Matriarchy isn’t Patriarchy in a dress

I’ve been noticing something lately in the conversations I have been having about the fall of patriarchy, and the rise of matriarchy.

Lately when I have been talking about matriarchy on my social media channels - about connection, earth-rootedness, secure attachment, care as a social foundation; a few comments in and something becomes clear: many people think matriarchy means putting women in charge instead of men. A simple swap. Patriarchy, but mirrored.

And the conversation I thought we were having turns out to be a different one entirely.

And look, The Word Does Carry a Trap

Here’s the thing that Angelika Duch named so precisely in a conversation I was part of recently on my page: “the word “matriarchy” has hierarchy written into its meaning.”

She’s right. Look at the suffix: *-archy*, from the Greek *archē* - meaning rule, dominance, control from above. It’s the same root that gives us monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy. And yes, patriarchy.

So when we reach for “matriarchy” to describe something tender and relational and earth-connected, we are, almost paradoxically, borrowing the structural logic of the very thing we’re trying to move away from.

We’re describing a different *content* but keeping the same *container*.

And containers shape what goes inside them.

So in order to define what I mean when I say Matriarchy, I have to actually flesh this out in plain language, as to not confuse you all.

What Matriarchal Principles Actually Are

When I talk about matriarchal principles, in my work, in my book, in conversations like this one, I’m not talking about women ruling men. I’m talking about a fundamentally different orientation toward life.

Matriarchal principles include things like:

Connection over extraction.

Matriarchal cultures, the ones anthropologists have actually studied, tend to organise around relationship: to the land, to ancestors, to future generations, to the community. The question isn’t “what can I take from this?” but “what does this ask of me?”

Care as infrastructure.

In a matriarchal framework, care isn’t a private, feminine afterthought. It’s the load-bearing wall of social life. The first years of a child’s life - staying close to the mother, building secure attachment, aren’t seen as a personal lifestyle choice. They’re understood as the foundation everything else rests on.

Cyclical rather than linear.

Patriarchal systems tend toward straight lines: growth, accumulation, conquest, progress.

Matriarchal principles tend toward cycles: seasons, return, rest, regeneration. Neither is inherently superior, but they produce very different worlds.

Horizontal rather than hierarchical.

This is the crucial one. Matriarchal societies that have been studied, like the Mosuo of China, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, the Khasi of India, are not characterised by women dominating men. They are characterised by flatter, more distributed forms of authority. Power tends to circulate rather than concentrate.

None of this is the same as “women on top.”

Why the Inversion Fantasy Is So Seductive

I understand why people go there. I really do.

When you’ve lived inside a system that has used power to harm, the most immediate imaginative move is to reassign who holds that power. It feels like justice. It feels like correction.

But inverting a hierarchy doesn’t dismantle it. It just changes who’s on top, and who’s being crushed underneath.

This matters because what most of us are actually reacting against, when we say we’re done with patriarchy, isn’t men. It’s a particular logic - one built on extraction, domination, and the abuse of power.

In a recent post, I wrote: “most of what we call patriarchy has been built not on its stated principles of protection and provision, but on extraction and power abuse. That’s what we’re rejecting.”

But here’s the thing: that logic has no gender. It will run through any structure you build if you don’t consciously dismantle it. A matriarchy that simply replaces male dominance with female dominance would potentially just recreate the same wound with different hands.

I say potentially - as we cannot know until we are there. And fundamentally, women ARE wired for more empathy than men, so there is actually a chance that by flipping the narrative, we would see less harm and extraction play out worldwide.

So, What Are We Actually Reaching For?

I think when people, especially women, say they want matriarchy, what they’re really reaching for is something that doesn’t have a clean, widely-accepted name yet.

They want a world where care is valued. Where children are protected by the whole community, not just their parents. Where the earth is treated as something we belong to, not something we own. Where power is held in trust, not wielded as a weapon. Where the first years of life - those quiet, tender, attachment-building years, are understood as the most important infrastructure investment a society can make.

Some thinkers have tried to find better language for this. Riane Eisler, in her landmark book The Chalice and the Blade, coined the term “partnership model”, deliberately contrasting it with the “dominator model” rather than framing it around gender at all. Her argument is that the real distinction in human societies isn’t male vs. female power, but whether a culture is organised around domination or mutual flourishing. It’s probably the most academically robust alternative we have, and it maps almost perfectly onto what most of us mean when we reach for “matriarchy.”

Anthropologists use the term matrifocal to describe societies centred on women and motherhood without implying women rule - it is more descriptive, less politically loaded. And historian Richard Lewinsohn proposed matrist to describe cultures oriented around feminine principles without the hierarchical suffix.

Each of these captures something real. None of them has the cultural momentum of “matriarchy.”

And that’s the honest dilemma: do we abandon the word and reach for more precise language - partnership, matrifocal, mutualist - or do we stay with “matriarchy” and fight to shift its meaning from within, the way “queer” was reclaimed and redefined by the very people it once diminished?

I don’t have a definitive answer. But I think naming the question is itself a kind of progress.

This Distinction Matters.

The confusion around this conversation DOES have real consequences.

When matriarchy gets defined as patriarchy-inverted, men (well, mostly men) hear it as a threat. Those who might otherwise be allies, disengage. They stop listening because they think they’re hearing “your turn to be dominated.”

When matriarchal principles are understood on their own terms - as a different logic, not just a different leader, then the conversation opens up. Men who are also suffering under the extractive, armoured expectations of patriarchy find themselves in the frame, not outside it.

The goal isn’t to transfer power, it’s to transform the way power works.

That’s a much harder project. It’s also the only one worth doing.

Here Is My Invitation To You.

I’m still working this out, and I think most of us are. The language is genuinely imperfect and the semantics are confusing. Plus, the history is complicated.

What I know is this: the conversations that excite me most are the ones where people are reaching beyond inversion toward something genuinely new. Where they’re asking not “who should be in charge?” but “what if the point wasn’t to be in charge at all?”

That’s the conversation I want to keep having.

What do you think? Does the word “matriarchy” still serve us, or has it become too loaded to carry what we actually mean? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

*If this resonated with you, share it with someone who’s been having this conversation. And if you want to go deeper, I explore these ideas in my book The MotherWild Revolution - here is the link