Surviving In The Matriarchy:
What a woman-run society would really be like today
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
7/20/94
It wouldn’t be just like our society only with females playing the traditional male roles and vice versa. It would be a society where, long ago, military might and brute force became subservient to education, culture, and family-palace intrigue. In short, a western world where women instead of gay men ran ancient Greece, where this female-led Greece conquered Rome instead of vice versa; an eastern world where ladies instead of lords effectively ruled the feudal clans. A few key developments at the proper points of history could’ve done it. If iron in the diet had been discovered sooner, fewer women would have died in childbirth or before menopause and the historic image of the frail woman would’ve developed differently. If a few key tribal groups in Europe, India and China got under strong (i.e., bitchy, judgmental, cunning) matriarchs, the rules that followed would have been different.
In this alternate Earth today, education (and hence nearly all the professions) are considered women’s work. Anything involving staying at home and building the non-physical aspects of a community would be woman-run, as well as anything involving the traditional feminine arts of food, apparel and design. Men would be seen as fit for roles descended from the hunter role in hunter-gatherer tribes. Those roles would include grunt labor, construction, and expendable roles like soldiering. There would still have been wars, and they would still have been nasty things that left many people dead and many more people subjugated under the thumb of far-off empires. Perhaps they might have been crueller, since the generals and monarchs giving the orders would be people who had never been foot soldiers, who had arisen in all-female leadership academies where they’d learned cold strategy based on second-hand knowledge of what male soldiers could physically accomplish.
The Greco-Roman adoration of the male body would have developed differently, too. With women doing the sculpting and painting, the vision of male beauty would have taken subtle differences. Instead of proud muscle definition, male images might have emphasized boyish eyes, big Elvis-like lips, and soft unerect penises of every known size and shape. In female images, the model might become credited as the real creator of the work, with the painter or sculptor a mere artisan preserving the model’s beauty for all time.
A society run by empresses, queens, dames and ladies of the court would be far more into palace intrigue and gossip, intercene treachery. Classic drama would be based on these woman vs. woman disputes, not on physical battlefields. Epic sagas would matter less than intimate disputes upon which the fate of nations would turn.
A female-led society would place far more importance on sanitation and safety. The Greco-Roman plumbing system would not have been allowed to collapse, and would have been among the last things to be defended as the empire receeded and eventually faded away. If the conquerers of the various former Greco-Roman colonies had female leaders themselves (or gradually became female-led under the empire’s influence), these conquering nations would have kept or rebuilt the aqueduct system. With better health, the population of Europe might have exploded centuries sooner. With fewer opportunities for a Black Plague to relieve this overpopulation, effective methods of birth control would have been a priority in the academies of research. Even with that, there would have been pressure between these nations over resources, and these nations would have gone on invading one another and eventually invading “new” worlds.
Without the male-idolatry of Rome, male-monotheist religions like Pauline Christianity would’ve surely developed differently. Judaism might have remained a minority tribe, misfits everywhere for their quaint custom of letting men learn to read, write, and perform religious rituals. Islam, a belief system tied in closely to male military discipline and female subjugation, might not have developed at all. The Turkish and North African nations would have developed some system to assert their independence from whatever belief system developed in Europe, but it might have taken very different forms. Perhaps it would have been Egyptian polytheism, a religion more suited toward helping diverse populations “fit in” and toward feminine sensibilities of collectivity instead of rugged individualism.
The daily lives of most people in middle-ages Europe might not have been much different. Men would still toil on the land (and, later, in the factories); women would still give painful childbirth when they weren’t preparing food, making clothes, and building social structures. The main differences would be among the educated classes. No matter which gender gave its family name to the next generation, the women would get the schooling and inherit the property. Male children would be bred and reared in the lower classes to be workers (perhaps even slaves) and in the upper classes to be soldiers, arranged-marriage partners, sexual playthings, athletic playthings, artisans, and art models.
Art and culture would have high priorities in this world, of course. Poetry, storytelling, textiles, food and wine, painting, pottery, and household goods would be among the preeminent genres of creative activity. Architecture would be influenced by practicality, not by monument.
Female imagery would definitely have been a part of the arts all this time. These images would have had a psychological purpose similar to the purpose of female nudity in women’s magazines today: to make women feel proud and/or ashamed of how they fit or didn’t fit the proper ideal of womanhood. Indeed, the ideal female image might be officially different in each nation or each regime of a nation, as different matriarchs impose their own standards of female being onto their subjects.
So where would this kind of a society be today? One where “pioneer spirit” wasn’t worshipped as much. Overseas exploration teams and colonizing armies might have been male-staffed, but they’d only have been considered the advance teams for the women who came in and organized the new societies in places like America.
It’s a society where the development of an idea is more important than its initial creation. Patent and copyright laws would give less priority to the concept of something, more priority to its application. It was a society where home and family were more important, a society with fewer opportunities for misfits and conconformists to make their own alternate social rules. As in our society here and now, home consumption is the driving economic force. Industry exists to make things for people, particularly things for women and families. Girls and boys would still grow up facing rigid gender roles to which to conform, but those roles would be different in ways big and small. Girls would still be expected to be pretty and to market themselves for success; boys would still be expected to be dumb jocks. The differences would lead from the way that girls would also be expected to organize everything, while boys would be discouraged from getting in the way of the ladies and to go off and play sports and not think too hard about trying to become doctors or presidents.
Because The Family Structure would be even more important in a feminine-led society, sex mores would, alas, be little more liberated than they are in our world. A man who gave a woman lots of great orgasms would be a prized possession. Women’s “health spas” would be near-sacred institutions, the sites of many importnat business deals; and some would discreetly feature male sex workers. Adultery for the sake of romance, however, would be strictly punished if caught, particularly if it led to a pregnancy outside of an arranged marriage. Love affairs outside the boundaries of prescribed family set-ups would be a threat to mothers’ power to control their daughters’ rise in society. Young women caught with men below their class would be outcasts.
