropology (Maine, McLennan, Westermarck)
•	Harrison's matriarchal interpretation of Greek religion and contemporary critiques
•	Briffault's The Mothers – concept of women's social dominance and "Briffault's law"
•	Nazi-era appropriation of Bachofen (scholars like Baeumler and Rosenberg's views)
•	Second-wave feminist use of matriarchal myth (Eller's analysis; Gimbutas' findings)
•	Simone de Beauvoir's rejection of an original matriarchy as "Bachofen's lucubrations"
•	Joan Bamberger's study of matriarchy myths reinforcing male dominance
•	Bonobo society as female-bonded and its implications for human evolution
•	Johansson & Hrdy on cooperative childcare and language origins (midwives/grandmothers as key)
•	Dean Falk's "motherese" hypothesis for language evolution
•	Chris Knight's theory of menstrual synchronization and the origins of symbolic culture

Below is a plain-text bibliography table covering every source referenced in the report. URLs are given in full (not hyperlinked) so you can copy-paste them directly. 

Author(s) / Source Year (first ed.) Title (or entry) Type URL Johann Jakob Bachofen 1861 Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right) Book https://archive.org/details/Bachofen-Johann-Mutterrecht Lewis Henry Morgan 1877 Ancient Society Book https://ia801502.us.archive.org/8/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.174214/2015.174214.Ancient-Society.pdf John F. McLennan 1886 (orig. 1865–76) Studies in Ancient History (2nd series) Book https://ia601506.us.archive.org/28/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.45396/2015.45396.Studies-In-Ancient-History.pdf Sir Henry S. Maine 1861 Ancient Law Book https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22910/22910-h/22910-h.htm Edvard Westermarck 1891 The History of Human Marriage Book https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59386/59386-h/59386-h.htm Friedrich Engels 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Book https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ Jane Ellen Harrison 1903 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion Book https://archive.org/download/prolegomenatostu00harr/prolegomenatostu00harr.pdf Jane Ellen Harrison 1912 Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion Book https://archive.org/details/themisstudyofthe00harruoft Robert Briffault 1931 The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins Book https://electrodes-h-sinclair-502.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/the_mothers__matriarchal_theory_social_origins__robert_briffault_1931.pdf Bronisław Malinowski 1927 Sex and Repression in Savage Society Book https://archive.org/details/sexandrepression033038mbp Wilhelm Schmidt 1930 The Origin and Spread of the World Cultures Book https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.77086 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown 1924 “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa” Journal article https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/1885/1/mother-s-brother.htm E. E. Evans-Pritchard 1930 “Some Remarks on the Early History of Kingship” Journal article https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972000003928 Marija Gimbutas 1974 The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe Book https://archive.org/details/goddessesgodsofo00gimb Elizabeth Gould Davis 1971 The First Sex Book https://archive.org/details/firstsex00davi Merlin Stone 1976 When God Was a Woman Book https://archive.org/details/whengodwaswoman00ston Cynthia Eller 2000 The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory Book https://archive.org/details/mythofmatriarcha0000elle Joan Bamberger 1974 “The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society” Journal article https://radicalanthropologygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/class_text_052.pdf Peggy Reeves Sanday 1981 Female Power and Male Dominance Book https://archive.org/details/femalepowermaled00sand Kristen Hawkes et al. 1997 “Grandmothering, Menopause, and the Evolution of Human Life Histories” (PNAS) Journal article https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.95.3.1336 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy 2009 Mothers and Others Book https://faculty.sfcc.spokane.edu/InetShare/AutoWebs/SarahMa/Hrdy.pdf Sverker Johansson 2021 The Dawn of Language Book https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-dawn-of-language-sverker-johansson/ebook/9781529411423.html Dean Falk 2004 “Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: Whence motherese?” Journal article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027153090700047X Chris Knight 1991 Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture Book https://blackbooksdotpub.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/blood-relations-chris-knight.pdf Amy Parish 1996 “Female Relationships in Bonobos (Pan paniscus)” Journal article https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02733490 Wawilak Sisters myth Access 2025 Wawilak Sisters (Dreamtime) Web entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawalag Changing Woman myth Access 2025 Changing Woman (Navajo) Web entry https://www.britannica.com/topic/Changing-Woman Amaterasu myth Access 2025 Amaterasu (Japanese sun goddess) Web entry https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amaterasu

(If you need URLs for additional titles referenced only in passing—e.g., Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs—let me know and I’ll append them.)