In my widely read blog and academic essay offering a new definition of patriarchy, I argued that patriarchy is a system of male dominance that arose at the intersection of the control of female sexuality, private property, and war. In it, bracketed the question of how patriarchy began. Today I want to share some thoughts provoked by a short paragraph in Harald Haarmann’s ground-breaking Roots of Ancient Greek Civilization. Haarmann briefly mentions (but does not discuss) the hypothesis that patriarchy arose among the steppe pastoralists as a result of conflicts over grazing lands. As these conflicts became increasingly violent, patriarchal warriors assumed clan leadership in order to protect animal herds, grazing lands, and the women and children of the clan.
On the recent Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, while we were driving through sparsely populated grazing land, my friend Cristina remarked that the shepherds on foot wearing traditional clothing that she had seen several decades earlier had been replaced by men in shirts and jeans, driving farm trucks. Her nostalgic reverie was interrupted by our young Cretan bus driver who said, “You would not want to be alone with one of those men, not now and certainly not then.”
According to Juvenal, politicians in ancient Rome discovered they could get the downtrodden masses to abdicate their rights and accept shocking degrees of oppression merely by giving them enough bread to eat and circuses to distract them.
Meanwhile, in our modern age, we have this thing called Mother’s Day. Never mind how overworked and burned out many mothers are, balancing fulltime employment with the lioness’s share of childcare and housework. Never mind that the possible overturning of the Roe vs. Wade would outlaw abortion and force a whole generation of women and girls in the United States to become mothers against their will.
We’re supposed to dismiss all of the above from our pretty heads because, for ONE DAY A YEAR, we celebrate motherhood with a proliferation of sentimental greeting cards, hothouse flowers, and overpriced restaurant meals served by waitresses who are themselves overworked, burned out mothers.
I think we need to call out hypocrisy here.
A culture that truly honored motherhood would do a lot more than offer one day of saccharine appeasement. It would provide paid parental leave for both parents and urge fathers to put in equal time in parenting and housework. It would provide excellent subsidized childcare, following the Scandinavian model, along with a shorter working week, creating an even playing field for women and men to pursue their careers while still having downtime with their families. A culture that truly celebrated motherhood would insure that motherhood was a freely-elected CHOICE and provide sex education, birth control, and abortion with no discussion or handwringing.
Motherhood in a culture that is toxic to mothers and to women in general can be a fraught experience. Generations of unspoken pain, repression, and deep-lying trauma get passed down from mothers to daughters. Some women I know have made the decision not to have children in order to end this long chain of hurt. Just imagine if every woman refused to reproduce until we could dismantle the chains of patriarchal oppression.
Mother’s Day can be a contentious holiday for both mothers and daughters, especially those who have suffered abuse, neglect, or trauma.
An older friend of mine is haunted by the beatings her mother gave her back in the day when the kind of physical punishment we would now view as child abuse was considered acceptable. Her mother even used to joke about these incidents at family gatherings, as if it were some amusing anecdote, and she seemed to remain steadfastly oblivious to her daughter’s deep pain and trauma. One can only wonder what was going on inside the mother. Did her repressed anger or her own unhealed trauma move her to smack the hell out of her little girl? Had she herself been beaten, shamed for her tears, and ordered to laugh it off?
As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. I would go further by saying that hurt mothers hurt their daughters.
This is the crux of how patriarchy divides and conquers women. How it trains mothers to cut their daughters down to size, just as they were cut down.
The greatest gift we can give mothers on Mother’s Day, or on ANY day, is our own healing and strength, co-creating a world where every woman, whether she is a mother or not, is respected and whole. Where hurt mothers can be healed and heard, without passing the pain down to the next generation. Where the whole insidious cycle of abuse can end once and for all and we can live inside our power.
Mary Sharratt is committed to telling women’s stories. Please check out her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, and her new novelRevelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich. Visit her website.
When we seek immortality or spiritual “rebirth,” are we not saying that there is something wrong with the “birth” that was given to us through the body of our mothers? In She Who Changes and in “Reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as Matricide and Theacide,” I asserted that our culture is “matricidal” because it is based on the assumption that life in the body in this world “just isn’t good enough.”
What is so wrong with the life that our mothers gave us that we must reject it in the name of a “higher” spiritual life? The answer of course death.
Can we love life without accepting death?
Can we love our mothers if we do not accept a life that ends in death?
Jesus was said to have encouraged his disciples to leave their wives and families in order to follow him. When he was told that his mother and brothers were outside and waiting to speak to him, he is said to have said:
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother. (Matt. 12:48-50)
I am pissed! I wrote this blogpost the day after Beltane when the leaked draft of the Supreme Court majority opinion regarding Roe v. Wade was leaked to the public. I was up anyway feeling the effects of PTSD. Lessons that Carol P. Christ wrote about and brought to my own consciousness were rattling around my head. The first is her definition of patriarchy: “patriarchy is a system of male domination in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality with the intent of passing property to male heirs.” This definition was part of a 3-part series she wrote (and we recently re-posed in her legacy posts) beginning here.
They are all well worth reading.
I was raped in 1977 when I was 22 years old. This after being abused by my father. I never got pregnant, but I was suicidal after the rape. Had I been pregnant without recourse to ending it, I would without a doubt have stabbed myself in the stomach or reached for that metal coat hanger. (I was too young to face pregnancy when my father abused me.) Had the result been my own death, that would have been warmly welcomed on my part. To this day, I still self-mutilate at times when stress becomes too much.
Yesterday I fell into the river. I had had a long afternoon and had gone to escape for a bit sitting on a bench by the river I live by. I had just gotten done with reading about Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune all being in Pisces. ‘Drip, drip, drip or maybe a huge wave.’ Elsaelsa – The Astrology Blog I had also just gotten done with a Yemaya Mother of the Ocean meditation that I had done for Circle a while back. And as I got back up to go home, I slip-slided all the way down the steep incline in front of the bench.
Plop. Into the river.
I was holding my wallet, my phone, my keys, my glasses and a water bottle. I instantly lost the water bottle but managed to hold the rest above water. I tried to start back up the river bank. And could not. ‘Woman Accidentally Falls Into Raging River and Dies’. My heart rate went up. Okay, it wasn’t raging. I reminded myself that I most likely would not die as I can swim, and I could just go down river to a less steep bank.
But it was most disconcerting.
I forced myself to take a deep breath, threw all my stuff up the significantly steep bank and tried again. My shoe fell off. I was in panic mode. ‘Just get out of the river, Caryn’
This post was originally posted on February 5, 2018
The symbol of the Goddess is as old as human history. The most ancient images of the Goddesses from the Paleolithic era are neither pregnant nor holding a child. In Neolithic Old Europe the Goddess was most commonly linked with birds or snakes and only rarely portrayed as mother. Yet we tend to equate the Goddess with the Mother Goddess. I suspect that images of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on her lap and prayers to God as Father have fused in our minds, leading us to think that the Goddess must be a Mother Goddess and primarily a Mother.
In a recent blog, Christy Croft reminded us that in our culture, women’s experiences of mothering and motherhood are not always positive:
[The mother] doesn’t always appear in our stories in simple or easy ways. Some of us mother children we did not or could not grow in our bodies; some of us birth babies who are now mothered by others. Some of us are not mothers at all. Some of us had mothers who could not love us unconditionally, or did not have mothers in our lives, or had mothers who brought us more pain and humiliation than comfort, from whose effects we are still recovering, are still healing.
Art by Deb Pollard Materials: Watercolor, markers, and vintage pearl button on paper.
In 1989 I was 37 years old. My body’s sacred work, centered around eggs, hormones and fertility, strongly governed my everyday existence. I’m sure that influence is strong for all women of that age, mothers or not, body conscious or not. I was directing a large women’s choir in Asheville, Womansong, composing and arranging for the women’s voices, as well as leading ritual-like rehearsals in a seated circle on the floor (pretty sure I can’t do that any more!) where I would often read my latest poems.
Now I know that the egg of our own existence was carried in our mother’s wombs while in our grandmother’s bodies. I can see how my imagination in 1989 would go further and further afield, to women’s relations with all the egg-bearers, flora and fauna, of our amazing Earth. Quite a family we are!
I’m sitting in my parents’ balcony in Pune, India, on a quiet morning. Well, this being a bustling Indian city of six million, it can’t really be quiet. As I sit with cup of tea in hand, I try and meditate – I’ve been practicing mindful meditation of late, and so, rather than block out the noises, I embrace the various sounds that make up this Monday morning.
I count the variety – sparrows gently chirping away while a noisy crow tries to outdo them in a contest he easily wins, a street hawker starting his day (and ours) on a rather cacophonous note, the sweeper from the neighbouring complex pouring his heart and soul into cleaning the grounds that will need re-sweeping in an hour or two, the put-putting rickshaw carrying squawking kids to the school down the alley, chirping chipmonks that temporarily develop wings as they fly from branch to branch in a cheerful chase, the honking car warning of its over-the-limit speed (reaffirming the fact there are two things we Indians especially love: honking for no reason, and breaking traffic rules), my mother’s footsteps as she peers out to see what I’m doing by myself…nine in all.
Marija Gimbutas coined the term “Old Europe” c.6500-3500 BCE to describe peaceful, sedentary, artistic, matrifocal, matrilineal and probably matrilocal agricultural societies that worshipped the Goddess as the power of birth, death, and regeneration in all of life. Gimbutas argued that Old Europe was overthrown by Indo-European speaking invaders who began to enter Europe from the steppes north of the Black Sea beginning about 4400 BCE. The Indo-Europeans were patrilineal and patriarchal, mobile and warlike, having domesticated the horse, were not highly artistic and worshiped the shining Gods of the sky reflected in their bronze weapons.
In the fields of classics and archaeology, Gimbutas’s work is often dismissed as nothing more than a fantasy of a “golden age.” In contrast, scholars of Indo-European languages, Gimbutas’s original specialty, are much more likely to accept the general outlines of her hypothesis. The German linguist and cultural scientist Harald Haarmann is one of them.
As Luke’s Gospel tells it, at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, the devil comes to him in the wilderness and tempts him.[1] First, the devil latches onto Jesus’ hunger after forty days of fasting: “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”[2] Then, he shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world.” He says, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to.If you worship me, it will all be yours.”[3]
I’ve been thinking about this second temptation: all the authority and splendor of the kingdoms of the world. All can be yours. You just have to worship me. Did Jesus find this appealing? Personally, I find it a little hard to relate to. I have zero interest in ruling the kingdoms of the world, however splendid they might be. The whole proposition sounds like too much limelight and far too much stress. Thank you, devil, but I’m good.
Feminism and Religion 