Under what conditions could a matriarchal world have emerged?

[Bookmark1995]

Conscription for women if fairly exceptional across space and time, both in war and peace (though I think it is more common as wartime emergency measure). While women routinely serve in modern professional military forces, the only country I know of that systematically conscripts women is Israel - and even there, there are more exemptions for women and it is rarer for them to see frontline service.
I am not sure that this hardly arguable fact can be construed as women benefitting from patriarchy (if got your point correctly) - but we could say that conscription can be described as a usually male-specific form of state oppression (although a lot of people who served as conscripts would probably disagree with such a characterization).

Well, even in "just" wars, there are dissenters from conscripts.

OTL Pierre Trudeau initially thought WWII was just a British colonial war. He grew up in Quebec, where there was a bit of anti-war sentiment. It wasn't until the Holocaust that he changed his mind.

 

[jatt_scythian]

Conscription for women if fairly exceptional across space and time, both in war and peace (though I think it is more common as wartime emergency measure). While women routinely serve in modern professional military forces, the only country I know of that systematically conscripts women is Israel - and even there, there are more exemptions for women and it is rarer for them to see frontline service.
I am not sure that this hardly arguable fact can be construed as women benefitting from patriarchy (if got your point correctly) - but we could say that conscription can be described as a usually male-specific form of state oppression (although a lot of people who served as conscripts would probably disagree with such a characterization).

Yea women never benefit from patrirachy/benevolent sexism. Its all in my mind. Not like there is a whole list of government benefits and rights only women have.

 

[kholieken]

But what quirk in climate or geography could've led to a woman dominated world?

Example from Moriori (and near-human Bonobo), it seems that rate of violence is what matter. The more warfare, the more likely that men is more valued. Peaceful Society has more chance for more equal society.

---
As for conscription (and other dangerous thing) that make men more "expendable", Remember that for most of history women is 'conscripted' to have children (which is very dangerous) and that primary beneficiary is other men (less competition for women).

More patriarchal society, where successful men can have more than one wife, encouraged reducing number of young men through conflict and other means.

 

[Salvador79]

It is certainly a distinct possibility, and one that was often speculated about in imaginary matriarchies across history (think of the myth of the Amazons). However, there are interesting counterexamples, such as Aristophanes' comedies (to remain within Ancient Greece) featuring gender role reversals that do not translate into men treated brutally (but don't let me get started on the complicated topic of how to interpret those texts). And there are tons of literary speculation on the topic in countless cultures.
Given how humans in general often behave horribly, a matriarchal society has clearly the potential for creating horrible ways to treat men (not that patriarchal societies ever had a shortage of that). I definitely do not think that women in general possess any inherently better (or worse) moral attitude than men. For all genders, it gets shaped by societal conditions and values.
I think this may be the place to mention @Salvador79 's excellent TL "The Book of the Holy Mountain", an alt-historical, and fascinatingly plausible, attempt to imagine a pre-modern real matriarchy (one that is not downright that horrible to men to be fair, but certainly devalues them as a gender).

Thanks for the recommendation!
Throughout OTL history, there have been many societies in which women were relatively more in positions of power, wealth, status etc. than men, in many sorts of socio-economic systems from hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists. An outright matriarchy, just like the patriarchy we're just emerging from after millennia, has not happened IOTL: a systematic exclusion of women from various important spheres of life and an equally systematic justification thereof. I believe this is not at all "naturally" caused, it is due to a highly complex web of factors and interlocking structural developments in just a few regions of the world, from where much of the rest of the world has been assimilated. In my TL I wanted to explore one possible path going into a different direction. OTL's patriarchy certainly isn't mere coincide, but it also cannot be pinned down to either naturalist explanations or just one or two basic underlying root reasons. Throughout its history, "patriarchy" has always been oscilating between various shapes, it has produced so many different images of itself, so many structural variations, too, with different loopholes, different consequences, too. Likewise, I assume if history had gone radically different and we'd had a global hegemony of matriarchy, it would be similar, too. Just like there were so many different flavours of colonialism and imperialism and there are so many different flavours of racism.

 

[Salvador79]

oh, but just to contribute SOMETHING concrete relating to the OP question:
I could at least hint at a combination of time and space frames.
If you want to stick (e.g. for recognisability's sake or because you think it's geographically determined or whatever) with the same nuclei of technological, social and cultural development as IOTL, then I believe the 3rd millennium BCE is the latest to really ensure a consistent path towards Matriarchy in the Mesopotamian/Mediterranean zone as well as long the Yellow River, while in South Asia you may have time until the 2nd millennium BCE. As for the Americas, I could not say; there might be very late options if we are allowed to vary the nuclei of state development here.

 

[galanx]

Yea women never benefit from patrirachy/benevolent sexism. Its all in my mind. Not like there is a whole list of government benefits and rights only women have.

Standard MGTOW/incel whining.

 

[Zireael]

3. A lot more pointless wars. Hear me out on this one. Remember that the Trojan War began because the wrong woman won a rigged beauty contest - for further details I will give the basis of the Trojan War -> there was a wedding, everyone and the gods were invited, someone tossed out an apple of gold and said for the most beautiful woman here. The goddess fought among themselves until they appealed to Zeus, Zeus knowing his goose was cooked deferred to someone else - Paris. The goddesses proceeded to bribe condole and influence the verdict. Aphrodite offered up Helen of Sparta's heart -> thus Troy burned because a bunch of woman were too vain.

That is a myth. No archaeological proof of that cause of the Trojan War was ever found, and research into the time period shows that the Danaeans/Achaeans were one of the many peoples fleeing famines/natural catastrophes at the time, and it is much more likely that they started the conflict that would be later remembered as the Trojan War than vice versa.

 

[dcharles]

According to what I've read in regards to evolutionary biology, the rise of patriarchy was a result of the transition to farming and the rise of civilization.

Human society before agriculture was pretty gender equal, with men and woman of tribes sharing in duties.

So under what conditions could a matriarchal society have emerged? What evolutionary or geological incident could've lead to the rise of a woman-ruled world once humans started to farm?

Observation: I always thought patriarchy was a weird phenomenon--it makes more sense to organize families matrilinealy, beause you always know who the mother of a child is. I'll be watching this disussion.

 

[JackLumber]

The thing is humans are fairly intelligent, social and fiercely tribalistic beings as a result it's really only a matter of time before some of the males realize they are larger, stronger and do the vast majority of the dangerous violent stuff at which point some ambitious males will seize power through force because really not much is stopping them.
I think by the time we are forming societies it's too late, you'd probably need an evolutionary pod

 

[Bookmark1995]

The thing is humans are fairly intelligent, social and fiercely tribalistic beings as a result it's really only a matter of time before some of the males realize they are larger, stronger and do the vast majority of the dangerous violent stuff at which point some ambitious males will seize power through force because really not much is stopping them.
I think by the time we are forming societies it's too late, you'd probably need an evolutionary pod

What makes bonobos a female-dominated society?

 

[JackLumber]

What makes bonobos a female-dominated society?

Bonobo social behaviour is more complicated than it is often made out to be, while a male derives his social standing from his mother he will still be of a higher social standing than females lower than his mother unlike a more true matriarchal social order like that found in spotted hyenas, social ranking is also less important in Bonobos than it is in chimps and their is evidence that ecological factors also play an important role (in terms of their behaviour vs chimps, specifically eastern chimps) with it being theorized that the greater abundance of more highly nutritious fruits and plants being south of the Congo River has made hunting and defending prime territory less important for banobos than chimps.

Short version: Bonobos have more abundant resources and so conflict is less important to their lives.

 

[jatt_scythian]

Standard MGTOW/incel whining.

Yup anybody you disagree with is an incel. Fuck off SJW asshole. Go back to whining about the orange man.

 

[JackLumber]

Yup anybody you disagree with is an incel. Fuck off SJW asshole. Go back to whining about the orange man.

Easy guys, you're gonna end up banned

 

[Bookmark1995]

Short version: Bonobos have more abundant resources and so conflict is less important to their lives.

Again, surplus paradoxically contributed to patriarchy.

 

[JackLumber]

Again, surplus paradoxically contributed to patriarchy.

A surplus that came after its entrenchment well after our society had formed and the surplus wasn't the important part, it was the importance of violence in the society, humans may have had ever greater surpluses of resources but we also became increasingly martial, that and the fact that our societies became so much more advanced and complex compared to other animals that comparison at that point begin to lose all meaning.

 

[Puzzle]

If women in prehistory are pumping out and raising six kids they’re going to be too busy to do too much else. Agriculture benefits linearly from more workers, so families are going to want to be as large as possible. Even ignoring any cultural expectations if men are out doing all the visible work while wives are silently in contending with their labor it makes sense that the men in question will make decisions since they’re the ones on the spot. Once people get used to following a leader it’ll naturally stay that way.

Something about the need for more children, the economic need since obviously there’s more to having kids than that, needs to change. Maybe a population is stuck on a small island with limited resources so having a ton of kids isn’t practical. They can only fish and farm so much, and having more kids just adds mouths. A smart and helpful wife would be valued as more than just a womb, and eventually one of the woman would be smart enough to become a leader of the population. She has two or three competent generations of daughters and suddenly it’s always been that way.

 

[Derek Jackson]

I suspect that the early stages of agriculture reflected woman the gatherer rather than man the hunter. When land starts to be defined as owned the trick is to avoid monogamy, if possible polyANDRY. Succession is the daughter because you know you who are the actual descendants.

If GIRLS are seen as of more value then the balance of the population changes

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Like others, I doubt if it would be possible at all. Early states and societies of increasing complexity are going to be about concentrating larger armies, and that skews too male. Even in small scale societies, even if we're not calling them patriarchal, war is absolutely under male leadership.

I do think you get a sort of secondary effect of the changes in institutional religion towards a single god / single source which is either male and/or identified with a male prophet. Maybe you can do away with that, but keeping a sort of diverse religious pantheon with male and female figures doesn't really get you any further from "patriarchy" really, in my book.

(There used to be some talk about how the proto-Indo-European expansions related to the birth of a patriarchal culture, but I suspect that's just an artefact that lots of the associated migrations seem to have been male biased, and thus male related common religious culture is easier to reconstruct.)

 

[Help]

That is a myth. No archaeological proof of that cause of the Trojan War was ever found, and research into the time period shows that the Danaeans/Achaeans were one of the many peoples fleeing famines/natural catastrophes at the time, and it is much more likely that they started the conflict that would be later remembered as the Trojan War than vice versa.

I thought it was a trade conflict?

 

[Skraea]

Its probably predated civilizations, Human is more related to chimp after all.

Actually,some scientists believe that humans are more kin to the bonobo. And we all know that the bonobo are more matriarchal (not to mention sex obsessed) than chimps. So,maybe some early cultures were like that.