by Mary Adams (AWC The Hague)
At the February Human Rights Team meeting, Connie Phlipot launched a discussion about women in power and decision-making based on the recommendations from her workgroup’s 30-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action. Please refer to the Working Group Statement: Women in Power & Decision-Making. Statistics show that since 1995, women have made some progress in attaining positions of power in the public, private and business sectors. However, gender challenges and barriers continue to slow progress.
Was there ever a time in world history that women ruled? For the last century, historians, anthropologists and other scholars have searched both human history and the continents to find a matriarchy—a society where the power was in the hands of women, not men. Most have concluded that a genuine matriarchy does not exist, perhaps may never have existed… and yet there is more and more proof that women have been in powerful positions since the Iron Age.
The History Channel1 has featured the lives of five female rulers in antiquity. Does this prove matriarchy? No, because the rest of the governing bodies were male. These women managed to stay in power for decades through “a mix of ambition, intelligence, political savvy, generosity, guile and in some cases, a ruthless and bloody drive for power.” The five rulers were Queen Hatshepsut (Egypt), Wu Zetian (China), Boudica (Britain), Cleopatra (Egypt) and Queen Seondeok (Korea). What all these women had in common is that none of them left a genetic legacy and when their reigns ended, most of their accomplishments were claimed by men.
Can science help clear the fog from the ancient world’s gender lens? Let’s set matriarchy aside and consider matrilocality. Matrilocality is a pattern in marriage where men go to live with the women’s kin. A recent New York Times article2 presented a tantalizing vision of a women-centric society in a Celtic tribe called the Durotriges that lived in Dorset, England 2,000 years ago. The research team analyzed 57 burials and found maternal lineages that are typical of a matrilocality system. The team based their finding on genome analysis and then continued the search for genetic markers of matrilocality across remains of over 150 archaeological sites spanning 6,000 years. They discovered several groups with similar patterns of female-line descent. Additional comparative studies of ancient DNA could reveal the extent and the distribution of matrilocal societies in the Iron Age.
Did you know that matrilocality and matrilineality (the tracing of familial relationships through the maternal bloodline) exist to this day? In the foothills of the Himalayas lies the home of the Mosuo people, commonly referred to as “The Kingdom of Women.”3 A unique cultural tradition is called zouhun or walking marriages. During these marriages, women invite men to visit their homes and stay only for the night. Couples do not live together, and babies are reared exclusively in the female’s family, with brothers and uncles providing the fatherly role. Men still wield political power in wider society, but women are the heads of their households and make decisions about family resources. Inheritance rights dictate that wealth and property are passed through the mother upon death, making Mosuo women a source of economic and political power. In Sumatra, the Minangkabau Indonesian ethnic group is also a present-day matrilineal community. The Minangkabau also trace descent and inheritance through the female line, including land and housing.4 Yet, despite the special position women are accorded in these societies, neither the Mosou nor the Minangkabau peoples have a system equivalent to female rule.
This begs the question, was there ever a royal female lineage? Possibly. In 2024, archaeologists excavated a monumental chamber in a pillared hall including a throne and mural artwork suggesting a powerful woman ruled there more than 1,300 years ago.5 This site at Pañamarca was a religious and political center for the ancient Moche culture, which flourished for centuries in northern Peru. The throne room is decorated with paintings that show a woman seated on the throne receiving visitors, alongside pictures of a crown, the crescent moon and workshops. The discoveries deepen scholarly understanding of the Moche culture and confirm the growing consensus that women held more power in the society than previously recognized. This new evidence points to the existence of a woman, or a lineage of women, who held a broad authority at Pañamarca during the seventh and eighth centuries. Whether these women were warrior-queens or divine rulers remains one of the team’s active research questions.6
1 5 Women Who Ruled the Ancient World | History.com
2 Celtic Women Held Sway in “Matrilocal” Societies | The New York Times
3 China’s “Kingdom of Women” | BBC
4 Indonesia's matriarchal Minangkabau offer an alternative social system | EurekAlert
5 Peru Pañamarca Archaeological Site Finds “Hall of the Braided Serpents” | The New York Times
6 Columbia Archaeologist Unearths “Thrilling” New Findings in Peru | Columbia News