July 9, 2002
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Securing the moral high groundAn interview with Riane Eislerby Stephanie Hiller |
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Riane Eisler: These are serious times when I am hoping that the progressive non-feminist non-children rights establishment will finally get it, that we've got to work on the foundations together.
AWE: What would that look like?
RE: Well it would look like the partnership agenda that I'm proposing. It has four planks, the first one being childhood, the second, gender, the third economics, and the fourth beliefs, myths, stories, including morality, spirituality. These are the things that we've neglected, except for economics. When I say "we" I mean the mainstream, progressive organizations.
It's not coincidental that historically those cultures that have been top down cultures that have relied on abuse and violence, that to maintain these rankings of domination, these cultures have always focused so heavily on primary relations, childhood relations, gender relations. We see it in modern history, we see for example that the so-called fundamentalist rightist alliance -- The defeat of the equal rights amendment, top priority; the taking away of reproductive freedom for women -- If they really cared about living beings instead of before you're born and after you die, right, they would focus on family planning among other things, they would focus on a social support for children regardless &endash; but of course they don't.
So it's not coincidental that these people focus so much on returning those relations to relations of domination and submission. Why? Because they're primary. Because that's where we first learn what is considered normal, natural and inevitable. And if you're going to rebuild these dominator cultures from the ground up, you are going to focus on these foundations.
But look at what's been happening in progressive politics. I mean, the mailings that you get, occasionally &endash; your progressive, your environmental organizations, social justice organizations, political campaign organizations, occasionally they throw a bone at issues of women and children. But it's hardly in the top priority, is it? And so fine, so they keep working on trying to change the top of the domination pyramid and they don't pay attention to the foundations. Whether it's under Hitler, let's return women to their traditional family, let's go back to a traditional family, Stalin, back to a traditional family, and need I say more about the Taliban, or Khomeini, or the people in the west who call themselves religious fundamentalists, who are really dominator fundamentalists. That's what they want. Their world view is a god, starting with this punitive, angry, violent god, going down to these punitive, angry, violent men and occasionally token women increasingly, and going into the family with these violent, angry, punitive parents, that's the natural order for them. And they are so organized and their agenda is so integrated. And that's what The Power of Partnership brings out again and again and again, but it doesn't just critique, it proposes actions, simple things that every one of us can do as well as the need to really work together on an integrated partnership political agenda. I have tables in Power of Partnership comparing, plank by plank, the domination political agenda and the partnership political agenda.
So my hope is, just as I have been able to get into mainstream organizations to some extent the understanding that these so-called women's issues and children's issues are fundamental human issues, without which we can't really go further, I'm hoping that this book can do two things. That it can really get to political activists and show them that we've got to have these two foundational planks. And I'm also hoping of course that, by bringing this book in under the radar as a self-help book, to politicize some very well meaning people who are all for love and for peace in the self-help New Age movement, who are so a-political, as if that were in a different planet.
AWE: How would the Progressive agenda address this, and how do you see the role of women in this moment of time?
RE: Well the two go together, actually. With my books, very often men give The Chalice and the Blade or Sacred Pleasure or Tomorrow's Children not only to their children, but to their wives and their daughters. But when all is said and done, the only reason that we have really moved as far as we have from the Middle Ages, when women were basically property, to now, is due to the organized actions from women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, she understood that it is absurd to talk about a moral society as long as the immoral treatment of women continues. So the role of women is enormous.
Our role, though, at this point, is not only to work for women's and children's rights worldwide, it's also to convince the more mainstream pro-democracy, pro-equity, pro-peace, pro-environmental groups to really pay attention to these issues. That's what I hope, that The Power of Partnership will give women's groups a tool, that they can just say, Read this book.
AWE: Do you think that the priories of women are primarily different from men's?
RE: Let me start from the beginning. There are obviously biological differences between women and men, but even if women have the capacity through their bodies to give life, and have the capacity through their bodies to nurture life, this doesn't necessarily mean that women are going to be kinder, gentler and more loving. In fact, in societies and sub cultures that orient to the domination model, women as mothers are very much entrusted with the role of making sure that kids are terrified, that kids kow-tow, and they pass on the gender preference. In some places, where there are very few resources, it's mothers who give girls less to eat than they give their sons. Now they may not have the power to change that, and in those cultures it is the male head of household who controls the finances, but I have seen horrible examples. There was a UN photo of this mother of twins, one boy and one girl, an '85 photo, and it was horrible. The little boy was vigorous because she nursed him first, and the little girl was skeletal and obviously so apathetic she couldn't even cry. And the mother was beaming for the photo. So let us start with that. But let us also say that the socialization of women and men is so different, women are supposed to do what nurturing is done. So yes, I think the priorities of women are different, but I really want to be careful to say women as a group, because then there's the Margaret Thatcher syndrome. It is the woman who has climbed to the top of the male political establishment by proving every step of the way that she is not soft or feminine.
AWE: Let's talk about how your discoveries in The Chalice and the Blade changed your consciousness. How important was the discovery of gynocratic societies to your later work?
RE: Well it's very important to me, because I'm a macro historian, I'm interested in patterns, I'm interested in the big picture. All the grand theories, whether they're religious or secular have stories of origins, don't they, and there's a reason for that. Something as commonplace as the caveman cartoon. There he is, dragging the woman with one hand, a club in the other. That story of origins says, that's how it is, it's always been that way, by implication it has to be that way. So my research… I did not start with prehistory, I was looking cross culturally. And I began to see these correlations of the traits and activities and behaviors stereotypically associated, in the dominator mind, with women, and how this affects everything. I looked at the Scandanavian countries, where the status of women is much higher, where women's political representation is much higher, but look at what that has done to the values men espouse! It's not just women but men who started the first peace academies. It's women and men joining together that passed these social policies for caregiving, for stereotypical feminine work, for universal healthcare, for childcare, for paid parental leave. If you look at Hitler's Germany, or at the Masai, a tribal society, or so-called fundamentalists, you see the dominator model, and the first thing is, women must be rigidly controlled by men. Well obviously something is happening here in terms of systems dynamics, isn't there? But then, because I also had a great deal of background in history and the study of myth, I began to be much more interested in archaeology, I began to see the same pattern in these earlier societies that I call partnership societies. Really the terms matriarchy and patriarchy are two sides of the dominator coin, aren't they, and they confuse the issue.
AWE: But you found another word for that.
RE: Well, I coined another word. Gylany. (guy-lan-ee) "Gy" for female, "any" for male, and "l" linking them, which also in the Greek stands for liberation. A lot of people have used that word, and I'm happy to say, I think my work is the first contemporary work that has brought women's rights out of the feminist corner that it's always shoved into.
AWE: What does gylany mean, and why was that so profound for you?
RE: It really means that, in contrast to matriarchy and patriarchy, we have a gender-specific term. If you look at partnership societies, like the Minangkabau of Sumatra, they call themselves a matriarchy, but if you really look at it, they're not. Men play much of the leading role in the intellectual and public sphere, I'm sorry to say, but women play a huge role in the ritual life and in the community life. Now that's just one way of balancing. Violence against children is not used, they're much more concerned about caring and caregiving, the whole configuration. They're not really matrifocal or gynocratic, they're partnership societies where equal value is given to the two halves of humanity. And nurturing is part of the male role, they don't say that's just what women do. So I wanted something to shift the emphasis from women. But partnership is more the popular term, because when people hear the word partnership, they get it.
Look, all this idealization of tribal societies is pretty ludicrous, if you look at tribal societies. If you look at Africa before colonial times, it was brutal, I mean slavery, autocratic regimes, or if you look at the Incas for goodness sakes, give me a break here. The only thing that the west has done is that it always has superior technology, but it certainly didn't introduce the dominator model into the developing world, and we've got to get over that. I mean, you know, female genital mutilation, the selling of children to the sex trade, those are not things that were introduced by the West, these are deeply rooted traditions of domination. And I know that it doesn't sound politically correct to say this, because the West does have such terrible policies, like the structural adjustment policies &endash; and who do you think benefits from those by the way? The elites in the developing world &endash; so it is not North versus South, it's really the degree to which any culture orients to the partnership or the dominator model. And I'm trying to introduce that clarity, because otherwise we get so fragmented. And it's so confusing. I mean, in Kenya, the founding president of the so-called Democratic Republic of Kenya, he wanted to westernize everything but he specifically wanted to retain female genital mutilation,. Just like these Muslim fundamentalists who, you know, walk around in western clothes, use western technology, but the one thing they don't want to change are the traditions where men dominate women. So let's be real here.
AWE: Perhaps you could explain how, with the partnership model, how would we have responded differently to the Twin Towers?
RE: There is such a thing as self-defense, and given the fact that these people come out of rigid dominator cultures, they targeted the most vulnerable, you know, civilians. So in the short term, we have the right to defend ourselves. But we also need long range policies that really are very different from the structural adjustment policies, from military aid, to dominator elites policies that we have in place. We need to channel aid to grassroots women's groups, through grassroots partnership groups &endash; so it doesn't get funneled into the corrupt system. We need to make this a major world effort, to raise the status of women, protect children in their own families, because those are the foundations, those are the schools for violence. There's no quick fix. We have to do both. We can't just sit there and wait for our children and our grandchildren to be terrorized and dominated by violence, but on the other hand, we also so urgently need to change these foundational relations. If you funnel for example foreign aid through women's groups (and there are lots of them), you bypass the corrupt system, you empower the women, and -- it's been very well documented &endash; that, in the developing world, in those regions that orient to the domination model, women's use of money is different from men's use of money. Women tend to invest it more in their children, men tend to invest it more in themselves!
AWE: That's one way that women's priorities are different from men's!
RE: It's not that they're evil creatures, some of the nicest people in the world are men. So please, when you print what I say, always qualify it, because I always worry about that, that it will come out that men are the enemy. Because they're not. Men have a miserable deal in the dominator model, because the one privilege they get is to lord it over those under them, but they sure are at the mercy of those above them, aren't they? I mean it's the men who through history are asked to give their bodies in battle for these guys who wanted more real estate.
AWE: So how can we help the men?
RE: Well, my work helps the men. It offers them a model in which they have a place and in which they as individuals are not the villains. It offers them a model in which they can see it's in their self-interest to change traditions of domination including those traditions that give them a little bit more privilege, and many men are becoming very open to this. I get a lot of mail from them, telling me how transformative my work has been to them. So I'm really hoping that men will take a leading role in the politics of partnership, not only women. I mean women still have to take the initiative here, because we have the organizations, but we need to now take our efforts out of this women's ghetto of activity and move it into the mainstream of politics and economics and spirituality. We have to have the spiritual courage to expose what is immoral, what is a dominator religious teaching for what it is. That's the only way we can get the moral high ground.
This interview was conducted by telephone on March 24, 2002