Controversial Issue: The Birth of Patriarchy

[Xeviat]

My girlfriend was helping me with my Valkyrie race. Now, since "Valkyrie" has a feminine connotation, I thought that would be a good place to start for a matriarchal culture in my setting.

Early on, when humans first encountered the Valkyries, they only met females, so they assumed there were only females. As it turns out, Valkyries have an intensely low male birthrate, so males stay at the settlements and raise the children. Females do not lactate, so there's no intrinsic reasons why males cannot care for the children. Because males are uncommon, they are protected and not allowed to participate in dangerous professions (like the aforementioned all female scouting parties that humans encountered). Prised males belong to the family heads (the mothers of each tribe).

I'm hoping that is a believable reason for matriarchy, one that isn't as potentially offensive as the drow's.

[sparkletwist]

More females than males doesn't necessarily automatically lead to a matriarchy. It could just lead to harems and the like. There'd be enough women to go around, so there'd be no competition like there is when the sex ratios are relatively even. I know some guys who would definitely enjoy living in this kind of society. :P

However, it very well could result in a matriarchy, as the women may decide they're not going to stand for it. In that case, the males would likely be a sort of valuable property. They'd be treated well, but not given much freedom at all. Wandering off alone is dangerous, too, of course. So, it could lead to rampant sexism and objectification, and might still offend someone. ;)
(Not for any good reason mind you! But you know. It could.)

[Snargash Moonclaw]

One of the fundamental shifts seems to have occurred with the awareness of the function/role of paternity. The old truism (prior to DNA testing) is the simple fact that you could really only be absolutely certain who someone's mother was. Patriarchy by and large appears to have resulted (in part at least) from attempts at ensuring knowledge of paternity by limiting sexual access to females. In anthropological terms, marriage customs in virtually all cultures/societies primarily function as means of controlling who has sexual access to whom and under what circumstances - property issues and inheritance being secondary (especially since inheritance depended on knowledge of parentage.) As someone mentioned earlier, the Hopi and Dine (Navaho) as well as a couple of other southwestern nations inherit along matrilineir lines - traditionally property was held by women and women were in control of their choices of husbands - able to declare divorce simply by placing the husbands moccasins outside the door as they were the only property he had any right to claim. While some of these customs have had to change over the last century and a half due to the imposition of white man's laws, maternity remains significantly more important to these cultures than paternity. In relevance to gaming, the familial customs (including naming conventions) of the Khurorkh in my game world are modeled after Hopi and Dine traditions including clan definitions and intramarriage taboos - marrying someone of either parents clan is considered incestuous, but (like the mother) the father's clan is traced through his grandmother and the clans of either grandfather are irrelevant.

Anyone curious about historical matriarchal cultures should read the work of the late Marija Gimbutas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbutas, colleague of the late Joseph Campbell. While her theories have come under fire (mostly posthumously), her detractors demonstrate at least as much, if not more, of a vested interest and bias in maintaining older theories which declare that there is absolutely no real evidence of there ever being any early matriarchal culture anywhere in which we now find patriarchal cultures. (The few vestiges of matriarchal cultures present today, such as among the Southwest Nations, being rather anomalous but still proving the point by their survival).

[sparkletwist]

While I agree with you that there's a relationship, I think the order probably went the other way. Paternity only became important when male lineage became more important-- that is, after patriarchy had already been established.

Indeed, in some societies, even patrilineal ones, a child's father was legally assumed to be the mother's husband-- regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

While I agree with you that there's a relationship, I think the order probably went the other way. Paternity only became important when male lineage became more important-- that is, after patriarchy had already been established.

Indeed, in some societies, even patrilineal ones, a child's father was legally assumed to be the mother's husband-- regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

I think it's a rather tough call either way - and most likely the two tended to help further each other. The principal reason paternity matters is inheritance. Assumptions of paternity can really only be made when the society is capable of affording a relative degree of certainty that only the husband has sexual access. Even then, the assumption isn't always made - a Jewish child still is only considered Jewish if the mother is - paternity remains irrelevant in this regard long after the establishment of patriarchy. Interestingly this does not seem to affect inheritance. One other odd pattern was among ancient Celtic peoples. Monogamy wasn't required of either sex - while property inheritance could get a bit convoluted since all spouses had rights to separate property and joint property rights depended on the form of the marriage (Brehon Law in Ireland recognized seven distinct forms of marriage, each with varying degrees of importance and concomitant rights adhering!) of particular note is that the chieftain's tainist (heir) was not selected from his (presumed) sons but those of his eldest sister. (Significant patterns of fosterage also seemed to constelate around paternal aunts and their husbands.) In both cases the fact that paternity could not be absolutely certain was a factor in the relevant traditions. Celtic society (as it survived in Ireland, Scotland and Wales) really couldn't be considered patriarchal until the last vestiges of Brehon law had been eliminated by combined forces of Catholicism and Sassanach imperialism.

I think one of the biggest difficulties in sorting the whole thing out is that there are no scholars weighing in on the topic without a pre-established axe (or labyris) to grind. Gimbutas would have us believe that Europe and the Mediterranean region were originally settled entirely by peaceful benevolent matriarchal cultures until suddenly they were overrun by invading foreign war-loving patriarchal invaders, while her detractors invariably argue that patriarchy has always been the natural human state under most environmental circumstances and no past matriarchies ever existed - her theories being based entirely on deliberate distortion and wishful interpretation of (at best) vague, flimsy evidence.

[Polycarp]

Gimbutas would have us believe that Europe and the Mediterranean region were originally settled entirely by peaceful benevolent matriarchal cultures until suddenly they were overrun by invading foreign war-loving patriarchal invaders,

I think that's why I don't find her case convincing - it's one thing to challenge the status quo, but quite another to propose an alternative that seems hopelessly utopian given our first-hand knowledge of the human race, and to propose it based on symbolic interpretations without much "hard" evidence.  It's not the "matriarchy" part of her theories that bothers me - I could, conceivably, believe that - so much as the idyllic paradise that supposedly accompanied it, apparently just by virtue of being matriarchal.

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=sparkletwist]While I agree with you that there's a relationship, I think the order probably went the other way. Paternity only became important when male lineage became more important-- that is, after patriarchy had already been established.[/blockquote]
respectfully disagree.
I believe that almost all the evidence points to patriarchal societies developing as a response to the importance of paternity, not the other way around.  Snargash's comment about the primary and secondary functions of said system is correct, but confuses the issue slightly.  Saying that the primary function of most patriachal marriage systems is to control sexual access to the cecile gamete pair bearer is correct, but so like so many biological determinants, an unconsious side effect.
So I would personally amend your statement to, "Paternity and the establishment of lineage became important, resulting in a patriarchal system to codify them."  But that is merely my take.  

[sparkletwist]

I believe that almost all the evidence points to patriarchal societies developing as a response to the importance of paternity, not the other way around.

had[/b] to pick a root cause, to pick the importance of paternity first. If paternity was important before the society was patriarchial, I'd have to ask, what made paternity important? This question is neatly answered if men are already in dominant positions-- the father is the dominant member of the family group, inheritance is done along paternal lines, and so on. However, if all that came out of (rather than resulting in) paternity being important, then the question is... what made paternity important? The baby came out of the woman, after all. She was probably more responsible for raising it. Depending on the sexual freedom she had, the father might not even be anywhere around. Why does it matter?

[Snargash Moonclaw]

What primarily makes parentage important at all tends to be inheritance - who gets what from whom is at the root of most conflict and most legal systems. Legitimacy of offspring would be directly tied to legitimacy of claim to property.