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Eller, Cynthia, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past
Won't Give Women a Future, Beacon, Boston, 2000
Reviewed by Max Dashu
The deliberately provocative title of Cynthia Eller's book spells out her
approach in a nutshell: it's not about history, but ideology. The ideas
under fire are the insurgent feminist histories that reject old
assumptions of universal patriarchy throughout history. The author aims to
critique the views of what she calls "feminist matriarchalists," but
commits the very offense of which she accuses them. History -- detailed,
in-depth analysis of historical evidence -- takes a back seat to theory (in
this case, of the post-structuralist gender variety) with a scattering of
ethnographic notes.
Eller's standpoint differs from that of the most ardent opponents of matrix
history in being avowedly feminist. But this does not get in the way of a
no-holds-barred polemic, beginning with the title itself. Eller styles the
matristic histories as a "myth" -- not a thesis or theory. She makes no
distinction between scholarly studies and novels, new age classes, guided
tours, or market-driven enterprises. All are conflated all into one
monolithic "myth" devoid of any historical foundation.
Though Eller acknowledges that the vast majority of feminist thinkers in
this area reject the word "matriarchy," she has chosen this loaded,
hot-button label as a descriptor. Throughout the book she refers to a
diverse range of feminist researchers as "feminist matriarchalists,"
tossing out broadbrush generalizations along the way: "Feminist
matriarchalists' interpretations of ancient myth are rather transparently
driven by ideology." Since Eller's label is more polemical than
descriptive, in this review I abbreviate it where necessary as "fms."
The introduction acknowledges "substantial dissension" within the
"matriarchal myth," but the body of the book paints a different picture,
relegating more diverse opinions to the footnotes. Eller goes for the easy
targets and steps well around those that look like they'll sit up and bite
back. She relies heavily on poems and interviews, quoting from scholarly
writers only in brief snippets. Gimbutas is identified as a major
influence, but not heard from directly as an archaeologist. Gerda Lerner is
barely alluded to, which is strange given her prominence; evidently she
would interfere with the desired impression of a wacko fringe. And where
are Miriam Robbins Dexter, Mary Condren, Asphodel Long, Paula Gunn Allen,
Patricia Monaghan, Pupul Jayakar, Aurora Levins-Morales, Joanna Hubbs, N.N.
Bhattacharya, or the Africanists Sheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga?
The book's tone is sardonic, often openly sarcastic. Eller treats the
proliferation of products, publications, and classes as harmful, portraying
them as a growing threat spreading into all areas. Even the youth are being
corrupted: this pernicious "myth" is being taught to innocent first
graders, and "There are even dedicated resources available to teach the
myth of matriarchal prehistory to younger girls."
Cynthia Eller has taken feminist spirituality as her anthropological
subject. Her earlier book, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist
Spirituality Movement in America (1993), contains a chapter on the same
material. In both books, Eller believes her subjects define women "quite
narrowly" as mothers, as bodies, sex, nature -- embracing, she says, the
preconceptions of the patriarchy they are trying to escape. Her critique of
what she sees as "essentialism" is a major theme of The Myth. The author
has no problem positing that all societies have been male-dominated, but
considers any and all proposals of sex-egalitarian matrilineages
"essentialist." This is the "invented past" of her title.
Eller recounts her first encounter with these ideas in an academic setting,
when a male archaeologist suggested that Crete had been a matriarchal
society. She reports an overwhelmingly negative response that evidently
impressed her deeply: "If a lot of mockery was all that prehistoric
matriarchies could get me, who needed them?" Instead, she has ended up in
the camp of the mockers: "For those with ears to hear it, the noise the
theory of matriarchal prehistory makes as we move into a new millennium is
deafening."
Eller does her best to portray this theory (and for her there is only one)
as weird, unfounded, extremist, and its proponents as blithely unconcerned
about historical veracity. She says that "fms" want the theory to be true
so badly that they will believe it in spite of all evidence. Eller is
"appalled by the sheer credulousness they demonstrated toward their very
dubious version of what happened in Western prehistory." She implies that
the evidence preponderates on the side of neolithic patriarchy, but as she
gets into the meat of her argument later in the book, it turns out to be
inconclusive, unproven and (by her own admission) unprovable.
Eller admits that scholars who did not adhere to the doctrine of timeless
patriarchy have been subjected to "the jeers of most of their colleagues."
It's strange that she so quickly passes over this subject of ridicule,
which has persisted in academia. In college during the late '60s, I
experienced it full force before I even had a position on "matriarchy"; it
was made quite clear that certain questions were not to be asked. The
negation was so pervasive as to be doctrinal, a trigger for shouting-down
rather than reasonable discussion. In recent decades, breaches have
appeared in the wall, but the threatened behavior persists. Many of its
targets have been non-academics, but the most visible challenge emerged
from within the ivory tower, in the eminent person of archaeologist Marija
Gimbutas.
THE FUROR OVER GIMBUTAS
By any account, Marija Gimbutas had an illustrious career as a major
20th-century archaeologist and a primary founder of modern Indo-European
studies. Her model for Indo-European origins is still the leading theory
in the field. Its basic outlines are still upheld -- minus the Goddess
interpretations -- by her former student J.P. Mallory, now one of the top
authorities in the field. Her ability to read sixteen European languages
enabled to her to read virtually all the archaeological literature on both
sides of the Cold War split, a crucial skill since most key publications in
her study area were written in eastern European languages. It was Gimbutas
who laid pivotal groundwork for integrating archaelogical data with
linguistic studies of Indo-European origins. She also excavated sites of
the Vinca, Starcevo, Karanovo and Sesklo cultures.
Eller grudgingly acknowledges the "tremendous linguistic expertise"
Gimbutas possessed, and her "encyclopedic knowledge of Central and Eastern
European archaeological sites that permitted her to speculate effectively
on 'big picture' questions." However, she completely sidesteps her heavily
footnoted analysis of why she thinks the kurgan-builders were invaders, and
why patriarchal. Eller never describes Gimbutas' theory in its own right,
or quotes from her historical analysis. Instead she assails it through a
pastiche of descriptions by her detractors and supporters.
Eller declares that the argument that IE spread from steppes through
military conquest "is completely speculative." At this point she stoops to
outright misrepresentation: "As J.P. Mallory summarizes, 'almost all of the
arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far better
explained without reference to Kurgan expansions'." Reading this came as a
shock, because my understanding of Mallory's position is quite different. I
had to look it up; sure enough, he says the opposite: "One might at first
imagine that the economy of argument involved with the Kurgan solution
should oblige us to accept it outright. But critics do exist and their
objections can be summarized quite simply --" and here follows the phrase
Eller so misleadingly cites.
She goes on to claim that "Neither is there any positive evidence that the
Kurgans from the Russian steppes were an exceptionally brutal, supremely
patriarchal people." She makes no mention of the women executed for burial
with the dominant males around whom these kurgan graves are centered, nor
of the fact that women were not buried in kurgans in their own right. At
this point, I started to question if she had actually read Gimbutas'
extensive documentation of these "suttee"-burials in _Civilization of the
Goddess_.
The accusation is often repeated that Marija Gimbutas -- unlike other
archaeologists -- made interpretations without supporting evidence. But
interpretation goes on all the time, and it is charged with political
ramifications. Brian Hayden, one of Gimbutas' most vociferous critics, has
gone out on a long theoretical limb with his claim that Old Europe was
dominated by Big Men. Jean-Paul Mohen likewise assumes that European
megaliths were seats of power of chiefs endowed with divine authority. His
attempts to contort west European megalithic societies to his
preconceptions would be funny if they were so depressingly typical of stuff
I've read for years: "The standardized design of neolithic houses indicate
a largely egalitarian society: but could this not have included a dominant
family, even if it lacked some or all the material signs of power?" Such
interpretations are never as controversial, even in the complete absence of
evidence, as calling female figurines goddesses.
For all the glaring flaws in his Indo-European origin hypothesis -- and it
has attracted much criticism, from both linguists and archaeologists --
Colin Renfrew has never encountered the contemptuous response that Gimbutas
has received. (In his version, it is the Indo-Europeans who bring
agriculture to Europe from Anatolia and who are responsible for the
civilization of neolithic Old Europe.) There is a marked difference in the
reception of women scholars who challenge doctrines of gender hierachy.
DECONSTRUCTING "MATRIARCHAL MYTH"
The outlines of the book's critique will be familiar to any well-read
person. Feminists have invented a "golden age," a utopian narrative
fantasizing a time when women were free. Eller calls it "a universalizing
story: once things were good, everywhere; now they are bad" -- an account
based on dualistic thinking and "a reductive notion" of who women and men
are. (Wait, which is the reductive idea: that women have always been
subordinate, and men dominant; or that other models have existed in human
society, and that even patriarchal societies show a significant range in
the degree of domination?) The simplistic charge of a "golden age" avoids
having to look at evidence for a more complex picture.
The Myth seems to admonish that the issue of identity under oppression
should not be engaged directly; to speak of groups with common history
comes too close to "essentialism." On those terms, it's hard to see how to
stop the dominant groups' ideology from continuing to define reality. As
Chris Brickell comments, "the term 'essentialism' has become something of
an epithet," even a term of abuse. Most often it is levelled at feminists,
whose analysis of historical/situational experience and behavorial
conditioning is equated with biological determinism, no matter how
explicitly they reject it.
To hear Eller tell it, feminist historians have fixed on a theory that
women's original power was based on male ignorance of conception, and its
overthrow followed men's discovery that they had a part in generation. This
claim has been made, but it's a minority viewpoint. Feminist historians
overwhelmingly reject the assumption that archaic peoples were ignorant of
the basics of reproduction. The sparse citations that Eller supplies don't
come close to proving her contention that this explanation for patriarchal
revolution "reigns supreme" over all others.
Eller thinks that "virtually all feminist reconstructions of matriarchal
society" focus on childbirth. She finds it significant that many childless
women celebrate birth or, failing that, menstruation, as a central mystery
of matrix cultures. For her, this approach is a centerpiece of
"essentialism." There is to be no reclaiming of female experiences which
have been deeply marked by patriarchal definition and control. Eller
concedes it's reasonable to rehabilitate degraded categories which have
been defined as feminine, but objects to continuing to define them as
female. In the brave new world of deconstruction, the heaps of cultural
baggage calling the feminine "bad" and "inferior" can be disposed of at
will. The positive associations of "woman" must be stripped away as well,
in the hope that this will somehow make oppressive realities disappear. But
it's hard to imagine the world's women going along with this prescription.
Eller throws out charges of "biological determinism", then backs away,
qualifies them, and reasserts them again as fact. No perspective on
historical patterns enters into this muddled and distorted picture. The
vast majority of matristic historians are saying that patriarchy emerged
out of historical processes, not from a biological necessity. Turning this
problem the other way, isn't declaring patriarchy a historical universal a
kind of biological determinism? To insist that, amidst all the luxuriant
variation in human culture, that egalitarian societies never emerged, seems
pretty equivalent to positing male dominance as an inherent trait.
AMONG THE ANTHROS
Although the book is titled The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, its true
subject is anthropological theory. Having rebuked matristic historians for
using ethnographic data to buttress their case, Eller goes on to do just
that. She writes that "it makes good sense" for anthropologists to use
ethnography to speculate about prehistory. For her the salient point is
that "Ethnographic analogies to contemporary groups with lifeways similar
to those of prehistoric times ... show little sex egalitarianism and no
matriarchy." A further disproof is "the fact that matrilineal kinship
systems are found at all levels of social complexity, not just in groups
judged to be most like the social model we conjecture for prehistoric
times."
Eller's covert assumption appears to be that modern hunter-gatherers or
horticulturalists can be taken as representative of some primeval order.
This kind of theoretical leap has been rejected by American Indian critics,
among others, as giving off more than a whiff of the racist evolutionary
ideas that modern anthropologists find so embarrassing. Because the
foraging peoples' technology and economy have not changed dramatically does
not mean that their social organization remained static over the millennia.
They live within history, like the rest of humanity.
Given the paucity of material evidence, how would we know if these peoples'
social structure had changed? The primary source would be their own oral
histories. These have been primarily available through anthropological
mediators, due to the way information has been organized in "Western"
institutions. They appear as ethnography, not as history. There has been a
strong tendency to analyze them as mechanisms of societal function, rather
than on their own terms.
This is Eller's approach as she turns to the widespread legends that female
power was overthrown by men who took over the primary rituals, lodges, and
sacred objects. Such traditions have been recorded among Australian
peoples, the Dogon and Mende in west Africa, northern Amazon peoples and in
southernmost Chile and Argentina, among others. Eller upholds Malinowski's
functionalist thesis of "charter myths," which interprets the legends as a
means of maintaining male dominance and defining morality.
But this would be no less true if these traditions do contain a memory of
actual shifts in social organization. In fact, they would be more
necessary. If male dominance is universal and existed from the beginning,
what need is there to justify it in "charter myths"? Eller's suggestion
that their purpose is to relieve social tensions falls flat. Reenactment of
the story involves an element of enforcement, as in her example of men
disguised as demons terrorizing nonconformist women by tearing through
their property and even beating or stabbing them. (Where? We aren't told.)
Eller thinks these myths function to reconcile women to their status
through a fantasy of former power, but the threat of violence seems a more
convincing reason.
Eller fails to consider a possible relationship between these traditions of
male seizure of ritual power, and ceremonies in which men imitate birth and
menstruation, or wear fake breasts and other female regalia. A more
important omission, though, is her failure to compare this symbolism with
known historical instances of men taking over spheres originally presided
over by priestesses. She might argue that references to Apollo's priests
taking control of the female oracles in Greece and Anatolia are more
mythical than historical. But the historical record does reflect an
escalating encroachment of male priests on female turf. For example, an
inscription of the 4th century BCE shows the high priestess of Eleusis
fighting in court to stop the male priest from usurping her traditional
privileges. [Zaidman, Louise Bruit, "Pandora's Daughters and Rituals in
Grecian Cities," in A History of Women in the Western World, 1992, p. 372]
We can roughly track the elimination of priestesses from public authority
in places with a long written record, such as Mesopotamia, China, and
Europe.
Nor are such accounts limited to ritual offices. Columbia River legends of
Tsagaglalal speak of a time of female chiefs coming to an end, and the
Aztecs remembered a challenge thrown out to the male chiefs by the woman
warrior Quilaztli. In Angola, the BaChokwe say that the female ruler Ruwej
was overthrown by her brothers. (Another version says that Ruwej married a
BaLuba chief who took over her political functions and imposed patrilineal
descent.) To preserve their matrilineal ways, BaChokwe oral history says
that they split off from the BaLunda and migrated south to Angola. Among
the BaLunda themselves, the name Ruwej remained as one of the titles of
female officers in court councils. The names of other court offices -- Mwad
Mwish, First Female Pillar, and Mwad Chilab, First Courageous Woman --
indicate that they originally belonged to women. [B. Crine-Mavar,
"L'Avant-Tradition Zairoise, Revue Zairoise des Sciences de l'Homme, No. 3,
1974]
The Myth insists that all known human societies have valued men over
women, and points to anthropological studies which say that matrilineages
are just as male-dominated as patrilineal societies. Sherry Ortner is cited
for her claim that lower female status is "one of the true universals, a
pan-cultural fact." If so, Ortner's highly theoretical paper does not
demonstrate it; it is assumed as a given, with only two shallow paragraphs
on the Chinese and the Hidatsa offered as examples. The other
anthropological sources Eller invokes may make a case, but her book doesn't.
Anthropologist Barbara Joans notes that the subject of "matriarchy" was
long considered "a closed chapter" in her field, until feminists like Sally
Slocum (who wrote "Woman the Gatherer") reopened the case. Joans thinks it
likely that "some matriarchal systems" have existed. She points to the few
known examples of polyandrous societies: "Had not several of them survived
into the 20th century we would probably be arguing the improbability of
their existence." It would have been declared a myth "because it
contradicts so much current anthropological data." (And ideology.)
Eller has a basis for saying that matrilineage alone doesn't guarantee an
absence of patriarchal customs. The problem with her analysis is that it's
based on an either-or proposition, with no perspective on historical shifts
to patrilineage and patriarchal law. For example, Elamite inscriptions
show there was once matrilineal descent in western Iran, and _Duga_ the
oldest recorded epic of West Africa proclaims: "Descendance from the woman,
descendance from the woman has ended..." But there don't seem to be any
examples of patrilineal systems shifting to matrilineal reckoning. The
traffic is all in the other direction. In the early '60s, Kathleen Gough
documented signs of shifts away from matrilineal descent reckoning under
heavy colonial pressure. Indigenous matrilineages today face even more
intense pressures as they battle for survival on all fronts.
What is completely missing from Eller's book is any discussion of
matrilineal societies with high female status, such as the Khasi (NE
India), Innu/Naskapi (E Canada), Musuo (SW China), Tuareg (Sahara), Keres
(New Mexico), Minangkabau (Sumatra), Haudenosaunee (New York/Ontario),
Amahuaca (E Peru), Seri (NW Mexico), Vanatinai (Pacifica). Also missing is
any historical perspective on female spheres of power in the Two Thirds
World. The Myth considers indigenous women only through the lens of
Western ethnography.
WHERE'S THE HISTORY?
Even though evidence from prehistoric times is "comparatively sparse," we
are told that "matriarchal myth fails completely on historical grounds." If
so, this book doesn't provide them. There is little history and much
theory. Citing the early deaths of women at Catal Hüyük -- averaging in the
20s -- and high infant mortality, and concludes the situation was unlikely
to cause reverence for miraculous pregnancy and birth as "the gifts of a
munificent goddess." (By that analogy, world suffering precludes beneficent
deities in any religion.) Or, we could conclude that the danger of
childbearing intensified the impulse to appeal to its goddess for
protection, and even gave it the charge of a shamanistic passage.
Eller rejects the idea that burial of women under the central platforms had
any implications of high status. After all, the men might still have owned
the platforms and "buried their wives and children under them" out of
affection -- or to underscore their ownership of them as property! The
unlikelihood of thIS interpretation is pointed up by peripheral burials of
the men. If they had been found buried in the shrine centers, the fact
would certainly have been held up as confirmation of their importance and
authority.
The book's discussion of the rise of patriarchy centers mainly around
invasion theories. However, patriarchy by conquest is only one model.
Others describe a gradual change in which male dominance builds up within a
society over time, but Eller has little to say about these. She alludes
briefly to theories that the advent of plow agriculture or animal husbandry
had something to do with it. The case Gerda Lerner made in The Creation of
Patriarchy is barely mentioned. Nothing in the book hints at the extensive
discussion of historical indicators of this shift in the last thirty years.
Eller's summary of the kurgan invasions narrative is miles removed from
Gimbutas' detailed, data-studded analysis. She asks where the invaders came
from and, sardonically: "How did they carry out their nefarious mission?"
Stooping to conspiracy theory, she suggests that questions of historical
evidence aside, "fms" picked the Ukrainian steppe because it's large,
within striking distance of "Europe and the Near East," and with a poorly
documented prehistory. Best of all is its sparse modern population "since
no one wants to come from the place where patriarchy began..." Whew. The
documentation Gimbutas assembled is nowhere in sight.
Eller is critical of the assertion that early neolithic sites were
peaceful, but her discussion of weapons and fortifications is extremely
thin. She cites the presence of maces, but without comparative data, or
names of sites other than Catal Huyuk. The book's discussion of the Aegean
is particularly disappointing. We're offered a male scholar's speculation
that Crete may have been "warlike" -- but the evidence has disappeared,
because all its military encounters took place at sea. Eller claims that
"fms" minimize the intensely patriarchal character of ancient Greece, but
her own account blurs the distinctions between Cretan, Mycenean, Homeric
and classical Greek societies.
ARGUING ABOUT THE GODDESS
The Myth claims that "feminist matriarchalists almost always posit a form
of goddess monotheism for prehistory..." Eller doesn't seem to have a clue
to how controversial this idea has been in goddess circles. (Already in the
'70s feminist pagans protested against anything that smacked of a
monotheist Big Daddy in the Sky.) This problematic claim of goddess
monotheism is used to sidestep the preponderance of female iconography in
neolithic times. Female statuettes are found not only in Europe and West
Asia, but on a global scale, from Ecuador and Colombia to Ohio and Utah and
Alaska, from Chad and Egypt to Kazakhstan and the Punjab and Japan.
Their femaleness has not been controversial, but Eller contends that only
50% of the ancient Balkan figurines are indisputably female. If all the
rest are assumed to be male, she says, then the gender breakdown would be
50-50. An illustration shows one of these "sexless" images: a breastless
statuette from Vinca, with the stance of hands on belly, feet together,
characteristic of the indisputably female figurines. Its rounded hips are
wider than the shoulders, the body violin-shaped, but Eller thinks it may
be male. Her interpretation is hardly compelling, but even if we conceded
that such images were male, how many male-dominated societies do we know of
that make nude figures of masculine gods, lords, warriors, or fathers --
sans penis?
Eller concludes that most of the images regarded as female, including the
famous plaster reliefs at Catal Huyuk, "are not definitely or even probably
female." Her short discussion of Malta states that evidence for widespread
goddess worship "is practically nonexistent." Why? Because certain
archaeologists are now disputing the larger statues as being of uncertain
sex, or even eunuchs. (One male archaeologist has likened them to Sumo
wrestlers.) Common sense should apply here: the sculptures have huge hips,
round feminine arms, and tiny hands. There is no penis. The breasts are
small, but similar proportions are found, with the same ridge of belly fat,
on female figurines from Sardinia and, from an earlier period, at Sesklo,
Greece. And a small Maltese scupture from Gozo shows an identically-formed
pair of seated women holding children in their laps.
Eller observes that the Greeks did not regard their various goddesses as
"aspects of a unitary goddess." That's true for classical Greece, but
there's a case for a syncretic Mediterranean Goddess in late antiquity, as
the aretologies of Isis and the writings of Apuleius show. Another example
of a Great Goddess tradition is found in the Shakta stream of Hindu
religion. She is worshipped under a myriad names and forms, or simply as
Devi (Goddess). A number of litanies exist of her Thousand Names, the most
famous being the Sri Lalitambika Sahasranama. They approach all the
classic Hindu goddesses as aspects of Devi, one of whose names is Ekakini,
"the One, Only."
Western feminist analysis turned to goddesses because they are so strongly
anathematized in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures. In the
Christian world, their erasure was linked to suppression of priestesses,
while in Judaic scripture their worship was condemned as "whoring after
false gods," and the metaphor recurs of Zion as a adulterous wife who will
be punished by a wrathful god/husband. Islam's triumph resulted in
outlawing of the old Arabian deities, among whom a trilogy of goddesses was
prominent: "instead of him, they worship only females." The idea that
patriarchal religion is pervaded by sexual politics was inescapable.
An extremely strong case for religious pluralism in ancient Judah and
Israel has been made in the past 30 years. In _The Hebrew Goddess_, Raphael
Patai marshalled piles of evidence from the Bible itself to show that many
Jews worshipped the goddess Asherah, and that her image stood in the Temple
of Solomon for two-thirds of its existence. Archaeology has turned up
female figurines in great numbers, but Eller scoffs at discussions of the
Hebrew goddess figurines because "we know that the religion of that place
and era was adamantly monotheistic." This assumption is outdated. The
weight of scholarly opinion has shifted as more information emerges --
including the Asherah inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom
-- indicating greater religious diversity than conventional Biblical
scholarship has been ready to concede.
POMO PRESCRIPTIONS
Eller sees "fms" as reinforcing patriarchal gendering by insisting on the
classic feminine traits, possibly because "they see no escape" from them.
On the other hand, she doesn't seem to entertain any possibility of
redefining "female" in a positive, flexible and diverse way. For her it
represents -- can only represent -- a negative, constrictive category
imposed by a patriarchal system. Her formulation seems to deny any voice,
creative shaping or subversion of ordained identity to the women
themselves. Her solution to the problem is simple: vacate the category of
women, as meaningless, illusional, and confining.
Post-structuralism proclaims that it is pointless to look for
commonalities, because there are none: "The only femaleness that is
characteristic of all women as a class is the experience of having the
label 'woman' affixed to one's being." (Are all identities as meaningless
as this?) Eller skims over the theory of gender as "performance" without
addressing -- except for a mention of pink and blue blankets -- the heavy
social/cultural/economic enforcement that underlies these "performances,"
and the retaliation and repression dealt out for the "wrong" behaviors. As
Stevie Jackson has pointed out, "Regarding meaning as _entirely_ fluid can
mean denying even the starkest of material realities." [Jackson, Stevie,
"The Amazing Deconstructing Woman," Trouble and Strife, #25, Winter 1992,
p.92] And renouncing identification also entails abandoning solidarity and
collective action.
The program seems to be: make gender disappear, as in no previous human
society. The structural realities of patriarchy -- physical and sexual
abuse, low female status combined with heavy caregiver responsibilities,
economic insecurity, legal inconsequence, even women's reactions to violent
and degrading treatment: can all that be made to vanish by declaring gender
irrelevant? Quoting Vicki Noble's remark that "We have to create the
feminine," Eller asks, Why? "Why can't we just ignore it and see if it goes
away?" (She must not have been to a toy store lately.) The naiveté of this
approach is staggering.
Eller proposes the Sisyphean project of overcoming a pan-historic male
domination through... moral choice. She doesn't address the problem of
whether the will to achieve this exists on a society-wide basis, amidst the
anti-feminist backlash against women's recent gains. But even if this goal
is unreachable, we can still try really hard, hoping for a better future in
spite of a bleak past, and "comfort ourselves with the thought that many of
the conditions we suspect have worked to create male dominance are no
longer with us, or need no longer produce the same response as they did in
the past."
Hmmm. What conditions might these be? This is the first mention of male
dominance having to be created, it having existed since the dawn of time
and all. Now Eller points to Richard Leakey's argument that the hunting and
gathering division of labor is the culprit in women's oppression. She is
hopeful that "the farther we grow from those roots, the less we need to be
affected by social roles that made sense only in the past." She assumes
that they ever made sense -- that they were not based on sheer coercion, to
the detriment of women, children, and non-dominant males.
But there's another problem. Eller puts this era of leaving behind foraging
lifeways (at least for "the West") at some 10,000 years ago. It seems as if
that would be more than long enough to outgrow any functionality of old
hunter-gatherer roles (were we prepared to concede them) which would then
just "go away." She tries to explain away the problem: "social systems can
continue to thrive long after the conditions that formed them have become
irrelevant." Indeed. This is what any number of feminist thinkers have been
saying about the persistence of goddess veneration in patriarchal
societies, but Eller doesn't apply the principle in that case.
At the book's end, Eller offers an unconvincing sop to the objects of her
inquiry: "The care and imagination feminist matriarchalists have devoted to
these 'origins' questions is in itself an impressive achievement." There is
cold comfort in this, as Eller immediately reverts to accusing "fms" of
"sloppy or wishful thinking" and "pretensions to historical truth." Not
only does she consider this spectrum of feminist theories escapist and
nostalgic for patriarchal archetypes, she thinks it's dangerous, serving
the enemies of feminism.
The only problem is, those enemies love her book. On the net it's being
gleefully hailed by outright and covert anti-feminists. Lawrence Osborne's
article on <salon.com> trumpets: "False Goddess: Despite what believers in
prehistoric matriarchy proclaim, women never ruled the Earth." [June 28,
2000] Osborne pontificates that Cynthia Eller is "unravelling the
pretensions of matriarchalists" and "middlebrow feminists." He calls them
"sentimental, gawky," and "woozy, sexist romantics," whose "twaddle" is
probably a "pathological reaction" to corporatist society. The more
cautious types on scholarly listservs won't be caught in such extreme
language, but some are still are holding up this book as the definitive
refutation of those pesky feminist ideologues and goddess "fantasies."
So, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory fails Eller's own "enemies" test.
Instead, it's looking a lot like Camille Paglia all over again.
Read the complete review at
<www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html>
Max Dashu <maxdashu@LMI.com>
International Women's Studies since 1970
<www.suppressedhistories.net>
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