Matriarchy
Matriarchy – from the Latin “mater”, meaning “mother,” and the Greek “archē”, meaning “rule” or “power” – is a concept used to describe a hypothetical form of social organization in which kinship, inheritance, family authority, and political power are organized around women or the maternal line.
In earlier anthropological theories, matriarchy was sometimes interpreted as an early stage in the development of primitive communal society, associated with maternal kinship groups and women’s leading social position. In contemporary gender studies, however, matriarchy is usually treated not as a universally proven historical stage, but as a theoretical model or hypothesis concerning social systems in which women hold family and political authority.
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