Matriarchy vs Patriarchy: Why It Was Never About Women Ruling Men

What’s The Difference Between Matriarchy and Patriarchy?

Matriarchy vs patriarchy is one of the most misunderstood debates in feminism and political thought. Matriarchy is often described as women ruling over men – a female version of patriarchal power. But anthropology shows that matriarchy and patriarchy are not mirror images of power at all. Instead, matriarchal and matrifocal societies organise authority, kinship and social continuity in fundamentally different ways.For decades, one quiet assumption has shaped public conversations about feminism, power, and governance. If patriarchy is a system where men dominate, then surely matriarchy must mean a system where women dominate. It sounds linguistically neat. It sounds politically symmetrical. And it is almost entirely wrong.

This misunderstanding does more than confuse anthropology. It distorts feminist politics. It traps women inside a framework of domination they are not actually trying to inherit. And it flattens an extraordinarily rich body of anthropological evidence into a caricature of “gender‑swapped power”.

When feminists are accused of wanting to replace patriarchy with matriarchy, what is really being projected is a fear that women would reproduce the same structures of control, only with different bodies at the top.

Anthropology tells a very different story. Matriarchy, in its serious scholarly sense, is not the mirror image of patriarchy. It is not female supremacy. It is not women ruling over men. It represents a fundamentally different way of organising social life, kinship, authority and moral responsibility. And understanding this difference matters deeply for feminism, for governance, and for any credible form of intersectional activism.

Check out more of my posts on Women and Gender Equality here.

The Lingustic Trap That Distorts the Debate

The confusion begins with language itself.

The suffix “‑archy” implies rule. Patriarchy literally means rule of the father. It names a political and social order organised around male authority, male lineage, male control of property, and male monopolisation of institutional power.

When the word “matriarchy” was popularised in European scholarship in the nineteenth century, it was immediately interpreted as the female equivalent of patriarchy. Scholars went searching for societies where women ruled in the same way men ruled elsewhere.

But here’s the thing. They didn’t find them.

This absence was then used, for much of the twentieth century, to argue that matriarchy simply does not exist. But this conclusion depended on a very narrow and culturally specific definition of power: formal political leadership, command structures, and institutional authority.

Anthropologists who worked more closely with living societies began to notice something crucial. Power is not only exercised through offices, titles, or public speech. It is exercised through kinship, through control of land and inheritance, through moral authority, through the regulation of marriage and belonging, through custodianship of social memory, and through the reproduction of social life itself.

This is where the idea of matriarchy begins to shift away from domination and toward something much more structurally interesting.

Rethinking Matriarchy: Peggy Reeves Sanday’s intervention

One of the most influential reconceptualisations of matriarchy comes from anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday.

Rather than treating matriarchy as female political domination, Sanday proposes that matriarchy should be understood as a sociocultural order in which the symbolic and social foundations of society are anchored in a primordial mother figure or ancestral female line.

In this framing, matriarchy is not primarily about who rules. It is about how society understands origin, continuity, belonging and moral responsibility. Motherhood is not romanticised sentimentally. It becomes a structural principle. The mother represents social regeneration, relational continuity and the moral centre of collective life.

In such systems, senior women are not rulers in the patriarchal sense. They are custodians of lineage, land, ritual, and social coherence. Authority flows through women rather than being monopolised by women. This distinction is subtle—but politically profound.

It dismantles the idea that power must always operate as top‑down command.

The Minangkabau: The Largest Living Matrilineal Society

The Minangkabau of West Sumatra provide one of the clearest illustrations of this alternative social architecture. They are often described as the world’s largest matrilineal society.

Property, especially ancestral land and houses, passes through the female line. Women remain in their natal households throughout their lives. Men marry into their wives’ homes. Daughters inherit the ancestral house. Women manage the continuity of the clan.

Yet this is not a society in which women dominate public life in the way male elites dominate in patriarchal states. Religious institutions are largely coordinated by men. Public ritual leadership often falls to men. Village councils contain male representatives. But the legitimacy of these public roles is embedded in a matrilineal moral economy. Women hold the continuity of land, kinship and collective identity. They manage the social reproduction that makes public life possible in the first place.

Crucially, customary law among the Minangkabau draws on a philosophy that treats nature itself as the teacher. Growth, regeneration and nurturance are understood as natural principles that should structure social order.

Here, maternal authority is not positioned as domination. It is positioned as social grounding. This is not a feminised patriarchy. It is a different political imagination.

The Mosuo: Kinship Without Husbands

In south‑western China, the Mosuo people offer another powerful illustration of matriarchal social organisation that does not resemble female rule.

Mosuo society is famously organised around what has often been called “walking marriages”. Romantic relationships do not produce cohabiting nuclear families. Men remain in their maternal households for life. Children belong to the mother’s family. Maternal uncles, rather than biological fathers, play central roles in child‑rearing.

Women manage household resources. Lineage is traced through the female line. Property remains within the maternal household. Men participate in labour, trade and community life, but they do not exercise patriarchal control over wives, children or household assets.

What emerges is not a hierarchy inverted, but a radically stabilised kinship system. Women’s economic security does not depend on marriage. Men’s social identity does not depend on control over women. Research consistently shows that women in such systems experience higher levels of autonomy and lower exposure to domestic power imbalances, without men being structurally marginalised.

This is not domination. It is redistribution of dependence.

The Bribri: Lineage, Land and Spiritual Continuity

Among the Bribri people of Costa Rica, matrilineality forms the core of identity itself. To belong to the Bribri community is to belong through one’s mother.

Clan membership, land tenure and spiritual inheritance are all transmitted through the female line. Sacred objects remain within women’s lineages. Women act as guardians of ancestral knowledge and custodians of ritual continuity.

Interestingly, some public spiritual offices are held by men, but eligibility for those offices depends entirely on maternal lineage. A man’s authority is derived from his mother’s clan. Here again, women do not monopolise visible leadership roles. They monopolise legitimacy. Power is not exercised through command. It is exercised through control of continuity.

The Haudenosaunee: Women Selecting Political Leaders

Among the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in North America, the figure of the Clan Mother offers one of the clearest challenges to Western assumptions about political power. Haudenosaunee society is matrilineal. Clans are traced through female ancestry. Women hold custodianship of land and property.

But more strikingly, Clan Mothers select the male chiefs who represent their clans in council. They instruct them. They can remove them if they fail to uphold their obligations. Men speak publicly. Women govern politically.

This separation of representation from authority disrupts the entire patriarchal model of leadership. Leadership is not self‑authorised. It is relationally granted. Once again, women are not replacing male dominance with female dominance. They are structurally embedding accountability into leadership itself.

African Matrilineal Systems and The Politics of Legitimacy

Across many African societies, matrilineal systems similarly distribute power in ways that do not resemble female political supremacy.

Among Akan societies of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, lineage and succession pass through the female line. The queen mother plays a decisive role in identifying and selecting the next chief or king. A ruler’s legitimacy flows through maternal ancestry.

Among Chewa, Yao, Bemba and other matrilineal communities, land inheritance follows women’s lineages. Maternal uncles often hold responsibility for socialisation and guardianship. Women remain central to decisions about land use and resource distribution.

Men frequently occupy formal leadership offices. But their authority is grounded in women’s genealogical power. Here again, matriarchy functions as an infrastructure of legitimacy, not as an apparatus of domination.

Patriarchy is a Domination System. Matriarchy is a Continuity System.

The most important analytical distinction that emerges from these cases is this: Patriarchy organises society around control.

It prioritises hierarchy, coercive authority, lineage through male bloodlines, monopolisation of property, and institutional concentration of power.

Matriarchal systems organise society around continuity. They prioritise kinship stability, social regeneration, relational accountability, and the protection of shared resources.

Patriarchal authority flows upward and outward. Matriarchal authority flows inward and across. Patriarchy produces rulers. Matriarchy produces custodians. This is not simply a gender difference. It is a structural difference in how power itself is imagined.

Why Feminism Keeps Being Misread

When critics accuse feminism of aiming to create a matriarchy, they are projecting a patriarchal model of power onto women’s political demands. They assume that power must look like domination.

But much of feminist political theory, particularly intersectional and decolonial feminism, has never been concerned with gender substitution at the top of oppressive systems.

It has been concerned with dismantling the systems themselves. The anthropological record strengthens this position. It shows that social orders centred on women’s lineage and moral authority tend to de‑emphasise coercive control, decentralise power, and embed leadership within kinship obligations.

This does not produce utopia. Matrilineal societies are not free of conflict, inequality or social tension. But they do demonstrate that domination is not an inevitable feature of human governance.

Environmental and Relational Governance

One of the most striking features of many matrilineal societies is the close relationship between women’s custodianship and environmental responsibility. Land is not treated as an alienable commodity. It is treated as ancestral trust.

Women’s authority over land inheritance often comes with explicit obligations to preserve it for future generations. In many cases, this produces long‑term ecological stewardship rather than extractive exploitation.

This is not coincidence.

A social order anchored in continuity rather than conquest generates different economic priorities. This has profound implications for contemporary debates about sustainability, climate justice and collective responsibility.

Intersectional Feminism Needs this Distinction

For intersectional activism, this reconceptualisation of matriarchy is not an academic curiosity. It offers a political resource. It allows feminism to articulate a vision of governance that is not trapped inside patriarchal logics of domination, militarisation and hierarchy. It opens space for alternative models of leadership rooted in care, accountability, lineage, and social reproduction.

It also allows feminists to respond more clearly to one of the most persistent bad‑faith critiques of the movement: that feminism merely seeks to flip the gender of the oppressor.

The anthropological record shows that women‑centred social systems historically developed very different political architectures.

They did not replicate male rule. They displaced it.

The Real Question is Not Who Should Rule

The obsession with whether men or women would govern better is itself a symptom of patriarchal thinking. It assumes that governance is synonymous with rule. Anthropology invites a more difficult, and more radical, question. What if governance is not primarily about ruling at all?

What if it is about sustaining life, managing relationships, protecting shared resources, and ensuring social continuity? From this perspective, matriarchy is not a failed attempt at female supremacy. It is a different political grammar. One that places regeneration above expansion. Custodianship above conquest. Legitimacy above force.

Matriarchy Was Never About Women Ruling Men

The idea that matriarchy represents women dominating men is a projection of patriarchal logic onto societies that were never organised around domination in the first place.

Serious anthropology shows that matriarchal and matrilineal systems are best understood as social orders centred on continuity, kinship, and moral authority rooted in maternal lineage. Therefore, women do not rule. Instead they anchor, they stabilise, they legitimate and they regenerate.

If feminism is to articulate a genuinely transformative political vision, it must continue to break away from domination‑based understandings of power. Matriarchy, properly understood, does not offer a female version of patriarchy. It offers a radically different way of imagining how human societies might organise themselves at all.  And that difference matters far more than who occupies the top of any hierarchy.

Reference List

Anthropology & Matriarchy

Sanday, P. R.
Anthropological definitions and critiques of matriarchy. (Reconceptualised understanding of mother-anchored social orders)

ConnollyCove. (n.d.). Examination of Minangkabau and Mosuo cultures.
Retrieved from https://www.connollycove.com/examination-of-minangkabau-and-mosuo-cultures/

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Minangkabau. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minangkabau

Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Mosuo. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

Objectification & Feminist Social Critique

APA. (n.d.). Sexual objectification.
American Psychological Association.
Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/education-career/ce/sexual-objectification.pdf

Journal of Sex Roles.
Study on self-objectification during pregnancy and wellbeing.
(Discusses how pregnant bodies are treated and objectified in Western contexts.)

(Stringer, A., et al.)

Reproductive Health & Unintended Pregnancy

United Nations Population Fund. (2022). Global Report on Unintended Pregnancy and Reproductive Rights.
Retrieved from https://www.unfpa.org

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