Matriarchies are true gender-egalitarian societies; this applies to the social contribution of both sexes-and even though women are at the center, this principle governs the social functioning and freedom of both sexes. Matriarchal societies should emphatically not be regarded as mirror images of patriarchal ones-with dominating women instead of patriarchy’s dominating men-as they have never needed patriarchy’s hierarchical structures.
Patriarchal domination, where a minority emerges from wars of conquest and takes over a whole culture, depends for is power on structures of enforcement, private ownership, colonial rule, and religious conversion. Such patriarchal power structures are a historically recent development, not appearing until about 4000-3000 B.C.E. (and many parts of the world even later) and increasing in strength throughout the further spread of patriarchy.
In light of this misunderstanding about the word “Matriarchy,” its linguistic background needs to be looked at more carefully.
We can challenge the current male-biased idea that matriarchy means “rule of women” or “domination by the mothers,” as these definitions are based on the assumption that matriarchy is parallel to patriarchy, except that a different gender is in charge. Because the words sound parallel, this fuelled the notion that the social patterns must be parallel.
In fact, the Greek word “arche” means not only “domination, “but also “beginning”-the earlier sense of the word. The two meanings are distinct and cannot be conflated. They are also clearly delineated in English: you would not translate “archetype” as “dominator-type,” nor would understand “archaeology” to be “the teaching of domination.” People who believe in the myth of universal patriarchy present this relatively recent form of society as if it had existed all over the world since the beginning of human history.
Hundreds of fictitious stories of this sort have been propagated by patriarchally-oriented theorists.
First of all, they are unable to see matriarchy through any other lens except the dominator pattern. Based on this misunderstanding, they search high and low for evidence of a matriarchy based on domination; when they find no evidence of any culture that conforms to their patriarchally-oriented hypothesis of domination by women, they proceed to assert that matriarchies do not now and never have existed. They invent a phantom culture, and then go looking for an example of it; then, because they cannot find any, they smugly proclaim that it was just a phantom.
This circular reasoning is not only illogical, it is a shameful waste of science.
Based on the older meaning of “arche’,” matriarchy means “the mothers from the beginning.” This refers both to the biological fact that through giving birth, mothers engender the beginning of life, and to the cultural fact that they also created the beginnings of culture itself. Patriarchy could either be translated as “domination by the fathers,” or ”the fathers from the beginning.”
This claim leads to domination of the fathers, because-lacking any natural right to claim a role in “beginning”-they have been obliged, since the start of patriarchy, to insist on that role, and then to enforce it through domination. Contrary to this, by virtue of giving birth to the group, to the next generation, and therefore to society, mothers clearly are the beginning; in matriarchy they have no need to enforce it by domination.
Deep Green Resistance is a radical feminist organization, because all oppression is connected. The freedom of women as a class cannot be separated from the resistance to the dominant culture as a whole. Racism is connected to patriarchy, patriarchy is woven together with the destruction of the planet, and ecocide is interlinked with class oppression.
This episode of The Green Flame focuses on “Pornography Men Possessing Women,” one of Andrea Dworkin’s most influential and important books. In this episode we highlight reflections from the Deep Green Book Club to approach the heart of Andrea Dworkin’s analysis and life’s work.
Poetry and Music
We thank Trinity La Fey for a special live recording of her poem “Tintinnabulation.”
Thank you to Beth Quist for sharing her live acoustic performance of her composition, Angel of Death. Beth is playing all the instruments as well as being the solo vocalist. The “studio” is her RV!
Musicians and artists have lost much of their their ability to create a livelihood as a result of social distancing during the pandemic. Please, if you are able, send some love and support their way.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action with a poem. The title of it is “A Song For Many Movements” and this reading is dedicated to Winnie Mandela. Winnie Mandela is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile somewhere in South Africa. She had been in prison and had been released and was picked up again after she spoke out against the recent jailing of black school children who were singing freedom songs and who were charged with public violence… “A Song for Many Movements.”
Nobody wants to die on the way
and caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sine in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.
Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence
Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
I am standing here as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that wait upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80% chance that the tumour was malignant.
Between that telling and the actual surgery there was a three week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.
But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.
Confronting Mortality
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly edged in a merciless light, and what I most regretted with my silences.
Of what I had ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could’ve meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end.
Death on the other hand is the final silence and that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into perspective gave me great strength.
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I have ever spoken myself. My silence has not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real spoken word, for every attempt I have ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
The women who sustained me throughout that period were black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact.
Casualty and Warrior
Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge – within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not – I am not only casualty, I am also a warrior.
What the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself – a black woman warrior poet doing my work and come to ask you, are you doing yours?
And of course I am afraid because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.
But my daughter when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
Silence and Fear
In the cause of silence each of us draws the face of her own fear-fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgement or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation.
But most of all, I think we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness.
For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings and neither were most of you here today, black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our Earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles and we will still be no less afraid.
In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanzaa, The African-American Festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day was Kujichagulia -self-determination – the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others.
Today is the third day and the principle for today is Umija, collective work and responsibility-the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together. Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us.
The Transformation of Silence Into Action
In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us but primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths by which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.
And it is never without fear – of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgement, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.
And where the words of women are crying to be heard we must each other’s recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinent to our lives.
That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance “I can’t possibly teach black women’s writing on their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and processed? Or another, “she is a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?“ Or, “she’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?“ Or again, “this woman writes of her sons and I have no children.“
And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves and each other we can learn to speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learnt to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words in an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference that which immobilizes us, but silence.
And there are so many silences to be broken.
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” who dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and homophobia.
In this excerpt from Ain’t I Woman: Black Women and Feminism, author bell hooks describes the insidious nature of racism and sexism and the links between patriarchy and white supremacy. Understanding this type of analysis is critical to understanding how oppression functions within civilization as a tool of social control. While hooks uses the term “American,” the same analysis applies across much of the world.
American women of all races are socialized to think of racism solely in the context of race hatred.
Specifically in the case of black and white people, the term racism is usually seen as synonymous with discrimination or prejudice against black people by white people.
For most women the first knowledge of racism as institutionalized oppression is engendered either by direct personal experience or through information gleaned from conversations, books, television, or movies. Consequently, the American woman’s understanding of racism as a political tool of colonialism and imperialism is severely limited.
To experience the pain of race hatred or to witness that pain is not to understand its origin, evolution, or impact on world history. The inability of American women to understand racism in the context of American politics is not due to any inherent deficiency in the woman’s psyche. It merely reflects the extent of our victimization.
No history books used in public schools informed us about racial imperialism.
Instead we were given romantic notions of the “new world“ the “American dream.” America as a great melting pot where all races come together as one. We were taught that Columbus discovered America; that “Indians“ was Scalphunters, killers of innocent women and children; that black people were enslaved because of the biblical curse of Ham, that God “himself” had decreed they would be hewers of wood, tillers of the field, and bringers of water.
No one talked of Africa as the cradle of civilization, of the African and Asian people who came to America before Columbus. No one mentioned mass murder of native Americans as genocide, or the rape of native American and African women as terrorism. No one discussed slavery as a foundation for the growth of capitalism. No one describe the forced breeding of white wives to increase the white population as sexist oppression.
I am a black woman. I attended all black public schools. I grew up in the south were all around me was the fact of racial discrimination, hatred, and for segregation. Yet my education to the politics of race in American society was not that different from that of white female students I met in integrated high schools, in college, or in various women’s groups.
The majority of us understood racism as a social evil perpetrated by prejudiced white people that could be overcome through bonding between blacks and liberal whites, through military protest, changing of laws or racial integration. Higher educational institutions did nothing to increase our limited understanding of racism as a political ideology. Instead professors systematically denied us truth, teaching us to accept racial polarity in the form of white supremacy and sexual polarity in the form of male dominance.
American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to accept a version of American history that was created to uphold and maintain racial imperialism in the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy. One measure of the success of such indoctrinate indoctrination is that we perpetrate both consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist.
Featured image: Armenian Graffiti in the city of Yerevan. It is a translated quote of the author bell hooks which reads “To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.” By RaffiKojian, CC BY SA 4.0.
Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a radical feminist theorist, writer, and campaigner. In this excerpt from her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin discusses the power of naming. In her analysis, the development of the culture of patriarchy has empowered men with almost sole access to the power to define language. This control over language allows for expansions in ideological hegemony, and has serious implications for women over the centuries.
By Andrea Dworkin
How Patriarchy Works: The Power of Naming
Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself.
As Mary Daly, who first isolated this power, wrote in Beyond God the Father “… It is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us“.
Male supremacy is fused into language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perpetual values developed expressly to subordinates women.
Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming. Their names resonate wherever there is human life. As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect. As with fire when it belonged to the gods, the power of naming appears magical: he gives the name, the name enjoys she gives the name the name is lost. But this magic is illusion.
The male power of naming is upheld by force, pure and simple.
On its own, without force to back it, measured against reality, it is not power; it is process, a more humble thing. “The old naming,” Mary Daly wrote, “was not the product of dialogue – a fact in advertently admitted in the Genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the woman.”
It is the naming by decree that is power over and against those who are forbidden to name their own experience; it is the decree backed up by violence that writes the name indelibly in blood in a male dominated culture. The male does not merely name women evil; he exterminates nine million women as witches because he is named them evil. He does not merely name women weak; he mutilates the female body, binds it up so that it cannot move freely, uses it as a toy or ornament, keeps it caged and stunted because he has named women weak. He says that the female wants to be raped; he rapes. She resists rape; he must beat her, threaten her with death, forcibly carry her off, attack her in the night, use knife or fist; and still he says she wants it, they all do. She says no; he claims that means yes.
He names her ignorant then forbids her education.
He does not allow her to use her mind or body rigourously, their names her intuitive and emotional. He defines femininity and when she does not conform he names her deviant, sick, beats her up, slices of her clitoris (repository of pathological masculinity), tears out her womb, (source of her personality), lobotomizes or narcotizes her (perverse recognition that she can think, though thinking in a woman is named deviant).
He names antagonism and violence, mixed in varying degrees “sex”; he beats her and names it variously “proof of love“ (if she is wife) or “eroticism“ (if she is mistress). If she wants him sexually he names her slut; if she does not want him he rapes her and says she does; If she would rather study or paint he names her repressed and brags he can cure her pathological interests with the apocryphal “good fuck“. He names her housewife, fit for only the house, keeps her poor and utterly dependent, only to buy her with his money should she leave the house and then he calls her whore. He names her whatever suits him. he does what he wants and calls it what he likes.
He actively maintains the power of naming through force and he justifies force through the power of naming.
The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way. […]
Whatever contradicts or subverts male naming is defamed out of existence; the power of naming itself, in the male system, is a form of force.
On this episode of the Green Flame, we interviewed Shahidah Janjua about women, writing, activism and the creation of a Women’s Centre in Kerry. Shahidah read one of her soon-to-be-published poems.
This episode is also dedicated to the memory of our beloved sister.
We share this memorial she wrote on the passing of Andrea Dworkin, whom she mentions in the interview saying, “I love that woman.”
On Andrea’s Passing.
April 12, 2005 05:53 AM
“I am gutted. It is the end of an era; not of our resistance, but of an era. I am a Pakistani woman of 55, a mother, a grandmother. I read Letters from a War Zone when I was 36 and it did save my life, not in any cliched way, but really. Everything I have done, thought and understood since then has evolved from reading that book. It laid bare what I had known and experienced. I went on to read all Andrea’s books. I wrote to Andrea to tell her this. Even if my voice was one of thousands, I felt it was important for her to know what she had given me. She replied with great humility.
At first I loved and looked up to Andrea as a child does to its mother, always wanting clarity, the truth, and cherishing the guidance when it came in articles, speeches, interviews and books. I grew from there into an adult and an equal, because this is the power that the truth gave me. It demanded that I grow in stature in the world and stand shoulder to shoulder with brave women, by becoming a brave woman myself. No other words, no other actions in the world had allowed me the full possibility of seeing myself in this way; someone of great worth and endless potential. Always her gendered analysis was the key. The abiding question it left me with in any circumstance was “where are the women in this, and what is happening to them?”, the question that followed was “where am I in this, and what is happening to me?” Asking these questions requires brutal honesty, and no place for complicity. I have lost a friend and a sister, and the way that I can honour this very precious relationship is by carrying on the resistance to male supremacy and domination.”
On behalf of the Women of DGR:
We lost you Shahidah in March, and we are gutted. We mourn no longer having the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with you, dear sister. We cherish the many gifts of your life’s work. We dedicate our lives, as you once did, to being brave, to continuing that work, wherever we are, with whatever gifts we have to give. With all our love and respect Shahidah Janjua, Thank You.
Rest in Peace. Rest in Power.
Shahidah was a woman of strength, a feminist, writer and member of DGR.
