Response to Kristy Coleman’s review of The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
(Cynthia Eller, "Response," Religion, 31 [2001]: 265-270)
As I wrote in the concluding chapter of The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, I never expected to convert any true believers to the idea that past matristic, goddess-worshipping societies are an unlikely historical proposition and, moreover, grounded in an unhelpful form of feminism. The whole tone of Coleman’s review tends to reinforce what I said there: that this vision of our ancient past “is far too valuable to those who treasure it to be sacrificed out of a concern for historical veracity” (182). Coleman—who one has to assume is a partisan of what she calls the “goddess revival movement”—shows no sign of sacrificing the myth of matriarchal prehistory in the wake of my “very persuasive” but ultimately “biased and incomplete” debunking of matriarchal myth. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, Coleman is willing to resort to misrepresentation of my work, faulty argumentation, and self-contradiction in her effort to keep some shred of the myth intact and feministly functional.
Coleman’s approach in this review (as is clear from her subtitles) is a point-by-point refutation of the major arguments of my work. I’d be happy to refute these refutations in return, but I worry that this exercise would be too tedious for most readers. So instead I will restrict myself to discussing the seven fallacies Coleman claims to find in my work (which she mostly draws from David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies).
Fallacy of Hypostatized Proof--Coleman includes two criticisms under this heading: first, that I have substituted my own peculiar and singular version of matriarchal myth for the variety of ones extant among the many narrators of this myth; and second, that the term “matriarchy” is unclear and, again, not true to the story as it is told. I won’t rehearse my choice of “matriarchy” here, since I discuss that in the book (along with the reasons why I do not consider “prepatriarchal” an adequate substitute [pp. 12-13]). But I would like to say something about my description of matriarchal myth. It is essentially the same one that appeared in my earlier book, Living in the Lap of the Goddess. As Coleman notes, this book was generally acknowledged by practitioners of feminist spirituality to be a fair and accurate representation of their beliefs and practices. No one thought to say how deficient my description of matriarchal myth was in Living in the Lap of the Goddess. I have to assume then that the reason why it has morphed into “a few scraps of allegedly empirical evidence” is because I have emerged as a critic.
In particular, Coleman complains that I have included “outlandish” theories in my description of matriarchal myth that do not reflect what most partisans believe. I would direct the reader to my endnotes; everything is documented. When I describe a more unusual variant of matriarchal myth (such as that women reproduced parthenogenetically in prehistoric times), I note in the text that it is unusual. Coleman’s analogy to “using the rhetoric of televangelists to define Protestant theology at large” is misplaced. I discuss what the feminist matriarchalist equivalents of televangelists (women who are channeling long-dead high priestesses from the matriarchal continent of Mu) have to say, but I also discuss—at greater length, I might add—what the equivalent of major Protestant theologians (women such as Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler) have to say. Any myth that has real religious, spiritual, or political utility is comprised of many versions, and I have tried to do justice to the many variations of matriarchal myth. Still, I stand by my claim that there is a common core to matriarchal myth and that I have accurately outlined it in Matriarchal Prehistory.
Coleman also insists that my description of matriarchal myth is flawed because I have naively concluded that feminist matriarchalists actually believe that prehistory was matristic (goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, whatever), that they even care whether or not the story they tell has any basis in actual human history. Now one does not have to go far in the literature—or afield from some of the movement’s most respected spokespeople—to find outright claims that prehistory was matriarchal (as I have defined the term on p. 13). It is Vicki Noble who calls it “documented fact,” Riane Eisler who proposes to tell us “what actually happened in our past,” Mara Lynn Keller who calls calls Gimbutas’s theory “to date the most scientifically plausible account of the available information regarding Neolithic Europe” (see pp. 7-8). These are not the “starry eyed” novices to whom Coleman makes reference.
Certainly I am aware that some partisans of matriarchal myth claim that the historical accuracy of the story is completely beside the point (see pp. 13-14). Some of these partisans, I am sure, actually mean this (and I’m not being facetious here—it is quite possible to use this story in a spiritual, psychological, or political way with complete indifference to the story’s historical truth, as I stated in the book [p. 182]). But more feminist matriarchalists, I believe, do think this is how prehistory happened, and retreat to the claim that it is merely a myth only when they are scared off by pointed critique of its historicity. I would offer Coleman as a case in point. She suggests that “real” practitioners of goddess spirituality make only modest, believable assertions about the matricentricity of prehistory, or alternatively, that they are completely indifferent to the story’s historical veracity. But for someone who regards the actual existence of prehistoric matristic societies as a take it or leave it proposition, Coleman devotes an awful lot of effort to keeping that proposition intact: she offers countless examples of my alleged omissions in the evidence, alludes to my biased perspective, and concludes that like the arrows in vector math, the available evidence points toward a major decrease in the power and autonomy of goddesses and women, occurring—as matriarchal myth says it does—right on the cusp of recorded history.
Fallacy of Circular Proof--In a related vein, Coleman offers frequent complaint that I have created a straw woman, called “feminist matriarchalist,” who does not actually exist. I have created this false and misleading image, she says, by advancing the thesis that “feminist matriarchalists are people who think X,” and then trying to support this thesis by arguing that “people who think X are feminist matriarchalists”—an obvious circularity. I would describe my approach more like this: I observe a phenomenon, namely that many people are talking about enviably harmonious prehistoric societies that were matricentric and goddess-worshipping; I label these people “feminist matriarchalists”; and then I proffer mountains of empirical evidence (in the form of books, journals, rituals, art, poetry, newsletters, etc.) that this phenomenon exists. Coleman may not like the term I chose, but I had to call these folks something. As to their existence, I have to believe Coleman is being disingenuous if she suggests that such a phenomenon—feminists professing matriarchal myth—does not exist or that I have not documented its existence.
If the choice of the term “feminist matriarchalist” is somewhat arbitrary, the inclusion of one person or another in that category is not. An individual earns the title “feminist matriarchalist” by telling the myth of matriarchal prehistory with the avowed intention of empowering women. Sigmund Freud, Frederick Engels, and Charles Darwin are not feminist matriarchalists (and contrary to Coleman’s claim, I never said they were): to the extent that they speak of prehistoric matriarchies, they are matriarchalists, but they are not feminists (perhaps they are “patriarchal matriarchalists” or “socialist matriarchalists”). Gerda Lerner is also not a feminist matriarchalist: she is a feminist, but she explicitly denies the existence of prehistoric matriarchies.
I think part of the confusion surrounding the term “feminist matriarchalists” comes from conflating them with spiritual feminists. There’s a lot of overlap between the two categories, but they are not identical. I do not (as Coleman says I do) use the term feminist matriarchalist “to describe the practitioners of the goddess movement and its advocates.” I note that many feminist matriarchalists are affiliated with what I have called “the feminist spirituality movement” but that others are quite secular (p. 10). I have further noted that not all spiritual feminists subscribe to the myth of matriarchal prehistory (p. 36). The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory is not a wholesale rejection of feminist spirituality. It should certainly not “unveil” me as a “foe” of the “goddess revival movement.” There is much more to feminist spirituality, thank goddess, than matriarchal myth.
Fallacy of Negative Proof—Repeatedly throughout her review, Coleman portrays me as a proponent of the thesis that human society has always been patriarchal, and still is, anywhere you look. She formalizes this in accusing me of the fallacy of negative proof: if “there is no evidence that X is not the case,” then “not-X is the case.” This is simply false. I do not argue that “we must accept that patriarchy has always been here”; I do not “insist upon the exclusivity of the masculine reign throughout hominid existence”; I do not fail to recognize “the possibility [her emphasis]” of prepatriarchal prehistoric societies. I state over and over again in my book that we can’t know just what prehistoric societies were like; that they could have been patriarchal, matriarchal, or something in between; and that most likely, they were highly variable, occupying many different stations along this continuum. Coleman herself quotes me as saying this in the final sentence of her review, so how she could elsewhere describe me as a proponent of the thesis of universal and inevitable patriarchy is beyond me.
Coleman appears to arrive at this conclusion in part because I select “morose examples” and “consistently oppressive illustrations.” Yes, the examples I choose are “particularly negative.” This is because they are counterexamples. They are not explorations of the whole range of variants in the ethnographic record. They are responses to a specific—usually broad and universalizing—claim made by feminist matriarchalists as to what correlates with high status for women. So when I say that foraging societies can be misogynistic, and give an example of one which is, I am not thereby saying that all foraging societies are misogynistic, or even that foraging societies as a class are no more egalitarian than, say, capitalist societies. When I say that religions can worship goddesses while oppressing women, and discuss the generally secondary status of women in Hindu culture, I am not saying that goddess worship cannot be empowering to women, either individually or throughout an entire religion. (Indeed, I wrote a book about a religion which is goddess-worshipping and empowering to women; namely, feminist spirituality.) What I am saying is that the conditions that we can reasonably imagine having existed in prehistory—foraging economies and goddess worship—do not necessarily produce societies in which women are honored and respected. Women may have been honored and respected in prehistoric societies. Or they may have been treated abominably. The point is that we can’t know this simply by knowing that there was no agriculture or that goddesses were worshipped.
Fallacy of Presumptive Proof--Coleman deems me guilty of this fallacy because I place the burden of proof on feminist matriarchalists “to provide a compelling explanation for the rise of patriarchy to advance [sic—disprove?]” my “proposition that it has always existed.” I do place the burden of proof on feminist matriarchalists, and I do so because this is where it belongs. I am not the one suggesting that prehistory—in all times and places prior to around 3000 BCE—was a wonderful place for women. I am not the one envisioning societies that are decidedly different from those of which we have knowledge today (either through historical or ethnographic evidence or both). And, as I’ve already said, I am not attempting to prove a thesis of universal patriarchy. I am trying to disprove a thesis of universal prehistoric matriarchy.
As to why I should focus such apparently harsh critical attention on what is, after all, a religious myth, I think the answer should by now be obvious. First, I am a feminist. I have a vested interest in what feminists say and do. Second, just because a story is used in a spiritual or religious way does not mean (at least not to me) that its adherents are free to say whatever they like about our shared human history or to shrug off all criticism as pointless and pedantic. Feminist matriarchalists have despaired over the fact that matriarchal myth is not taught in school as an accurate account of human prehistory. I would be very upset if this made it into the curriculum at my daughter’s elementary school, and at times it seems poised to do so. Now Christian fundamentalists have similarly despaired over the fact that a literal six-day divine creation is passed over in public schools, and I haven’t seen fit to argue with them. But if and when my daughter’s science teacher tells her that humans did not evolve from apes and that God created the world in six days through the force of his words alone, maybe I will have to write a book debunking that.
Reasoning Error of Relativism--Coleman also argues that I discredit certain points solely because they are made by feminist matriarchalists, and that I accept others solely because they come from the mouths of archaeologists or other “authorities.” If I have done this, I need to be shown where, since I made every possible effort to avoid this. The chapter of my book that Coleman cites as perpetrating guilt-by-association (“The Story They Tell”) is intended to be solely descriptive. If this account is read as dismissive or discrediting, it is not meant to be; at this point in the book, I have not yet begun to question any of the claims feminist matriarchalists make, either the very fanciful or the comparatively plausible. The fact that I don’t similarly perpetrate a sort of righteousness-by-association can be seen when I don’t accept something simply because an anthropologist says it. Of course I am aware that many cutting-edge feminist anthropologists have argued that complementarity and egalitarianism “are more appropriate terms” than domination and inequality when discussing gender roles in other cultures. Maybe I should be more humble in my opinions than I am (given that I am not trained as an anthropologist), but my first-order response to this is not that some great advance has been made in anthropological theory or method, but rather that some feminist anthropologists, like most feminist matriarchalists, have abandoned themselves to an overly sanguine and ultimately dishonest way of assessing women’s status cross-culturally. In any event, I clearly do not credit a theory for the simple reason that it came from the pen of an “authority.”
I think I make it pretty clear in the course of Matriarchal Prehistory that I am a “glass half empty” sort of feminist. Call it a character flaw or a personal quirk; many of my friends do. I’m sure that my cynicism will cause some readers to dismiss my arguments out of hand. Still, I have made every effort to distinguish between what I say as a result of my various biases—including my native cynicism and my dislike for “difference” feminism—and what I believe are reasonable inferences from prehistoric and ethnographic evidence. The reader will have to judge for herself if I have done this successfully. Obviously my early remarks about my reactions to matriarchal myth when I was in graduate school (pp. 5-6) do, as Coleman says, “demonstrate . . . an erroneous and disparaging depiction” of feminist matriarchalists. I was twenty-three years old, and I was an annoying little intellectual snob. I won’t try to convince anyone that I’m not still an intellectual snob—if you’ve gotten this far in my response you probably suspect that I still am—but I did spend the last five years researching matriarchal myth specifically, and issues of gender in prehistory more generally. I believe this is testament to how seriously I take “the possibility of a prepatriarchal prehistory.”
Fallacy of Metaphysical Questions--In her endnotes and also in her text, Coleman takes me to task for demanding answers to too many “why” questions (such as “Why did the golden age fall?” and “Why did men begin to suddenly experience womb envy?”). Echoing Fischer, Coleman writes that “good historical inquiry” should begin with “an open-ended question.” Maybe so. But my book is not, nor did it ever pretend to be, a historical inquiry. It is a critique. I am not asking why the golden age fell, because I suspect there never was one. I am not asking why men suddenly began to experience womb envy in 3000 BCE, because I don’t think they did. What I am doing is pointing out weak spots in the logic of matriarchal myth. These are questions directed not at “history” but at feminist matriarchalists. More general questions of gender relations in prehistory do come into play in the course of this critique. But as I announce loudly and regularly throughout the book, I believe that there is very little we can know with any degree of certainty about prehistoric gender relations. We can be pretty sure, however, that they were not exactly as feminist matriarchalists have claimed, or that if they were, this can’t be deduced from the evidence feminist matriarchalists present.
Arguing ad Hominem--Coleman’s last criticism of my methodology is that I argue against the myth of matriarchal prehistory via ad hominem (ad feminem?) attacks on feminist matriarchalists. She only mentions one of these specifically, and she mentions it twice: that I say, on page eight of my book, that feminist matriarchalists are “vacuous” or that their “thinking is vacuous.” I was surprised to read this. It didn’t sound like something I would say. So I went to page eight to see how I had let such a remark slip in, and this is what I found: “Relying on matriarchal myth in the face of the evidence that challenges its veracity leaves feminists open to charges of vacuousness and irrelevance that we cannot afford to court.” Roughly translated, I’m saying, “if you keep talking like this, someone (not me!) might think you’re vacuous, and that could reflect badly on all of us.” I fail to understand how this qualifies as an ad hominem argument.
It is gratifying to have the opportunity to clarify some points which may have been lost in the shuffle in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, especially regarding how I define “feminist matriarchalist” and why I dwell on the depressing when I report my learnings from ethnographic sources. But as I said in the book, and as I will say again here, the historical debunking of matriarchal myth—while necessary and valuable—is not the most important critique to be made. Coleman spent comparatively little time discussing my critique of the gender stereotypes upon which matriarchal myth typically relies. She does find me short-sighted for my apparent disinterest in the incontestable fact that it is only women who have babies. As the mother of two (an infant and a six-year-old), I don’t think that motherhood is beside the point when it comes to feminist politics. But I don’t feel that my frustrations or the expectations placed upon me as a mother will be whisked away if only others would regard my mysterious life-giving womb with awe or treat me as a living embodiment of the all-creating Goddess. As I read most feminist matriarchalists—and granted, I could be reading them wrong—a woman like me needs to get with the program and take pride in “the feminine,” which she embodies whether she wants to or not, whether she recognizes it or not.
I would urge feminist matriarchalists to go ahead and enjoy their femaleness as a source of power, mystery, and many enviable human traits typically labeled “feminine.” If you can convince others to admire you for your femaleness, for your at-oneness with the Goddess, the creatrix of the world, well, more power to you. But when it comes to telling me that this is how I ought to experience my femaleness or how I ought to regard you because of your femaleness . . . this is where things get a little more edgy. There is a very basic difference between my feminism and Coleman’s (at least as she presents it in her review): Coleman endorses the search “for characteristics that define female identity”; she clearly sees the uncovering of “female identity” as relevant to the feminist project. As I argue in my book, I see “female identity” (not yours, not mine, but everywoman’s) as relevant mainly to the patriarchal project. I’m guessing that if I were African American, I would be disinterested in searching for the characteristics that define “black identity” across cultures and throughout time, and much more interested in getting people to give up the practice of using my blackness to decide who I am, what I can legitimately want out of life, and how I should be treated. If my only choices are to have people loathe me or revere me because of my femaleness, I’ll choose to be revered every time. But what I’m looking for is something a little different, and it is this that inspires me to take a good chunk of my career to critique matriarchal myth.
(Cynthia Eller, "Response," Religion, 31 [2001]: 265-270)
As I wrote in the concluding chapter of The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, I never expected to convert any true believers to the idea that past matristic, goddess-worshipping societies are an unlikely historical proposition and, moreover, grounded in an unhelpful form of feminism. The whole tone of Coleman’s review tends to reinforce what I said there: that this vision of our ancient past “is far too valuable to those who treasure it to be sacrificed out of a concern for historical veracity” (182). Coleman—who one has to assume is a partisan of what she calls the “goddess revival movement”—shows no sign of sacrificing the myth of matriarchal prehistory in the wake of my “very persuasive” but ultimately “biased and incomplete” debunking of matriarchal myth. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, Coleman is willing to resort to misrepresentation of my work, faulty argumentation, and self-contradiction in her effort to keep some shred of the myth intact and feministly functional.
Coleman’s approach in this review (as is clear from her subtitles) is a point-by-point refutation of the major arguments of my work. I’d be happy to refute these refutations in return, but I worry that this exercise would be too tedious for most readers. So instead I will restrict myself to discussing the seven fallacies Coleman claims to find in my work (which she mostly draws from David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies).
Fallacy of Hypostatized Proof--Coleman includes two criticisms under this heading: first, that I have substituted my own peculiar and singular version of matriarchal myth for the variety of ones extant among the many narrators of this myth; and second, that the term “matriarchy” is unclear and, again, not true to the story as it is told. I won’t rehearse my choice of “matriarchy” here, since I discuss that in the book (along with the reasons why I do not consider “prepatriarchal” an adequate substitute [pp. 12-13]). But I would like to say something about my description of matriarchal myth. It is essentially the same one that appeared in my earlier book, Living in the Lap of the Goddess. As Coleman notes, this book was generally acknowledged by practitioners of feminist spirituality to be a fair and accurate representation of their beliefs and practices. No one thought to say how deficient my description of matriarchal myth was in Living in the Lap of the Goddess. I have to assume then that the reason why it has morphed into “a few scraps of allegedly empirical evidence” is because I have emerged as a critic.
In particular, Coleman complains that I have included “outlandish” theories in my description of matriarchal myth that do not reflect what most partisans believe. I would direct the reader to my endnotes; everything is documented. When I describe a more unusual variant of matriarchal myth (such as that women reproduced parthenogenetically in prehistoric times), I note in the text that it is unusual. Coleman’s analogy to “using the rhetoric of televangelists to define Protestant theology at large” is misplaced. I discuss what the feminist matriarchalist equivalents of televangelists (women who are channeling long-dead high priestesses from the matriarchal continent of Mu) have to say, but I also discuss—at greater length, I might add—what the equivalent of major Protestant theologians (women such as Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler) have to say. Any myth that has real religious, spiritual, or political utility is comprised of many versions, and I have tried to do justice to the many variations of matriarchal myth. Still, I stand by my claim that there is a common core to matriarchal myth and that I have accurately outlined it in Matriarchal Prehistory.
Coleman also insists that my description of matriarchal myth is flawed because I have naively concluded that feminist matriarchalists actually believe that prehistory was matristic (goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, whatever), that they even care whether or not the story they tell has any basis in actual human history. Now one does not have to go far in the literature—or afield from some of the movement’s most respected spokespeople—to find outright claims that prehistory was matriarchal (as I have defined the term on p. 13). It is Vicki Noble who calls it “documented fact,” Riane Eisler who proposes to tell us “what actually happened in our past,” Mara Lynn Keller who calls calls Gimbutas’s theory “to date the most scientifically plausible account of the available information regarding Neolithic Europe” (see pp. 7-8). These are not the “starry eyed” novices to whom Coleman makes reference.
Certainly I am aware that some partisans of matriarchal myth claim that the historical accuracy of the story is completely beside the point (see pp. 13-14). Some of these partisans, I am sure, actually mean this (and I’m not being facetious here—it is quite possible to use this story in a spiritual, psychological, or political way with complete indifference to the story’s historical truth, as I stated in the book [p. 182]). But more feminist matriarchalists, I believe, do think this is how prehistory happened, and retreat to the claim that it is merely a myth only when they are scared off by pointed critique of its historicity. I would offer Coleman as a case in point. She suggests that “real” practitioners of goddess spirituality make only modest, believable assertions about the matricentricity of prehistory, or alternatively, that they are completely indifferent to the story’s historical veracity. But for someone who regards the actual existence of prehistoric matristic societies as a take it or leave it proposition, Coleman devotes an awful lot of effort to keeping that proposition intact: she offers countless examples of my alleged omissions in the evidence, alludes to my biased perspective, and concludes that like the arrows in vector math, the available evidence points toward a major decrease in the power and autonomy of goddesses and women, occurring—as matriarchal myth says it does—right on the cusp of recorded history.
Fallacy of Circular Proof--In a related vein, Coleman offers frequent complaint that I have created a straw woman, called “feminist matriarchalist,” who does not actually exist. I have created this false and misleading image, she says, by advancing the thesis that “feminist matriarchalists are people who think X,” and then trying to support this thesis by arguing that “people who think X are feminist matriarchalists”—an obvious circularity. I would describe my approach more like this: I observe a phenomenon, namely that many people are talking about enviably harmonious prehistoric societies that were matricentric and goddess-worshipping; I label these people “feminist matriarchalists”; and then I proffer mountains of empirical evidence (in the form of books, journals, rituals, art, poetry, newsletters, etc.) that this phenomenon exists. Coleman may not like the term I chose, but I had to call these folks something. As to their existence, I have to believe Coleman is being disingenuous if she suggests that such a phenomenon—feminists professing matriarchal myth—does not exist or that I have not documented its existence.
If the choice of the term “feminist matriarchalist” is somewhat arbitrary, the inclusion of one person or another in that category is not. An individual earns the title “feminist matriarchalist” by telling the myth of matriarchal prehistory with the avowed intention of empowering women. Sigmund Freud, Frederick Engels, and Charles Darwin are not feminist matriarchalists (and contrary to Coleman’s claim, I never said they were): to the extent that they speak of prehistoric matriarchies, they are matriarchalists, but they are not feminists (perhaps they are “patriarchal matriarchalists” or “socialist matriarchalists”). Gerda Lerner is also not a feminist matriarchalist: she is a feminist, but she explicitly denies the existence of prehistoric matriarchies.
I think part of the confusion surrounding the term “feminist matriarchalists” comes from conflating them with spiritual feminists. There’s a lot of overlap between the two categories, but they are not identical. I do not (as Coleman says I do) use the term feminist matriarchalist “to describe the practitioners of the goddess movement and its advocates.” I note that many feminist matriarchalists are affiliated with what I have called “the feminist spirituality movement” but that others are quite secular (p. 10). I have further noted that not all spiritual feminists subscribe to the myth of matriarchal prehistory (p. 36). The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory is not a wholesale rejection of feminist spirituality. It should certainly not “unveil” me as a “foe” of the “goddess revival movement.” There is much more to feminist spirituality, thank goddess, than matriarchal myth.
Fallacy of Negative Proof—Repeatedly throughout her review, Coleman portrays me as a proponent of the thesis that human society has always been patriarchal, and still is, anywhere you look. She formalizes this in accusing me of the fallacy of negative proof: if “there is no evidence that X is not the case,” then “not-X is the case.” This is simply false. I do not argue that “we must accept that patriarchy has always been here”; I do not “insist upon the exclusivity of the masculine reign throughout hominid existence”; I do not fail to recognize “the possibility [her emphasis]” of prepatriarchal prehistoric societies. I state over and over again in my book that we can’t know just what prehistoric societies were like; that they could have been patriarchal, matriarchal, or something in between; and that most likely, they were highly variable, occupying many different stations along this continuum. Coleman herself quotes me as saying this in the final sentence of her review, so how she could elsewhere describe me as a proponent of the thesis of universal and inevitable patriarchy is beyond me.
Coleman appears to arrive at this conclusion in part because I select “morose examples” and “consistently oppressive illustrations.” Yes, the examples I choose are “particularly negative.” This is because they are counterexamples. They are not explorations of the whole range of variants in the ethnographic record. They are responses to a specific—usually broad and universalizing—claim made by feminist matriarchalists as to what correlates with high status for women. So when I say that foraging societies can be misogynistic, and give an example of one which is, I am not thereby saying that all foraging societies are misogynistic, or even that foraging societies as a class are no more egalitarian than, say, capitalist societies. When I say that religions can worship goddesses while oppressing women, and discuss the generally secondary status of women in Hindu culture, I am not saying that goddess worship cannot be empowering to women, either individually or throughout an entire religion. (Indeed, I wrote a book about a religion which is goddess-worshipping and empowering to women; namely, feminist spirituality.) What I am saying is that the conditions that we can reasonably imagine having existed in prehistory—foraging economies and goddess worship—do not necessarily produce societies in which women are honored and respected. Women may have been honored and respected in prehistoric societies. Or they may have been treated abominably. The point is that we can’t know this simply by knowing that there was no agriculture or that goddesses were worshipped.
Fallacy of Presumptive Proof--Coleman deems me guilty of this fallacy because I place the burden of proof on feminist matriarchalists “to provide a compelling explanation for the rise of patriarchy to advance [sic—disprove?]” my “proposition that it has always existed.” I do place the burden of proof on feminist matriarchalists, and I do so because this is where it belongs. I am not the one suggesting that prehistory—in all times and places prior to around 3000 BCE—was a wonderful place for women. I am not the one envisioning societies that are decidedly different from those of which we have knowledge today (either through historical or ethnographic evidence or both). And, as I’ve already said, I am not attempting to prove a thesis of universal patriarchy. I am trying to disprove a thesis of universal prehistoric matriarchy.
As to why I should focus such apparently harsh critical attention on what is, after all, a religious myth, I think the answer should by now be obvious. First, I am a feminist. I have a vested interest in what feminists say and do. Second, just because a story is used in a spiritual or religious way does not mean (at least not to me) that its adherents are free to say whatever they like about our shared human history or to shrug off all criticism as pointless and pedantic. Feminist matriarchalists have despaired over the fact that matriarchal myth is not taught in school as an accurate account of human prehistory. I would be very upset if this made it into the curriculum at my daughter’s elementary school, and at times it seems poised to do so. Now Christian fundamentalists have similarly despaired over the fact that a literal six-day divine creation is passed over in public schools, and I haven’t seen fit to argue with them. But if and when my daughter’s science teacher tells her that humans did not evolve from apes and that God created the world in six days through the force of his words alone, maybe I will have to write a book debunking that.
Reasoning Error of Relativism--Coleman also argues that I discredit certain points solely because they are made by feminist matriarchalists, and that I accept others solely because they come from the mouths of archaeologists or other “authorities.” If I have done this, I need to be shown where, since I made every possible effort to avoid this. The chapter of my book that Coleman cites as perpetrating guilt-by-association (“The Story They Tell”) is intended to be solely descriptive. If this account is read as dismissive or discrediting, it is not meant to be; at this point in the book, I have not yet begun to question any of the claims feminist matriarchalists make, either the very fanciful or the comparatively plausible. The fact that I don’t similarly perpetrate a sort of righteousness-by-association can be seen when I don’t accept something simply because an anthropologist says it. Of course I am aware that many cutting-edge feminist anthropologists have argued that complementarity and egalitarianism “are more appropriate terms” than domination and inequality when discussing gender roles in other cultures. Maybe I should be more humble in my opinions than I am (given that I am not trained as an anthropologist), but my first-order response to this is not that some great advance has been made in anthropological theory or method, but rather that some feminist anthropologists, like most feminist matriarchalists, have abandoned themselves to an overly sanguine and ultimately dishonest way of assessing women’s status cross-culturally. In any event, I clearly do not credit a theory for the simple reason that it came from the pen of an “authority.”
I think I make it pretty clear in the course of Matriarchal Prehistory that I am a “glass half empty” sort of feminist. Call it a character flaw or a personal quirk; many of my friends do. I’m sure that my cynicism will cause some readers to dismiss my arguments out of hand. Still, I have made every effort to distinguish between what I say as a result of my various biases—including my native cynicism and my dislike for “difference” feminism—and what I believe are reasonable inferences from prehistoric and ethnographic evidence. The reader will have to judge for herself if I have done this successfully. Obviously my early remarks about my reactions to matriarchal myth when I was in graduate school (pp. 5-6) do, as Coleman says, “demonstrate . . . an erroneous and disparaging depiction” of feminist matriarchalists. I was twenty-three years old, and I was an annoying little intellectual snob. I won’t try to convince anyone that I’m not still an intellectual snob—if you’ve gotten this far in my response you probably suspect that I still am—but I did spend the last five years researching matriarchal myth specifically, and issues of gender in prehistory more generally. I believe this is testament to how seriously I take “the possibility of a prepatriarchal prehistory.”
Fallacy of Metaphysical Questions--In her endnotes and also in her text, Coleman takes me to task for demanding answers to too many “why” questions (such as “Why did the golden age fall?” and “Why did men begin to suddenly experience womb envy?”). Echoing Fischer, Coleman writes that “good historical inquiry” should begin with “an open-ended question.” Maybe so. But my book is not, nor did it ever pretend to be, a historical inquiry. It is a critique. I am not asking why the golden age fell, because I suspect there never was one. I am not asking why men suddenly began to experience womb envy in 3000 BCE, because I don’t think they did. What I am doing is pointing out weak spots in the logic of matriarchal myth. These are questions directed not at “history” but at feminist matriarchalists. More general questions of gender relations in prehistory do come into play in the course of this critique. But as I announce loudly and regularly throughout the book, I believe that there is very little we can know with any degree of certainty about prehistoric gender relations. We can be pretty sure, however, that they were not exactly as feminist matriarchalists have claimed, or that if they were, this can’t be deduced from the evidence feminist matriarchalists present.
Arguing ad Hominem--Coleman’s last criticism of my methodology is that I argue against the myth of matriarchal prehistory via ad hominem (ad feminem?) attacks on feminist matriarchalists. She only mentions one of these specifically, and she mentions it twice: that I say, on page eight of my book, that feminist matriarchalists are “vacuous” or that their “thinking is vacuous.” I was surprised to read this. It didn’t sound like something I would say. So I went to page eight to see how I had let such a remark slip in, and this is what I found: “Relying on matriarchal myth in the face of the evidence that challenges its veracity leaves feminists open to charges of vacuousness and irrelevance that we cannot afford to court.” Roughly translated, I’m saying, “if you keep talking like this, someone (not me!) might think you’re vacuous, and that could reflect badly on all of us.” I fail to understand how this qualifies as an ad hominem argument.
It is gratifying to have the opportunity to clarify some points which may have been lost in the shuffle in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, especially regarding how I define “feminist matriarchalist” and why I dwell on the depressing when I report my learnings from ethnographic sources. But as I said in the book, and as I will say again here, the historical debunking of matriarchal myth—while necessary and valuable—is not the most important critique to be made. Coleman spent comparatively little time discussing my critique of the gender stereotypes upon which matriarchal myth typically relies. She does find me short-sighted for my apparent disinterest in the incontestable fact that it is only women who have babies. As the mother of two (an infant and a six-year-old), I don’t think that motherhood is beside the point when it comes to feminist politics. But I don’t feel that my frustrations or the expectations placed upon me as a mother will be whisked away if only others would regard my mysterious life-giving womb with awe or treat me as a living embodiment of the all-creating Goddess. As I read most feminist matriarchalists—and granted, I could be reading them wrong—a woman like me needs to get with the program and take pride in “the feminine,” which she embodies whether she wants to or not, whether she recognizes it or not.
I would urge feminist matriarchalists to go ahead and enjoy their femaleness as a source of power, mystery, and many enviable human traits typically labeled “feminine.” If you can convince others to admire you for your femaleness, for your at-oneness with the Goddess, the creatrix of the world, well, more power to you. But when it comes to telling me that this is how I ought to experience my femaleness or how I ought to regard you because of your femaleness . . . this is where things get a little more edgy. There is a very basic difference between my feminism and Coleman’s (at least as she presents it in her review): Coleman endorses the search “for characteristics that define female identity”; she clearly sees the uncovering of “female identity” as relevant to the feminist project. As I argue in my book, I see “female identity” (not yours, not mine, but everywoman’s) as relevant mainly to the patriarchal project. I’m guessing that if I were African American, I would be disinterested in searching for the characteristics that define “black identity” across cultures and throughout time, and much more interested in getting people to give up the practice of using my blackness to decide who I am, what I can legitimately want out of life, and how I should be treated. If my only choices are to have people loathe me or revere me because of my femaleness, I’ll choose to be revered every time. But what I’m looking for is something a little different, and it is this that inspires me to take a good chunk of my career to critique matriarchal myth.
