MATRIARCHY

hypothetical social system in which familial and political authority is wielded by women. Under the influence of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution and, more particularly, the work of the Swiss anthropologist J.J. Bachofen, some 19th-century historians and anthropologists believed that matriarchy followed a stage of general promiscuity and preceded male ascendancy in human society's evolutionary sequence. Like other elements of the so-called evolutionist view of human culture, the view of matriarchy as constituting a stage of cultural development is now generally discredited. Furthermore, the consensus among modern anthropologists and sociologists is that a strictly matriarchal society never existed.