In the early 1970s, as a young teen, I discovered feminism, and my mother discovered Eleanor of Aquitaine. That combination led me to a career in Women’s history and feminist activism. Now as I sit comfortably in the middle of my crone years I am grateful to my mother and Eleanor for help to guide me through the rough and rocky path the patriarchy has left in its wake.
Elisabeth, this is beautiful. I know we are strangers, but I am so proud of you and your gorgeous mentality. Thank you for sharing this with me -- so, so much. As a mom to a young girl, this tells me I'm doing the right thing by sharing these incredible women with my daughter for us both to learn from. Thank you for spending time with my words and reconnecting with your old friend, Eleanor! ❤️
I was lucky enough to have been raised among a coterie of horsewomen for whom the years after their kids growing up meant they were free. They were highly accomplished, physically brave, cared mostly that they looked "appropriate" when necessary but were never happier than when splattered with mud after a hard ride to hounds (anachronistic yes, also, we only had like 2 foxes, and made sure they didn't die). It was absolutely formative, and I'm deeply grateful.
As a French woman who named her daughter after Aliénor d'Aquitaine (as she is known in French) because I always thought she was badass, I'm so happy to find out more about her and to see that my daughter displays many of her traits! Thank you for this brilliant piece! 🔥
Oh my goodness, Annette! Thank you for this comment. What a beautiful, powerful name! 😍 She truly was so phenomenal and patriarchy-confronting. I find myself wanting to go back to her story often.
Thank you for spending your time with my words!! 💜
I read with interest because I am building a family history based on a centuries long archive but the women are hard to find in there And yet I know that often they were the ones who ran family properties and had the knowhow.
Oh my goodness what a fantastic project. I can understand that challenge. Researching medieval women means I read a lot of “she has been lost to time,” “her name is unknown,” “her work is lost.” It’s defeating at times. Can’t wait to hear more on yours!
I appreciate knowing more of the “back story” to “The Lion in Winter,” one of my favorite movies. Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for playing Eleanor, and she earned it.
She really did!! Eleanor is so incredibly fascinating. I plan on writing more on her in a later piece around women's power in later age, but that won't be for some time now. The Lion in Winter is so good, it has been some time since I've seen it and I may be due for a rewatch soon!! Thank you for spending time with my words, Charles.
I really loved reading this. It makes me sad to think about the way that not much has changed across history...we're still devaluing women as they age and making them do all that they can to appear as if they're still the "less threatening, more acquiescent, more desirable" bodies of younger women. It is, as you said, self oppression, and we are definitely falling for it. Reading this & all the comments from other folks makes me hopeful though - through recognizing it and talking more about it, perhaps we can stop this particular way of fortifying our own oppression :)
Thank you so very much for the kindness and spending time with my words. I’m honored. 💜 While writing I really had to deconstruct the ways in which I too participate in this self oppression and it was a lot more willingly than I’d been conscious of! It is so ingrained and so saturated, but we deserve better than to fear the inevitable. We deserve to celebrate every moment of the aging we are lucky to experience. Sending love!
Aren't there alternative explanations for WEIRD societies' contempt for the elderly? In traditional societies, the elder may be the only person who remembers where faraway water may be found during a once-in-a-lifetime drought. She may be admired for her long-honed handcraft skills or the wisdom of her experience. Her grandchildren can expect to live lives much like hers, and her insights are therefore useful to them.
In a modern, innovative economy, technology and social norms change rapidly. Who cares that Grandma can darn socks? A replacement pair is $3 on Amazon. Who wants life advice from Great Auntie who still believes in a sky fairy and recites magic words over a beaded necklace? The constant technological disruption of modernity means rapid obsolescence of skills, beliefs, and other folkways. All elderly people are consequently devalued.
How would this be different in a non-patriarchal society?
Hi there, that last question is interesting and I'm glad you asked it. In societies we'll dub 'not patriarchy' for purposes of this response; care is seen as a communal act. Caring for both the elderly and the young is a community initiative, but aside from the necessary care work that all humans require, regardless of age, in not-patriarchal societies, humans have intrinsic and inherent worth. Patriarchy requires hierarchies, capitalistic patriarchy requires hierarchies, white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy is many, many hierarchies used to subjugate folks. Not-patriarchies are built with equity as a starting point coupled with communal work. There are a lot of writers and activists out there writing specifically on communal societies, and I highly encourage reading them - one I've enjoyed recently is Abolition. Feminism. Now.
by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.
Thanks for the reference; I see the text is available as a pdf online.
Is there a historical or current example of a society that you would call non-patriarchal in the manner you describe? You've laid out a set of values, which are indeed admirable, but it's difficult to imagine what this might look like in practice. I'm not aware of any society on earth in which attention and status are not awarded to those blessed with useful skills or abilities (including physical prowess/childbearing ability) or with beauty (correlated with the former) and charisma (read: useful social ally). In my reading on communal societies, eg intentional communities, power typically accrues to these people regardless of everyone's stated ideals. This seems to be a durable feature of human nature, resulting from the human desire for social support, belonging, and affiliation with prestigious people - not something unique to capitalism, patriarchy, or white supremacy.
You wrote that, "Only in a patriarchal society would women’s aging, or aging in general (an inevitable human condition), be viewed as a weakness, a vulnerability to be dealt with and exploited as opposed to a wealth of context to be tapped into and cared for." Only in a patriarchy? How do you know? Why wouldn't this result from the totally banal, predictable conferral of status on useful people - a conferral which seems to happen under every form of human social organization? Why would we need patriarchy, specifically, to explain this?
Edited to add: in many traditional societies, respect for elders and obedience to Grandma is a much stronger value than in WEIRD societies. Older women have considerable social power, which is not dependent on beauty. Granted, their power tends to be limited to family members, especially younger women. But in smaller-scale societies, that's still real power - often the power to extract labor and resources from sons and daughters-in-law. And these cultures are typically much less gender egalitarian than the one I grew up in. Are we sure there's a reliable correlation between patriarchy and how much it sucks for women to age?
I love that you’ve asked clarifying questions here, thank you for taking thoughtful time with my words and wanting to explore further. Answering this thoroughly would require a bit of clarification around patriarchy and its impacts on our historical knowledge, so please excuse me if I over-respond a bit, just ensuring common language.
To borrow from the Internationale Akademie HAGIA, “in modern Matriarchal Studies the term “matriarchy” is understood as not to imply the matriarchal societies’ organization as simply the reversal of the patriarchal organization of society, but as a system with its own rules. The confusion about this term is partly due to the incorrect use of J. J. Bachofen’s Greek term gynaikokratie, or “rule by women” (1861), a term which has been confused with the term “matriarchy”. “Rule by women” has never existed in the patriarchal sense of “rule”, but matriarchies have existed, in various forms, over very long periods of human history.”
Patriarchy far outdates a lot of our written records which requires us to access the past utilizing archeology and anthropology, meaning clear records of ancient societies are nigh-impossible to access. It’s also so important to consider the impact of the single story and who/what has been chosen to be kept for our living memory—our present time is ripe with book bans and educational limitation, and this is roughly 5,000-7,000 years into patriarchy, so we can only imagine what has been removed from the historical narrative. I think of Christine de Pizan who mentions women and histories in her 1405 writings whom are now lost from us, or the femina book burnings, or the deliberate exclusion of girls from education, all which impacted the trajectory of our current patriarchy. (My most recent piece is on the pervasive power of the single story, if you have any interest.) And lastly, I want to mention the importance and power of imagination and naming our actions; if we can not imagine it, we can not create it. As Rose Braz said in 2008, “a prerequisite to seeking any social change is the naming of it. In other words, even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and fight for it today, it will never come.”
I think I write this in every piece, but the idea of “it has always been this way” is not only untrue, categorically, but also a really poor reason to continue doing anything in the future without reflection of it’s benefits/harm. When I said only in a patriarchy, this is what I meant: in the few examples of matriarchy that we have present day, women’s worth isn’t tied to their child-bearing years, as we see it in today’s manifestation of WSCP (white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy, to make things easier!) In WSCP, women are valued for their ability to create the next generation of workers. Limiting reproductive healthcare, allowing child labor, striking down attempts to make child marriages illegal, and the almost lack of punishment for sexual assaults are all indicative of this—birthrate and labor are important to patriarchs. Though matriarchies absolutely uplift and center motherhood, making care a communal activity and not an isolated one, a woman’s worth isn’t tied to if she is able or willing to be a mother, it is inherent, as is all peoples. Their worth is intrinsic, and tied to the communities well-being vs. the isolationism patriarchy pushes, which often marginalizes anyone other than white, straight, man (including aging women, who fit two-fold—if white, more if they are BIPOC—into oppression.)
WSCP specifically ensures that we believe humans are just this way. We are socialized to view power as important, but again, socialization isn’t inherent humanness: it is what we’ve been taught to value and how we’ve been taught to act. WSCP is built upon the dominator model—man>woman, white>non-white, abled-body>disabled, and so on—requiring subjugation and subordination to work as expected, which again, we have been socialized to believe is totally normal, as if we don’t also have the ability to zoom in on data sets that tell us the exact opposite. It isn’t a coincidence that 5 of the top 10 happiest countries are also countries with the most gender parity. We also know in environments lacking (or with less) trauma often result in better later-in-life outcomes for all peoples. (Highly encourage reading into ACE’s and the impact on later-in-life behavior directly linked to trauma experienced in formative years.) Patriarchy as we know it is predicated on trauma (look at colonization, forced sterilization, enslavement, genocide, and the like), which is impossible to avoid when utilizing a dominator model, thus requiring everyone that exists within it to be traumatized. Domination requires subjugation, and only the patriarchy (yes, I mean only) benefits when we believe it is not responsible for our current, devastating reality.
Took a few turns, as this is a lot to unpack in a comment section, but if you’re truly interested in learning more, I highly encourage you to deep dive these resources:
-I never, ever say this, but Wikipedia-ing ‘matriarchy’ would be beneficial. Feminists have ensured the page is in-depth and updated, linking to further resources outside of questionable wiki.
-bell hooks ‘A will to change’ will forever be on my recommended reading list, so it feels applicable here
-And again, Abolition. Feminism. Now. Explores some of the pop-up matriarchies experienced in segregated societies and the lack of patriarchal power dynamics upon them result in more inclusive decision making.
Thank you! 💜 It really does mean so very much to me. Last year I decided to bet on myself and jumped into writing -- the thing I’ve always wanted to do for a living-- and I feel so grateful that my words are connecting with like-souls out in this world.
This brought tears to my eyes. I LOVE this for you!!!!! Thank you so much for sharing your own personal thoughts on aging within your body. I am so grateful. 💜💜💜💜
In the early 1970s, as a young teen, I discovered feminism, and my mother discovered Eleanor of Aquitaine. That combination led me to a career in Women’s history and feminist activism. Now as I sit comfortably in the middle of my crone years I am grateful to my mother and Eleanor for help to guide me through the rough and rocky path the patriarchy has left in its wake.
Elisabeth, this is beautiful. I know we are strangers, but I am so proud of you and your gorgeous mentality. Thank you for sharing this with me -- so, so much. As a mom to a young girl, this tells me I'm doing the right thing by sharing these incredible women with my daughter for us both to learn from. Thank you for spending time with my words and reconnecting with your old friend, Eleanor! ❤️
The alternative is a lot worse.
Too true and the perfect commentary on this! Thank you, Marple! ❤️
Many thanks - I look forward to pursuing at my leisure.
I was lucky enough to have been raised among a coterie of horsewomen for whom the years after their kids growing up meant they were free. They were highly accomplished, physically brave, cared mostly that they looked "appropriate" when necessary but were never happier than when splattered with mud after a hard ride to hounds (anachronistic yes, also, we only had like 2 foxes, and made sure they didn't die). It was absolutely formative, and I'm deeply grateful.
Oh my gosh what a neat upbringing! Thank you so much for sharing that with me, that’s incredible. 💜💜💜
Loved this! As my daughter said to me recently, “the patriarchy isn’t good for anyone.”
You have a wise daughter!!! Good job, mama 💜💜 Thank you for spending time with words, I’m grateful!
Yes to all of this!! 🙌 So right on--love the connections you made to aging, it's brilliant.
Thank you!!! 💜💜💜
As a French woman who named her daughter after Aliénor d'Aquitaine (as she is known in French) because I always thought she was badass, I'm so happy to find out more about her and to see that my daughter displays many of her traits! Thank you for this brilliant piece! 🔥
Oh my goodness, Annette! Thank you for this comment. What a beautiful, powerful name! 😍 She truly was so phenomenal and patriarchy-confronting. I find myself wanting to go back to her story often.
Thank you for spending your time with my words!! 💜
Thank you for this gift of an essay, truly.
What a fantastic read.
I read with interest because I am building a family history based on a centuries long archive but the women are hard to find in there And yet I know that often they were the ones who ran family properties and had the knowhow.
Oh my goodness what a fantastic project. I can understand that challenge. Researching medieval women means I read a lot of “she has been lost to time,” “her name is unknown,” “her work is lost.” It’s defeating at times. Can’t wait to hear more on yours!
Thank you Roberto! I’m grateful you took time with my words and to spread a kindness too!
I appreciate knowing more of the “back story” to “The Lion in Winter,” one of my favorite movies. Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar for playing Eleanor, and she earned it.
She really did!! Eleanor is so incredibly fascinating. I plan on writing more on her in a later piece around women's power in later age, but that won't be for some time now. The Lion in Winter is so good, it has been some time since I've seen it and I may be due for a rewatch soon!! Thank you for spending time with my words, Charles.
I really loved reading this. It makes me sad to think about the way that not much has changed across history...we're still devaluing women as they age and making them do all that they can to appear as if they're still the "less threatening, more acquiescent, more desirable" bodies of younger women. It is, as you said, self oppression, and we are definitely falling for it. Reading this & all the comments from other folks makes me hopeful though - through recognizing it and talking more about it, perhaps we can stop this particular way of fortifying our own oppression :)
Thank you so very much for the kindness and spending time with my words. I’m honored. 💜 While writing I really had to deconstruct the ways in which I too participate in this self oppression and it was a lot more willingly than I’d been conscious of! It is so ingrained and so saturated, but we deserve better than to fear the inevitable. We deserve to celebrate every moment of the aging we are lucky to experience. Sending love!
Aren't there alternative explanations for WEIRD societies' contempt for the elderly? In traditional societies, the elder may be the only person who remembers where faraway water may be found during a once-in-a-lifetime drought. She may be admired for her long-honed handcraft skills or the wisdom of her experience. Her grandchildren can expect to live lives much like hers, and her insights are therefore useful to them.
In a modern, innovative economy, technology and social norms change rapidly. Who cares that Grandma can darn socks? A replacement pair is $3 on Amazon. Who wants life advice from Great Auntie who still believes in a sky fairy and recites magic words over a beaded necklace? The constant technological disruption of modernity means rapid obsolescence of skills, beliefs, and other folkways. All elderly people are consequently devalued.
How would this be different in a non-patriarchal society?
Hi there, that last question is interesting and I'm glad you asked it. In societies we'll dub 'not patriarchy' for purposes of this response; care is seen as a communal act. Caring for both the elderly and the young is a community initiative, but aside from the necessary care work that all humans require, regardless of age, in not-patriarchal societies, humans have intrinsic and inherent worth. Patriarchy requires hierarchies, capitalistic patriarchy requires hierarchies, white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy is many, many hierarchies used to subjugate folks. Not-patriarchies are built with equity as a starting point coupled with communal work. There are a lot of writers and activists out there writing specifically on communal societies, and I highly encourage reading them - one I've enjoyed recently is Abolition. Feminism. Now.
by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.
Thanks for the reference; I see the text is available as a pdf online.
Is there a historical or current example of a society that you would call non-patriarchal in the manner you describe? You've laid out a set of values, which are indeed admirable, but it's difficult to imagine what this might look like in practice. I'm not aware of any society on earth in which attention and status are not awarded to those blessed with useful skills or abilities (including physical prowess/childbearing ability) or with beauty (correlated with the former) and charisma (read: useful social ally). In my reading on communal societies, eg intentional communities, power typically accrues to these people regardless of everyone's stated ideals. This seems to be a durable feature of human nature, resulting from the human desire for social support, belonging, and affiliation with prestigious people - not something unique to capitalism, patriarchy, or white supremacy.
You wrote that, "Only in a patriarchal society would women’s aging, or aging in general (an inevitable human condition), be viewed as a weakness, a vulnerability to be dealt with and exploited as opposed to a wealth of context to be tapped into and cared for." Only in a patriarchy? How do you know? Why wouldn't this result from the totally banal, predictable conferral of status on useful people - a conferral which seems to happen under every form of human social organization? Why would we need patriarchy, specifically, to explain this?
Edited to add: in many traditional societies, respect for elders and obedience to Grandma is a much stronger value than in WEIRD societies. Older women have considerable social power, which is not dependent on beauty. Granted, their power tends to be limited to family members, especially younger women. But in smaller-scale societies, that's still real power - often the power to extract labor and resources from sons and daughters-in-law. And these cultures are typically much less gender egalitarian than the one I grew up in. Are we sure there's a reliable correlation between patriarchy and how much it sucks for women to age?
I love that you’ve asked clarifying questions here, thank you for taking thoughtful time with my words and wanting to explore further. Answering this thoroughly would require a bit of clarification around patriarchy and its impacts on our historical knowledge, so please excuse me if I over-respond a bit, just ensuring common language.
To borrow from the Internationale Akademie HAGIA, “in modern Matriarchal Studies the term “matriarchy” is understood as not to imply the matriarchal societies’ organization as simply the reversal of the patriarchal organization of society, but as a system with its own rules. The confusion about this term is partly due to the incorrect use of J. J. Bachofen’s Greek term gynaikokratie, or “rule by women” (1861), a term which has been confused with the term “matriarchy”. “Rule by women” has never existed in the patriarchal sense of “rule”, but matriarchies have existed, in various forms, over very long periods of human history.”
Patriarchy far outdates a lot of our written records which requires us to access the past utilizing archeology and anthropology, meaning clear records of ancient societies are nigh-impossible to access. It’s also so important to consider the impact of the single story and who/what has been chosen to be kept for our living memory—our present time is ripe with book bans and educational limitation, and this is roughly 5,000-7,000 years into patriarchy, so we can only imagine what has been removed from the historical narrative. I think of Christine de Pizan who mentions women and histories in her 1405 writings whom are now lost from us, or the femina book burnings, or the deliberate exclusion of girls from education, all which impacted the trajectory of our current patriarchy. (My most recent piece is on the pervasive power of the single story, if you have any interest.) And lastly, I want to mention the importance and power of imagination and naming our actions; if we can not imagine it, we can not create it. As Rose Braz said in 2008, “a prerequisite to seeking any social change is the naming of it. In other words, even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and fight for it today, it will never come.”
I think I write this in every piece, but the idea of “it has always been this way” is not only untrue, categorically, but also a really poor reason to continue doing anything in the future without reflection of it’s benefits/harm. When I said only in a patriarchy, this is what I meant: in the few examples of matriarchy that we have present day, women’s worth isn’t tied to their child-bearing years, as we see it in today’s manifestation of WSCP (white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy, to make things easier!) In WSCP, women are valued for their ability to create the next generation of workers. Limiting reproductive healthcare, allowing child labor, striking down attempts to make child marriages illegal, and the almost lack of punishment for sexual assaults are all indicative of this—birthrate and labor are important to patriarchs. Though matriarchies absolutely uplift and center motherhood, making care a communal activity and not an isolated one, a woman’s worth isn’t tied to if she is able or willing to be a mother, it is inherent, as is all peoples. Their worth is intrinsic, and tied to the communities well-being vs. the isolationism patriarchy pushes, which often marginalizes anyone other than white, straight, man (including aging women, who fit two-fold—if white, more if they are BIPOC—into oppression.)
WSCP specifically ensures that we believe humans are just this way. We are socialized to view power as important, but again, socialization isn’t inherent humanness: it is what we’ve been taught to value and how we’ve been taught to act. WSCP is built upon the dominator model—man>woman, white>non-white, abled-body>disabled, and so on—requiring subjugation and subordination to work as expected, which again, we have been socialized to believe is totally normal, as if we don’t also have the ability to zoom in on data sets that tell us the exact opposite. It isn’t a coincidence that 5 of the top 10 happiest countries are also countries with the most gender parity. We also know in environments lacking (or with less) trauma often result in better later-in-life outcomes for all peoples. (Highly encourage reading into ACE’s and the impact on later-in-life behavior directly linked to trauma experienced in formative years.) Patriarchy as we know it is predicated on trauma (look at colonization, forced sterilization, enslavement, genocide, and the like), which is impossible to avoid when utilizing a dominator model, thus requiring everyone that exists within it to be traumatized. Domination requires subjugation, and only the patriarchy (yes, I mean only) benefits when we believe it is not responsible for our current, devastating reality.
Took a few turns, as this is a lot to unpack in a comment section, but if you’re truly interested in learning more, I highly encourage you to deep dive these resources:
- https://hagia.de/en/international-academy-hagia
- Liz Plank wrote an excellent piece on what is/isn’t matriarchy: https://lizplank.substack.com/p/men-explaining-matriarchy-to-me?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email
-I never, ever say this, but Wikipedia-ing ‘matriarchy’ would be beneficial. Feminists have ensured the page is in-depth and updated, linking to further resources outside of questionable wiki.
-Research the gender differences experienced in matriarchal societies, this is a good place to start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8133476/
-bell hooks ‘A will to change’ will forever be on my recommended reading list, so it feels applicable here
-And again, Abolition. Feminism. Now. Explores some of the pop-up matriarchies experienced in segregated societies and the lack of patriarchal power dynamics upon them result in more inclusive decision making.
Thank you! 💜 It really does mean so very much to me. Last year I decided to bet on myself and jumped into writing -- the thing I’ve always wanted to do for a living-- and I feel so grateful that my words are connecting with like-souls out in this world.
This brought tears to my eyes. I LOVE this for you!!!!! Thank you so much for sharing your own personal thoughts on aging within your body. I am so grateful. 💜💜💜💜