In Aristophanes' 5th-century BC comedy, Assemblywomen, for example, women have taken charge of Athens, and bring in a whole series of hare-brained pseudo-egalitarian measures – including the requirement that men had to sleep with ugly old women before pretty young ones. Most of the literary fantasies about women in charge, ancient or modern, make the same point. And that, according to the logic of the stories, is why we now have patriarchy. The important point about matriarchy in most of these myths is that the women rulers made a terrible mess of things or they imposed regimes of such terror (who would like to be ruled by the Amazons, after all?) that there was no choice but to overthrow them. As most anthropologists have recognised for decades, these are cautionary tales invented by men to justify their own dominance. Those stories of primitive warrior queens, buxom mother goddesses and tribes of Amazons are no evidence at all that women did once rule the world. T he myth of matriarchy is one of patriarchy's oldest inventions.
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