Amazons in America

Matriarchs, Utopians, and Wonder Women in U.S. Popular Culture

Keira V. Williams

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780807170861
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

With this remarkable study, historian Keira V. Williams shows how fictional matriarchies—produced for specific audiences in successive eras and across multiple media—constitute prescriptive, solution-oriented thought experiments directed at contemporary social issues. In the process, Amazons in America uncovers a rich tradition of matriarchal popular culture in the United States. Beginning with late-nineteenth-century anthropological studies, which theorized a universal prehistoric matriarchy, Williams explores how representations of women-centered societies reveal changing ideas of gender and power over the course of the twentieth century and into the present day. She examines a deep archive of cultural artifacts, both familiar and obscure, including L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz series, Progressive-era fiction like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian novel Herland, the original 1940s Wonder Woman comics, midcentury films featuring nuclear families, and feminist science fiction novels from the 1970s that invented prehistoric and futuristic matriarchal societies. While such texts have, at times, served as sites of feminist theory, Williams unpacks their cyclical nature and, in doing so, pinpoints some of the premises that have historically hindered gender equality in the United States. Williams also delves into popular works from the twenty-first century, such as Tyler Perry's Madea franchise and DC Comics/Warner Bros.' globally successful film Wonder Woman, which attest to the ongoing presence of matriarchal ideas and their capacity for combating patriarchy and white nationalism with visions of rebellion and liberation. Amazons in America provides an indispensable critique of how anxieties and fantasies about women in power are culturally expressed, ultimately informing a broader discussion about how to nurture a stable, equitable society.

1

GYNECOCRACY IN THE GILDED AGE

The Intellectual and Historical Foundations of American Matriarchalism

This rediscovery of the primitive matriarch(y) . . . has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value has for political economy.

—FRIEDRICH ENGELS Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State (1884)

The latter half of the Victorian era featured many new theories about human origins that reframed knowledge about the past and had major implications for prevailing concepts of human identity, including gender roles. In the United States just before the turn of the twentieth century, there emerged a full-blown discourse of gendered power, known as matriarchalism, that was both academic and popular. Matriarchalism, in its original form, was an academic theory that posited one or more of the following: prehistoric human societies were universally matriarchal; all societies, in their “primitive” forms (to use the terminology of this theory’s nineteenth-century progenitors), underwent a matriarchal stage before transitioning to patriarchy; and the female rule that characterized matriarchal societies was qualitatively different from the nature of rule within male-dominated societies. Linked by some to Darwinian evolution, matriarchalism was embraced by scholars ranging from anthropology, to biology, to history.

Matriarchy was, of course, not a new concept in the nineteenth century. Discrete matriarchal myths have been identified throughout much of human history, from ancient Greece to the Americas during the era of European colonization. Yet these myths did not consolidate into a body of academic theory until the late nineteenth century, and this theory solidified and spread quickly following the publications of its initial proponents.1 In this chapter, I examine the primary ideological roots of matriarchalism, which include mythology, archaeology, evolutionary theory, early anthropology, North American ethnography, and socialist history.

The burgeoning academic interest in matriarchalism in the second half of the nineteenth century was the product of a confluence of factors that, taken together, thoroughly challenged long-standing truth claims about the human past at their very origins. This matriarchalist moment spawned theories that arose in direct contrast to several standard operating conceptions of the world. In particular, the idea of a universally matriarchal prehistoric past contradicted the belief in the biblical account of human history. Matriarchalism presented a twofold contradiction: it challenged the biblical account by positing that human history was far older than the book of Genesis indicated, and, by definition, matriarchalism argued that male dominance was not a natural or original state of social organization. Although challenges had been posed to the concept of biblical time in previous centuries, the mid-nineteenth-century theory of biological evolution and archaeological evidence for “extreme human antiquity”—the argument that humanity was hundreds of thousands of years old—inaugurated a full-blown intellectual paradigm shift. Matriarchalism became, for a time, a crucial part of this shift, largely due to the combined historical theories of Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Karl Marx, Johann Jakob Bachofen, and Friedrich Engels.2

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Darwinian concepts of evolution by means of natural selection and the descent of humans from animal species via common ancestors combined with Lyell’s theory of a virtually unknown human prehistory of thousands of years to produce widespread scholarly interest in prebiblical societies. The influence of evolutionary theory cannot be overstated; within a generation, its reach went far beyond science. Many thinkers of the era were concerned with the connection between science and society, including Karl Marx, who famously lauded Darwin’s work as “a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history.” One of Marx’s goals was to apply Darwin’s theories of “historical evolution in Nature” to the sociopolitical history of humans, which he and Friedrich Engels had been investigating since the 1840s.3

Taken together, Darwinism and Marxism represented a full-scale assault on Western “truths.” Darwin provided a theory of the process of evolution by means of natural selection, while Marx applied his understanding of this Darwinian process to the socioeconomic struggles of human history. Interpretations of their theories would come to represent core components of early anthropology, specifically in the form of evolutionism, or the teleological belief that all human societies progressed, albeit at different paces, along a clearly delineated time line of human progress from simple/savage to complex/civilized. According to historians of anthropology, the preoccupation with human origins according to the Darwinian model, and especially the Western interest in “primitive” societies, helped to transform the discipline into a science. Historian J. W. Burrow argues that while “Darwin was certainly not the father of evolutionary anthropology,” he was “possibly its wealthy uncle.”4

In the 1860s, this amalgamation of revisionist history was the primary theoretical context of a new gendered vision of the development of human societies. The first scholar to articulate this was Johann Jakob Bachofen of Switzerland. Bachofen explicitly set out to challenge the Western belief in the natural, biological imperative of patriarchy. His investigation of the archives, mythology, and archaeology of Europe in the 1850s led him to a universalizing theory of “gynecocracy,” or female supremacy, based on his findings that the origins of ancient cultures and societies were woman-centered. He compiled his research into a series of lectures and eventually a manuscript, which he marketed to publishers with the argument that “the position of women in human society is of paramount significance for the insight into the cultural condition of every age.” In 1861, this work was published as Mother Right: A Study of the Religious and Juridical Aspects of Gynecocracy in the Ancient World.5

The primary significance of Bachofen’s work is his gendering of the time line of the evolution of human societies. Representing the anthropological wing of the mid-nineteenth-century challenge to biblical accounts of the human past, Bachofen argued, based on his research on Egyptian, Greek, and Roman myths, that patriarchy was, historically speaking, quite young. According to Bachofen, “mother right,” or the matriarchal organization of the family and society, was an early stage of sociocultural development that defined all human societies. In short, he argued that “Amazonism is a universal phenomenon,” part of the dynamic and often violent relations between the sexes that characterized each period of human history. Rather than a hindrance to progress, these relations were, for Bachofen, the catalyst of social evolution.6

Within his time line of human history, Bachofen charted five major stages, three of which were explicitly matriarchal. “Unregulated hetaerism,” featuring widespread concubinage due to the absence of the organizing cultural institution of marriage, was a lowly stage characterized by the brute rule of men. Male tyrants ran clans, but inheritance of power and rights was, by necessity, matrilineal, because humans had not yet discovered the paternal function in reproduction. Bachofen’s low estimation of this stage of “primitive promiscuity” is clear, but there was one positive social good within it: motherhood, “the only light in the moral darkness.”7

This maternal instinct was the basis for the second stage of history, Demetrian matriarchy or “gynecocracy.” In this “first period of Amazonism,” which represented a “step forward toward civilization,” women chose husbands and ruled over them. During the “Mother-age,” the brutes of hetaerism were transformed into boys governed by the guiding hands of mothers. Indeed, maternity became the organizing principle of society: “It is the woman’s vocation to tame man’s primordial strength, to guide it into benign channels.8

According to Bachofen, this first matriarchal stage was followed by the Dionysian age, in which men grew powerful once again. But “one extreme followed the other,” and eventually from this came a second Amazon stage, an overcorrection in power relations between the sexes in which women rebelled against male dominance yet again, resulting in the warlike, “unnatural exaggerated matriarchies” found in ancient Greece, Asia Minor, and some European tales of conquest.9

Ultimately, the oppression of males that characterized this final Amazonian stage sowed the seeds of the destruction of matriarchy. The “rise of father right,” Bachofen explained, began with the men’s rebellion against the Amazons. Bachofen seemed, at times, to be of a divided mind on the value of this final transition to patriarchy, yet he ultimately deemed the development of patriarchy “the progress of civilization,” a phrase that seemingly indicates that this was, in his estimation, a positive evolution. Bachofen explained this using a cosmic metaphor, arguing that gender relations were like those between the moon and the sun. The development of the “highest stage of the male principle of nature” mirrored that of the natural world: “The earth’s development is a striving to copy faithfully the cosmic prototype of the celestial bodies. And this process is completed only with the domination of man over woman, of the sun over the moon.”10

Thus ascended the Apollonian age, enacted through the patriarchal conquest of the Amazons, spurred on by the discovery of paternity, and represented by classical Greece. The fact of paternity was to be given a primary role in almost all subsequent matriarchalist theories; the discovery of men’s role in reproduction, according to most proponents of matriarchalism, had a profound effect on gender relations and thus social organization. The primacy of paternity was, however, a supposition that was not based on archaeological or historical evidence. Bachofen, for one, did not concern himself with any formal standards of proof. As a classicist, he relied upon mythology as sociological evidence, deeming it an “authentic, independent record of the primordial age, a record in which no invention played a part.” According to his methodology, myths could be used to shore up spotty archaeological evidence, and vice versa. For Bachofen, reports of encounters with Amazons throughout history were not isolated incidents or representations of male fears and fantasies. Rather, their prevalence, and their common characteristics—the global and timeless “homogeneity of matriarchal ideas”—proved that matriarchy was a universal pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 GYNECOCRACY IN THE GILDED AGE
• 2 MOTHER-RULE IN THE MODERN WORLD
• 3 WHITE QUEENS AND AFRICAN AMAZONS
• 4 WITCHES, WIZARDS, AND WOMEN OF CAST IRON
• 5 LIKE COMING HOME TO MOTHER
• 6 THE AMAZING AMAZON
• 7 VIPERS AND MOMARCHIES
• 8 GODDESSES, EARTH MOTHERS, AND FEMALE MEN
• 9 MAMMIES, MATRIARCHS, AND WELFARE QUEENS
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX