>>509779111 (OP)Already in the nineteenth century, when archeology was still in its infancy, scholars found evidence of societies where women were not subordinate to men. But their interpretation of this evidence was that, if these societies were not patriarchies, they must have been matriarchies. In other words, if men did not dominate women, then women must have dominated men.
However, the conclusion that in prepatriarchal societies men were oppressed by women is not borne out by the evidence.
Rather, it is a function of what I have called a dominator society worldview. The real alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy, which is only the other side of the dominator coin. The alternative, now revealed to be the original direction of our cultural evolution, is a partnership society: a way of organizing human relations in which-beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, the difference between female and male -- diversity is not equated with inferiority or superiority.
What we have until now been taught as history is only the history of dominator societies: the record of the male-dominant, authoritarian, and highly violent civilizations that began approximately five thousand years ago. For example, the conventional view is that the beginning of European civilization is marked by the emergence in ancient Greece of the Indo-Europeans. But the new archeological evidence demonstrates that the arrival of the so-called Indo-Europeans actually marks the truncation of European civilization.
