How advanced would a matriarchy be?

I think that in a matriarchy, we'd be bound to see child bearing as a hugely inportant thing, if only out of naked self interest.

This would be one thing that any matriarchal society would gladly expend its resources on, surely?

How that looked on the ground is anyone's guess ...

Oooh interesting. Like a Handmaid's Tale but in reverse. What would happen to make men as a physically superior class relinquish power? Maybe something like Rwanda, where the male population is so diminished due to civil war.

I think it would be very different just because it would have been different people which is always going to bring about a different kind of vibe or focus. Look at Japan, for example. A starkly different culture from anywhere else on Earth, because for a very long time they were entirely separate.

Maybe if way back when there had been some kind of illness that wiped out loads of blokes or made male babies rare or something. Then men would be "precious" and subject to tight control much as women have been.

curwen i've said i don't think it's possible to know. i certainly don't think that women are incapable of oppression or cruelty, but if that were to occur under a matriarchy i don't know what form it might take

Anything could be different, or nothing. It could be a million times better or a million times worse. As women are physically smaller than men something pretty fundamental would have had to have happened to make women in charge in the first place. All ideas are on the table, it's in the realms of imagination and SciFi. Could be like anything. Interesting to hear others ideas!

Curwen, we are talking about a baseline rewrite, not "if we woke up in 1900 and the government was all female and men didn't have the vote" For example - if property were inherited down the maternal line, would marriage have even developed as there would be no requirement to be "certain" of paternity?

I have to ask again, why does anyone, especially a feminist, think that it would be in any way different, apart from role reversal? That kind of thinking flies in the face of everything I have read on here about feminism. I am lost.

I would be more interested in a feminist society than a matriarchy tbh because a feminist one would be more egalitarian.

I do think men would do better in a matriarchy than women have done under patriarchy though.

It would be interesting to know what a matriarchy would be like, wouldn't it?

Would, for example, capitalism have flourished as it has under a matriarchy?

"you see i don't think we can know what a matriarchy would look like, because we are so socialised into gender roles that any assumptions we make now are clouded by that. who knows whether women would be more or less warmongering, compassionate and nurturing, keen to reach the moon, likely to develop a cure for PMT "

Yy to this.

no, those matriarchs only exert power within the spheres of influence allowed by men with more power

The OP wrote: "there is a matriarchal society in China , the Mosuo."

I disagree.

The Mosuo are more matrilineal than matriarchal. Athough Mosuo women are often the head of the household, inheritance is through the female line, and women make business decisions, the political power is held by the men, and the women do the housework.

Any matriarchal female influence in the affairs of the Mosuo people is now subservient to the patriarchal Communist Party of China, so the Mosuo are not in control of their own destiny or free from patriarchal oppression.

There is similar patriarchal domination of other supposedly matriarchal societies including the Nair and Bunt peoples of India and the Minangkabau people of Indonesia etc.

It reminds me of how some mothers in western societies are sometimes described as matriarchs, but that doesn't make western societies matriarchal instead of patriarchal.

I agree with petula.

I don't understand the idea there'd be less fighting and more empathy. Power corrupts etc. People like to have resources. The sort of people who are natural leaders often seem to be nutso arseholes.

Maybe it would be a lovely cooperative fair just place, maybe it would be even more violent a tribal than it is at the moment. Impossible to say.

Balls to the suggestion that girls can't do sums or science by the way. Fuck that.

Curwen

Hmm, that's an interesting point. A lot of counterfactual imaginings r.e a matriarchal society (e.g. the old canard that "if women ruled the world there would be no wars") make assumptions based on gendered behaviour that has been formed in a specific patriarchal cultural context. If we had a matriarchy, "typical women's behaviour" would presumably be different...

How could it be any different, apart from reversal of roles? Under the covers, men and women are exactly the same, bar a couple of appendages. We'd still have the same shit going on all around us.

Not exactly an answer to your question, but The Cleft by Doris Lessing is a really fascinating consideration of what a (primitive) matriarchy might look like. It also raises a lot of questions about how history is written and how history changes depending on who is in control of the writing/remembering of it...

I've often wondered how much further ahead we would be if our technological advances had more focus on support and enrichment of society and less on weapons and destruction. Even a small shift in that direction would make a huge difference given how much time, energy and money is currently spend on combat.

I think progress would have happened in a more considerate way, Empathic joined up thinking. Scientific and technological advances would still have happened, because we'd still have brilliant scientists of both sexes, its just that they would have been taught and encouraged towards a more compassionate and conscientious use of their brains after being brought up and educated in a matriarchal society.

Daft stuff like sharia law wouldn't exist and i like to think that all organised religion would have evolved and be inclusive of everybody under a "we are all our mothers children" sort of ethos.

You lot would all be in government, and I'd be on Dadsnet plotting your downfall

I agree with Petula. It would be nice though if what BloominNora suggests is correct.

Sometimes I console myself with the multiple universe theory - you know, every time someone makes a decision it splits off into another one, so there are infinite worlds with all possibilities. Maybe somewhere they've got it right!

you see i don't think we can know what a matriarchy would look like, because we are so socialised into gender roles that any assumptions we make now are clouded by that. who knows whether women would be more or less warmongering, compassionate and nurturing, keen to reach the moon, likely to develop a cure for PMT

and of course any group oppressing another (if that is the set-up of the matriarchy - it's unclear whether that would be the case or not) is not a good thing

Cross post with thatstoast

I think science and technology would look very different. We probably wouldn't have been to the moon, maybe not even into space. However I think everyone would have enough food and access to clean drinking water.

I think science would focus less on doing things just to see if we can and more on things that actually solve more immediate problems.

With regards to technology, a lot of things have been invented which initially had a military application. Maybe some people would argue that in a matriarchal society there would be less war and so less dual use technology. I don't think we'd still be living in huts but I can see a scenario in which the space race didn't happen.