Why We're Not Building a Matriarchy
And what we're building instead
I've been pondering over a word lately – “matriarchy”. It sounds like justice and what is owed to us. And it is familiar to us because it is the feminine answer to patriarchy…. isn’t it?
But I've decided it's the wrong word, and it's worth telling you why, because the reasoning matters more than the semantics.
Matriarchy asks the same question patriarchy has always asked, the question being “who's in charge?” but instead it just swaps the answer, and it keeps the scoreboard. It keeps the idea that worth is something one group has by virtue of another group not having it. And if we're honest, a scoreboard is a game the group with less power rarely wins by playing on the terms the other side set. The underdogs may win but it is often short-lived and evokes a fierce return battle.
The power many of us hold today, we hold because it has been extended to us, not seized or even given, outright. None of this outright – you only need ask people in minority groups how fragile any power extended to them is and how long the longevity is. Building a movement on "our turn now" leaves us defending ground instead of standing on our own. Of course, we are asking for equality not power, but it will not be heard this way and have we learned nothing? We could end up having it all but doing it all still.
So, I've dropped matriarchy. I’ve also, deliberately, dropped power and even women as my rallying words. Power keeps us in the scoreboard game. And "women," used as a banner rather than a description, has started to do something I don't want it to do and that is, turning a person into a side. I don't want it to be a tribe. Surely, we want something sturdier than a side, and it triggers something in the wrong type of man, i.e., the type we just haven’t the power to hold back.
What I’ve landed on instead is feminine sovereignty.
Not sovereignty over anyone. Sovereignty in the oldest sense – “self-governance”.
A woman whose confidence doesn't depend on comparison. Whose sense of her own worth isn't dependent on a man's failure, or a man's approval, or her position relative to other women. Whose financial footing, her own relationships, her own presence in a room, a say over her own body, all rest on ground she built rather than ground she was granted or ground she's still fighting to have and keep. Remember how recently women have gained the rights to credit without a man signing for her. Don’t let’s take that ground for granted.
This matters to me because I can see the trap up close. We at Ostara East celebrate the men who are calling other men in. The men who are naming the invisible tax so many women carry, the men who recognise the alertness to danger that runs quietly under everything, and the men that see that second shift of cooking, laundry, cleaning, childcare that starts the moment the paid workday ends. Their awareness-raising is valuable and we'll keep amplifying it, I guess we can hope that they are true allies because we do need allies whether we believe this or not. True allies know that awareness of a problem isn't the same as a solution to it, and "look how much worse it is for us”, however true, builds a case for women and the men who are not our allies do not want to hear about women, or should I say, other men’s women, they are mostly only concerned about the women in their life. This comparison between the sexes hands the argument, and often the outcome, to whoever's judging the comparison. It keeps us defined by what's being done to us rather than by what we're building ourselves.
This is why we're not building a matriarchy. Feminine sovereignty is the harder and slower work because it is intergenerational. It's raising a daughter's sense of her own worth so thoroughly that she never needs to take it from another women, in comparison. It's raising a son who was never taught that his worth depends on someone else having less. It's a woman's confidence, her voice, her financial standing, her relationships, man and woman alike, resting on something she owns outright.
That's the ground we are building on. In the posts that follow, I'll go deeper into what that looks like in confidence, in money, in the relationships we choose and the ones we're raising the next generation to choose.
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