I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense
think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?
writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?
maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.
how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?
how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept – how does that work?
what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?
like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that.
THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.
I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.
Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?
On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.
It doesn’t have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think that’s the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes from–why are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying “what if women could tell MEN what to do!” is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.
This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.
Also, how are the relationships structured?
Our western society tends to treat one man+one woman marriage as the default, but, that isn’t the case everywhere. It tends to be enforced in all the areas that Christianity colonized, but, in a matriarchy would that be the way things are?
How about one of these two scenarios:
1. Extended families with a matriarch in charge as the last word in judgements and what projects get done and how. The line is passed down through the daughters, and men often leave their own families to join their mate/mates. Women are the ones deciding which fields are planted or fallow, and which kids get trained in what professions.
Or/and:
2. The excess daughters or all daughters of the houses go off to travel and decide what trades they want to pursue. They make friends along the way and decide to form a household with 2 to four other women. Maybe they pick up a guy or two, but, fathers for babies aren’t hard to get for city or merchant households.System one sounds more rural to me, and system two sounds more like what might happen in a city or with a lot of trade caravans or ships moving people around.
Childcare in either system is built in with the assumption that no woman is off by herself. (Maybe she is off by herself for periods of time but leaves the kids with family) Maybe the women time pregnancy so that they can be milk mothers to each other’s kids. Maybe they decide to pick one guy to be the father of several of their kids so their kids will be half sibs, or because they like him and keep him around, or because he is valuable in some way(a skill he can teach, maybe, or he’s a storyteller or musician). Maybe the men are traded between families for alliances or to share skills or teach languages.
YALL SHOULD BE READING URSULA LE GUIN STORIES.
For example: from Mountain Ways (read here)
Note for readers unfamiliar with the planet O:
Ki’O society is divided into two halves or moieties, called (for ancient religious reasons) the Morning and the Evening. You belong to your mother’s moiety, and you can’t have sex with anybody of your moiety.
Marriage on O is a foursome, the sedoretu—a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships.
The expected relationships within each sedoretu are:
The Morning woman and the Evening man (the “Morning marriage”)
The Evening woman and the Morning man (the “Evening marriage”)
The Morning woman and the Evening woman (the “Day marriage”)
The Morning man and the Evening man (the “Night marriage”)
The forbidden relationships are between the Morning woman and the Morning man, and between the Evening woman and the Evening man, and they aren’t called anything, except sacrilege.
It’s just as complicated as it sounds, but aren’t most marriages?
Other important questions to ask:
What historical or social knowledge is specific to women? What knowledge of rituals and rites? who performs them for who? Are there rituals specifically performed by one gender for the benefit of the other? is one specific gender considered “better” at performing certain rites than the other? if there was a shift in the expected gender identity of those who perform these rituals in history, is there a social or mythological explanation for this?
Where do people who are transgender/intersex/nonbinary/bigender fit in this society? are there rituals or social functions specific to them?
Are there certain social tests one needs to pass to get married or be considered an adult? are they specific to men or women, or do both perform them? is one gender considered specific to initiating the marriage process or do both equally initiate it? Is marriage based on attraction allowed or is choosing a partner based on the performance of specific rituals/tests?
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