CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: UNEARTHING MATRIARCHY and academic credulity.

Ten years ago, Cynthia Eller offered a useful and long-overdue demolition of a mistaken idea that gained widespread currency in women’s studies and in some sectors of popular culture. In The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future (Beacon Press 2001), Eller, who is an associate professor of women’s studies and religious studies at Montclair State University, reviewed the archaeological evidence in favor of the idea that human society had, in a remote epoch, gone through a period when women ruled and showed that this proposition was a tissue of wishful thinking, wild surmise, and aggressive misreading of the available facts.

The fantasy, of course, remains in circulation, often in association with the idea that once upon a time people were generally united in worship of “the Goddess,” in her various guises. The Goddess, according to this story, was eventually suppressed by patriarchal society. Suppressed but not forgotten, she lives on—notably in the syllabi of numerous women’s studies courses and feminist-inflected courses in other parts of the curriculum.

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