Anatomy of Female Power

by Chinweizu

  Such is the power of a nest queen that it is far more difficult for her subjects to withdraw from her nest than it is for a citizen to emigrate from a state. A boy-child may run away from home, but the matriarchist laws and customs of the larger society will seek to return him to his mother. If a husband absconds, the matriarchist laws of the larger society will seek to return him to his nest duties, and to punish him for nest desertion; and should he decide to quit his nest duties permanently, he may find himself paying wife and child support dues in lieu of services he has chosen to default on. In contrast, only in cases of serious crime is an emigrant from a state extradited back for trial and punishment; and only by totalitarian tyrannies are emigrants treated as they are by matriarchs - as traitors and defectors.

  Like all secure and hallowed despotisms, matriarch power does not show its harsh aspect unless it is either flagrantly thwarted, or on the verge of being cast off. When a husband attempts to break from the yoke of matriarch power, he is liable to be severely punished: he is either wilfully denied a divorce, so he can be imprisoned in the nest and tortured, or he is made to pay a grievous price for the divorce.

  Casting back to the issues raised in the prologue, some questions can now be addressed. Why does female power not manifest itself through councils of matriarchs or other large and formal organizations?

  In the absence of such organizations, in what sense could one still speak of matriarchy? And why has conventional knowledge failed to acknowledge female power?

  If female power does not operate through large, formal organizations, it is because it doesn't need to. As this inquiry has shown, female power has different purposes from male power, and it has resources peculiar to it. Since function and context help to determine form, we ought not to be surprised that the structures of female power differ significantly from those of male power. {110}

  Since the cardinal aim of female power is the procurement and management of a nest-slave by a nest-queen; and since, as we have seen, this one-on-one control operates mainly through intimate psychological manipulation; female power does not need those elaborate structures of formal authority which have evolved to control the large aggregates of persons required by the specialist activities of the male domain -namely, hunting and war and their modern extensions. In particular, grand councils of matriarchs are not necessary for the effective exercise of female power.

  As we have seen from this inquiry, marriage is the central institution of female power - not political parties, parliaments, armies, business enterprises, bureaucracies, etc. The nest or family home, where a woman is both mother and wife, is the seat of female power – not barracks, factories, offices or other such places where large numbers of persons gather to work together. In making marriage its central institution, female power has chosen the organizational form most suited to its nature and its needs.

  As buttresses to the marriage institution, female power also operates informal consultative bodies like sororities, kaffee klatches, gossip groups, and associations of the wives of generals, politicians, businessmen, etc. These suffice for exchanges of ideas on how to manage men, and for conspiracies against men which each wife then implements on her husband.

  Even where women have thought it useful to have their own organs of political authority (female councils which are counterweights to male councils), these are auxiliary to the central institution of female power.

  Whatever powers all-female councils wield are extra to the overwhelming powers which women wield through marriage.

  Because of the functional and contextual differences between female power and male power, matriarchy cannot be properly defined as what would obtain if women were substituted for men in patriarchal structures. To avoid the confusions of over-sophistication, we need to remind ourselves that, in down-to-earth terms, matriarchy and patriarchy are, respectively, mother-rule and father-rule. We need, therefore, to define them, each in terms of the realities of power and authority in the nest organization. Let us begin with some preliminaries.

  A nest (mother, father and children) has two heads: a female head and a male head. A matriarch is the female head of a nest. A patriarch is the male head of a nest. Unlike a pair of Roman consuls, these two {111} heads are not co-equal in power and authority. Whereas the matriarch is the real head, with more of the actual power, the patriarch is the figurehead, with more of the aura of authority. Indeed, the matriarch holds the power behind the authority of the patriarch. Now to the main definitions.

  Matriarchy is a form of social organization in which the female head of a nest exercises dominant power in it, while the male head is her lieutenant who operates its formal machinery of authority.

  Patriarchy is a form of social organization in which the male head of a nest operates its formal machinery of authority, while giving the impression of exercising dominant power in it.

  These definitions, I submit, capture the realities far better than the conventional ones accepted by anthropologists and sociologists. For example, this definition of matriarch does not require us to treat the idea of a matriarch as a joke; nor does it place us in the quandary of denying the name to those matrons who, in addition to exercising dominant power, also wield familial authority in the style usual for patriarchs. Such a matron is like a monarch who also acts as her own prime minister.

  Secondly, on this definition of matriarchy, women do not have to exercise any formal authority in order for a social system to be matriarchal.

  Where women confine themselves to exercising power within the marriage institution, we have a matriarchal system. If they, in addition, operate all-female associations that exercise political powers that are zoned to women, then the scope of matriarchy in that system is enlarged.

  So long as women exercise dominant power somewhere in the social system, that system is matriarchal, for it features mother-rule.

  Thirdly, matriarchy and patriarchy, as now defined, can co-exist, as they indeed do in actual societies, the latter mostly as the authority system for routinely applying the power of the former. A society cannot, therefore, be either "strictly matriarchal" or "strictly patriarchal"; rather, a society can have matriarchal and patriarchal subsystems, and these usually complement each other. The notion that a society has to be either entirely ruled by mothers or entirely ruled by fathers is a piece of over-sophisticated nonsense. In reality, mother-rule and father-rule each has its own sphere in each society: some powers are in the keep of mothers, and other powers are in the keep of fathers.

  It ought to be noted here that, in any organization, there are front structures of formal authority as well as back channels of unformalised {112} power. In society as a whole, whereas the patriarchal subsystem specializes in the front structures of authority, the matriarchal subsystem specializes in back channel power. The supremacy of the matriarchal subsystem explains why, even in an all-male organization, advancement comes easier to those men who are championed by the wives, mistresses, daughters and female confidantes of powerful men - i.e. by women who are nominally not even part of the organization. Why has female power proved elusive to conventional observers and investigators? It is not surprising that they fail to find female power who expect its manifestations to be mirror images of those of male power.

  After all, an anthropologist or sociologist who is looking for elephants, is not likely to find any, even while standing in the midst of a herd of elephants, if he believes that an elephant is built like, and flies like, an eagle. If the consensus of the experts is that neither matriarchs nor matriarchy exists, and hence that female power does not exist, then theirs is a consensus of errors based on unwarranted analogies and inappropriate definitions. And as history has all too often shown, the consensus is not always correct. It is typical of feminists not only to deny female power, but to specifically deny matriarch power. For example, Germaine Greer has declared:

  If you look at wives in general they don't have much power over their husbands. Most of them have onl
y the vaguest notion of what their husbands are doing.96

  That second sentence may well be true; however, their ignorance of what their husbands are doing does not prove that wives have no power over their husbands. After all, the Chairman of the Board of a corporation need not have more than the vaguest notion of what his field technicians are doing; yet he has power over them, and they work for him. And as the anti-feminist woman, Esther Vilar, has illuminatingly put it:

  Women are to the world what stockholders are to corporations: although they understand nothing of what is involved, and although they themselves do nothing for the corporation, everything that is done is being done in their interest.97 {113}

  Yes, to have others work in your interest, isn’t that power indeed?

  An acknowledgement of matriarch power will necessarily affect our understanding of society's power structure. In the standard perception, elite men are the lords of society. Once matriarch power is taken into account, and it is acknowledged that elite women (as mothers and wives to elite men) rule elite men, it then has to be conceded that the topmost layer in society's power hierarchy is occupied by elite women. The grand matriarchs (the Nancy Reagans, Clementine Churchills, Livias and Lady Macbeths of history and fiction), who rule the grand patriarchs who rule the world, are indeed the overall bosses of the world.

  The relationship between grand patriarchs and grand matriarchs is this: the former, like a management team, run society in the interest of the latter who are, indeed, society's supreme stockholders.

  When we acknowledge matriarch power, we are obliged to admit that matriarchy, a system in which ultimate power in society resides with matriarchs, is the human norm. Yes, penultimate power and the structures of authority may be in the hands of patriarchs, but ultimate power lies in the laps of matriarchs. As the Igbo say: Mother is supreme. It has been so since the original division of labour by gender which took place at the beginning of human society; it remains so to this day. Contrary to conventional opinion, matriarchy operates everywhere, no matter how ubiquitous the facade of patriarchy may be.

  The grand matriarch enjoys, at its most spectacular level, what every married mother enjoys, and every man-hunting woman aspires to. In this sense, the overwhelming majority of women are matriarchists, for their life ideal is to be-matriarchs. Most women like being women, they are keen to get husbands to support them in the style they aspire to, and they wouldn't like to be men, or to live the way men do.

  I once asked a Lagos girl why she liked being a woman. She replied:

  As a woman, you can afford to be lazy and still be fed and clothed and taken care of. And you don't even have to be beautiful; you just make yourself attractive. If you don't have money, your boyfriend will give you money. Men give money to their girlfriends; girls don't give money to their boyfriends.

  Asked why she was keenly looking for a husband, a young Nigerian woman journalist said: {114}

  Seek ye first a husband, and everything else shall be added unto you. Instead of hunting for a house and a car, you find a husband and he'll give you the house and car, and do so on his knees.

  Asked what she thought of a man's life, a young Nigerian woman said: "To be a man is punishment".

  In another encounter, a young Nigerian school leaver, who had just been spouting bits and pieces of feminist propaganda about how it is all "a man's world," was cornered with the question:

  'In your next incarnation, would you like to come as a man?'

  'Do you think I want a life of suffering?’, she exclaimed without hesitation.

  Asked whether she would like to be a man, Miriam Ikejiani, a Nigerian university lecturer in Political Science, declared:

  Certainly not. I enjoy being a woman. I enjoy being attractive and being pampered. I also enjoy getting what I want because I'm a woman. I enjoy looking after my children as well as cooking.98

  One evening, in a London brasserie, an English woman firmly told another, who was half her age and full of feminist chatter: "I like being a kept woman." This happened when the man they were with offered to buy them drinks and the young feminist insisted on paying for her own.

  Why were these women, like so many, so gladly attached to woman's way of life and so unattracted to man's life? Well, woman's way of life is full of exemptions from unpleasant things like the burdens and anxieties of public office; like the biting cold of winter lumbering in the frozen forests; like the heat and dust and dangers of coal and gold mines deep in the bowels of the earth; like the mud and wounds and bloody stench of battlefields. Women are routinely exempted from such unpleasant things which men may not shirk. These hallowed exemptions do not in the least interfere with a woman's right to share the pleasures of the wealth, fame and status which the men in her life (father, brothers, {115} husbands, lovers) secure by the very toil and high risks she is exempted from.

  These privileges, which are available to all women, turn the lives of grand matriarchs (who enjoy them at the highest level) into the closest thing to paradise on earth. Unsurprisingly, the cardinal aim of elite matriarchs is to preserve the social arrangements which bestow these paradisiac privileges upon all women. And in furthering this aim, they can count on the support of the matriarchist majority of women. {116}

  16. Feminism: A Revolt in Paradise

  I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.99

  - The "voice within women", as reported by Betty Friedan.

  Women's liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one's likely to do anything about that.100

  - Golda Meir

  Despite woman's paradise of privileges - privileges anchored on the womb, privileges of which most women are fully and happily aware - feminists claim that women are powerless, and are oppressed by men. They have therefore demanded a reorganization of society on the basis of equality between men and women. They say they want a world without roles assigned by gender: a world in which women share power and work and status equally with men - in the home and outside it, in the kitchen and in the office; in minding the mess and confusion of the children's play pen, and in managing the crises and disasters in the corridors of public power.

  If indeed human society is basically matriarchal, despite its patriarchal façade; if woman is indeed man's boss; if most women know that their lives are quite privileged compared to the lives of their men, what then is one to make of feminism and its egalitarian programme?

  To help us assess feminism, we ought to note that, in their attitudes to men, there are three basic types of women: the matriarchists, the tomboys and the termagants. A matriarchist is a woman who believes that a man's natural or god-ordained role in life is to serve some matriarch or married mother; and that the best way to get full service out of him is to make him think that he is his matriarch's boss. A tomboy is a woman who would rather be a man. A termagant is a woman, {117} whether tomboy or quasi-matriarchist, who insists on showing her man that she, not he, is boss; she therefore takes sadistic pleasure in harassing and bossing men.

  Most women, down through history, have been matriarchist. Tomboys there have always been, but most, at puberty, reconciled themselves to the matriarchist social arrangements which suited the overwhelming majority of women. Termagants, the man-hating, temperamental misfits in the matriarchist paradise, there have always been. Incensed by the facade of patriarchy, they would vent on the hapless men around them their resentment of the matriarchist requirement that women make believe that they are ruled by men.

  Feminism is a movement of bored matriarchists, frustrated tomboys and natural termagants; each of these types has its reasons for being discontented in the matriarchist paradise that is woman's traditional world. Indeed, the career of post WWII feminism may be summarized as follows:

  Bored matriarchists (like Betty Friedan) and frustrated tomboys (like Simone de Beauvoir) kicked it off;

  Termagants (like Andrea D
workin) made a public nuisance of it;

  Satisfied matriarchists (like Phyllis Schlafly) oppose it;

  Non-militant tomboys (the female yuppies) have quietly profited from it.

  Friedanite feminism began by giving public voice to the craving by bored, wealthy, suburban American housewives for "something more than my husband and my children and my home." Much of feminism has been inspired by this desire for something better than the matriarchist paradise; however, feminists find it politically expedient to present their aggrandizing demands in the language of liberation from oppression.

  But it is hard, without standing the word "oppression" on its head, to fathom how their boredom, an affliction of the leisured and the idle rich, can be taken as a product of oppression. It takes Orwellian doublespeak to say that such a wife is oppressed by the husband whose income makes possible her leisured life. And if the idle rich are oppressed, then what are slaves, peons, and the like? What Friedanite feminism proves is that what to most women is paradise, to some women is hell; that any paradise can bore some to {118} rebellion. Such a rebellion is the subject of this bizarre story from Switzerland, which is aptly titled "Pampered Wife Wants Divorce":

  A housewife has filed for divorce claiming her hubby made her miserable - by doing too much work around the house!

  The Zurich, Switzerland, woman - identified only as Susan - said she had absolutely nothing to do and was totally demoralized after six years of living with her husband Karl and being waited on hand and foot.

  In court papers, she said her 42-year-old office worker husband returned from his job every day and started work all over again - cleaning house, according to accounts in the Swiss newspaper Blick.