What Western Feminism Got Wrong About Matriarchy. Ancestral matriarchies are not reversed patriarchy. Lovette Jallow explains what the West misunderstood and what was never theirs to reconstruct.
I love this if it didn't read like ChatGPT 😫 please tell me it's copying good writers like you and that you didn't use it to tell this important story...
I’m not going to engage further because it’s clear you haven’t read the rest of my work on matriarchy, patriarchy, gender norms, or the structural harm embedded in patriarchal standards. Claiming patriarchy isn’t inherently harmful while conflating matriarchy with gynarchy shows you’re not actually responding to what I wrote just reacting to what you misread.
Whew your words resurrected my heart. I’ve been feeling the disconnection in the world as I return home to myself and purge what I know not to be true. So much clutter above the veil. I’ve been struggling to speak what I know to be true bc of the words not being written before. It’s hard to be in community and build relationships here in the west, I’ve been isolating but your words gave me life.
Thank you. This is so powerful and I feel cheated for not having these insights - or even the basic trellis upon which to let them grow - for most of my life. This idea that science is catching up to the wisdom of ancient peoples has captivated me, albeit for only a few of my 60+ years. The deification of precision, objectivity, data, consistency, orderliness, purity, sterile environments, numerics and other highly structured and rigidly ordered gates that filter our wisdom has, for me (and presumably so many others) suffocated so much wisdom that is "unconventional" (by Western reckoning) despite its richness and texture. I keep opening doors and walking into Technicolor worlds I could hardly imagine. One after the other. I appreciate the gift each time you have opened such a door.
I will be bookmarking and returning to this again and again. Constant battle for those of us in the diaspora who know / feel this in our souls, but have ended up transported to the west and therefore not immune from the indoctrination. Thank you for this beautiful archiving Lovette. Grateful for all who are keepers of knowledge. 🙏🏾
This makes me think of Elizabeth the First in England - she basically ruled as a man because she couldn't rule as a woman. The only other well-known female figure I'm aware of in the UK is Boudicca and there are a lot of similarities there too.
Another thing we don't seem to have in the West is ancestry - we barely manage extended family (my family is all-white and I feel like white people seem to be particularly bad at this).
I believe there are traces of matriarchal societies in the U.K. but so long ago as to be lost in time. Archaeologists have found settlements where it’s only male DNA that is found to be from outside the settlement, suggesting it was men who moved to the woman’s community for marriage. Hinting at a matriarchal world. I wonder what it was like. More humane, I hope, and kinder than life in our current patriarchal one.
That’s a great observation, but it’s important to distinguish between matrilineal or matrifocal systems and true matriarchy. What you’re describing where men move to women’s communities, lineage is traced through the mother, or inheritance passes through the maternal line is more accurately a matrilineal setup, which can still operate within patriarchal structures.
Even the celts had some. Matriarchy, as I write about it, isn’t just about lineage it’s a political, social, spiritual, and relational system where power, leadership, and decision-making are embedded in communal responsibility, not domination. It’s not about women replacing men or living separate men are integral not separate by gender in a hierarchy, but dissolving hierarchy altogether in favor of alignment, observation, and role-based support.
Western anthropology often misreads or romanticizes these distinctions, especially when examining Indigenous or African matriarchies. But lived matriarchy still exists what’s “lost to time” in Europe is still practiced elsewhere.
Kind doesn’t mean powerless. Humane doesn’t mean passive. And matriarchy doesn’t mean reverse patriarchy. 🙏🏾✨
I’m curious as to whether matrilineal societies were sometimes not matriarchal as I had imagined they would go together, so that’s fascinating. It strange to see kind put in conjunction powerlessness, and humane with passiveness as I’ve not seen them these ways. Kindness can be pretty fierce in my experience and being truly humane has always been associated with courage for me. Really enjoyed your reply. Thank you.
You’re right to question the assumed overlap. Matrilineal doesn’t always mean matriarchal. Sometimes the line is inherited through the mother, but the authority remains patriarchal. That distinction is part of what I explore in the next piece.
And I’m with you kindness isn’t weakness. Performative niceness is actually what’s harmful and uses plausible deniability when confronted “but I am nice”. True matriarchs embody fierce care, generational memory, and strategic grace. It’s not passive. It’s deeply human and deliberately held. My grandmother took out a predators eye once it’s in my notes somewhere on the timeline….that was kindness to the child harmed she didn’t perform niceness politics. She acted out swift accountability on someone who would have weaponised performative niceness after viciously harming a child and undoubtedly used niceness to gaslight her. No one could gaslight her. She marked him for life as he marked that child’s psyche. She was backed by community after.
My mother was appropriately protective of her children, she was definitely not always ‘nice’ in service of it. I don’t think she ever took anyone’s eye out but would have done, in a moment, had the need arisen! Thanks for your reply and looking forward to more of your sharing.
Living in the dumpster fire that is the US, is a constant battle of what my spirt tells me is true and what I see. The level of lost is deeply from a lack of listening. We have no idea how to listen and return. It’s a violent culture of reinventing what already exists and still performing it incorrectly because it ain’t pure! We have a real complex of ownership and claiming what can never be contained. So self centered.
I deeply appreciate your writing. What you speak on is the way of a matriarch that I know to be true in the depths of my soul. I am grateful to you for sharing your experience, preserving truth, and speaking on what need be said. I got some more reflecting and releasing to do!
Sage Aja Ra, your words as always 😭 land with the weight of someone who knows. I’ve been deeply moved by your writing too, it carries the kind of remembrance that can’t be taught, only remembered through the body, the blood, the lineage. Cross seas and continents it lives in the DNA.
You’re right: this culture’s obsession with reinvention without reverence is violent. It’s not creation it’s extraction dressed up as originality. The matriarchal way isn’t loud or performative, it’s rooted. And it refuses to be contained or diluted.
Thank you for reading me with such presence. May your reflecting and releasing be held by the ancestors who already saw all of this coming. We’re walking it together, even across oceans. 🙏🏾✨
Phenomenal. First writing of yours I’ve read since I fan girl crushed finding you the other day.
Your piece demanded I listen… “matriarch?” I’m a matriarch….but wait. Listen. Read.
That’s what I did.
I see that you’re not offering opinion. You’re archiving truth, that’s been protected by oral contract, not paper citation. You’re speaking from a place that predates what most of us even think of as time. Your definition of matriarch is not metaphorical. It is bloodline, land, governance, memory, and law.
I honor every piece of that.
I come to you not as someone who shares your lineage, I don’t.
I’m not Black. I don’t live anywhere in Scandinavia. I don’t speak 7 languages, oral and written. I wasn’t raised inside a tradition like yours. But I am a matriarch. 👑
Not because of title or platform.
But because I was raised by a matriarch, raised by a matriarch, by a matriarch and I am -#4, and I had to rise from the ashes of my broken heart when I had to, cremate my son. Walking through loss that nearly took everything, my abusive marriage ending, a special needs daughter and neurospicy AF, immigrating as a single mother from the US under T.1 to NZ, traveling the world the last 1.5 years with my incredible daughter, raising her to be a leader in her own life…and most of all, I have led over 1000 women through birth and grief for 25 years, through sovereignty reclamation, through rewriting motherhood, partnership, and selfhood from the inside out.
I am SO priveledged to have been bathed in the strength of women like this. So grateful to find such powerhouse female and/or queer leaders such as yourself.
Such power we hold. 🔥🔥
Matriarch, in my language, isn’t metaphor either. It’s identity. Responsibility. Devotion.
I bow in reverence to your ancestral definition, I offer mine beside it, not in defiance, not as replacement, but as another flavor of truth.
The dictionary says a matriarch is “a woman who is the head of a family or tribe.”
That part, I understand deeply.
But where yours is protected, passed orally, and built for sacred endurance, mine is intentionally accessible.
But open to women who were not given language or lineage, but still knew.
Knew there was more. Knew they were meant to lead.
Even if they’ve never seen it done.
My work invites those women in.
Not because I’m trying to replace what your grandmother carried under the sacred trees, but because I believe that, across the world, different matriarchs are rising.
Each with their own tongue. Their own map. Their own remembering.
Like you, I center children.
Like you, I believe in systems that do not pathologize difference, but prepare for it.
When I say children are the future, I don’t mean potential workforce.
I mean the breath that will carry our survival forward.
I mean our last chance to live in something better.
So yes, I see what you’re protecting.
And I agree: it should be protected.
But what I hold is meant to be shared.
Not because it’s lesser. But because it was built for women who were never handed anything at all.
I don’t require credentials. Or bloodline.
Just willingness. Curiosity. Courage.
I read your piece and I didn’t feel defensive, I felt invited.
Not into your gates, because I honor that they are closed.
But into alignment. Into clarity.
Into remembering that there are matriarchs walking this earth right now who have never met and yet are somehow part of the same revolution.
Thank you for this essay. For the fire. For the memory.
I will not extract from you.
But I will walk beside, if ever that becomes possible.
The way I have chills reading this, I'm so grateful to have found this and read this today <3 thank you so much for speaking on this!! I know I'm white but, I feel seen as someone who's neurodiverse and has always seen beyond the current structure. Thank so SO MUCH for the validation and education!!! I so needed this 💖
Thank you for reading and for sharing this. I appreciate your reflection and the energy you brought into this space. Feeling seen across race, neurology, or experience matters, and it’s always powerful when readers come with openness and respect. I’m glad this met you where you needed it today. Seeing others in their fullness is a blessing for the one who is often unseen. Stay steady. 🙏🏾🫶🏾
Thank YOU so much!!! I so appreciate your perspective and your time spent cultivating a space where folx can come in with open hearts and minds and discuss!!! Non-judgement is increasingly important so, I'm very grateful for you!! 💛🫂 blessed be!!
Yes! We know what we know it's in our blood and lineage. I don't look to nurture it in those it's alien to, but I do often consider how I embody and celebrate it in myself and others.
Beautifully said, Gurjinder. That knowing really does live in the blood, your DNA unchangeable, unmoved by outside recognition. I’ve stopped offering it where it’s unwelcome too. These days, I’m more interested in how we honour it out loud, in ourselves and with those who carry that same ancestral rhythm. Wherever it calls you answer 🙏🏾✨
I love this if it didn't read like ChatGPT 😫 please tell me it's copying good writers like you and that you didn't use it to tell this important story...
Using the west as an example.pf patriarchy is also dishonest. Because patriarchies/matriarchies aren't inherently bad nor good
I’m not going to engage further because it’s clear you haven’t read the rest of my work on matriarchy, patriarchy, gender norms, or the structural harm embedded in patriarchal standards. Claiming patriarchy isn’t inherently harmful while conflating matriarchy with gynarchy shows you’re not actually responding to what I wrote just reacting to what you misread.
I just found your writing and I am so excited to dig in. You are fierce and I’m standing at attention!
I am honoured 😍
😍
😘
Great read, thank you for writing it.
Powerful, so glad to have come across your writing, perspective and wisdom- thank you!
Whew your words resurrected my heart. I’ve been feeling the disconnection in the world as I return home to myself and purge what I know not to be true. So much clutter above the veil. I’ve been struggling to speak what I know to be true bc of the words not being written before. It’s hard to be in community and build relationships here in the west, I’ve been isolating but your words gave me life.
Thank you. This is so powerful and I feel cheated for not having these insights - or even the basic trellis upon which to let them grow - for most of my life. This idea that science is catching up to the wisdom of ancient peoples has captivated me, albeit for only a few of my 60+ years. The deification of precision, objectivity, data, consistency, orderliness, purity, sterile environments, numerics and other highly structured and rigidly ordered gates that filter our wisdom has, for me (and presumably so many others) suffocated so much wisdom that is "unconventional" (by Western reckoning) despite its richness and texture. I keep opening doors and walking into Technicolor worlds I could hardly imagine. One after the other. I appreciate the gift each time you have opened such a door.
I will be bookmarking and returning to this again and again. Constant battle for those of us in the diaspora who know / feel this in our souls, but have ended up transported to the west and therefore not immune from the indoctrination. Thank you for this beautiful archiving Lovette. Grateful for all who are keepers of knowledge. 🙏🏾
This makes me think of Elizabeth the First in England - she basically ruled as a man because she couldn't rule as a woman. The only other well-known female figure I'm aware of in the UK is Boudicca and there are a lot of similarities there too.
Another thing we don't seem to have in the West is ancestry - we barely manage extended family (my family is all-white and I feel like white people seem to be particularly bad at this).
I believe there are traces of matriarchal societies in the U.K. but so long ago as to be lost in time. Archaeologists have found settlements where it’s only male DNA that is found to be from outside the settlement, suggesting it was men who moved to the woman’s community for marriage. Hinting at a matriarchal world. I wonder what it was like. More humane, I hope, and kinder than life in our current patriarchal one.
That’s a great observation, but it’s important to distinguish between matrilineal or matrifocal systems and true matriarchy. What you’re describing where men move to women’s communities, lineage is traced through the mother, or inheritance passes through the maternal line is more accurately a matrilineal setup, which can still operate within patriarchal structures.
Even the celts had some. Matriarchy, as I write about it, isn’t just about lineage it’s a political, social, spiritual, and relational system where power, leadership, and decision-making are embedded in communal responsibility, not domination. It’s not about women replacing men or living separate men are integral not separate by gender in a hierarchy, but dissolving hierarchy altogether in favor of alignment, observation, and role-based support.
Western anthropology often misreads or romanticizes these distinctions, especially when examining Indigenous or African matriarchies. But lived matriarchy still exists what’s “lost to time” in Europe is still practiced elsewhere.
Kind doesn’t mean powerless. Humane doesn’t mean passive. And matriarchy doesn’t mean reverse patriarchy. 🙏🏾✨
I’m curious as to whether matrilineal societies were sometimes not matriarchal as I had imagined they would go together, so that’s fascinating. It strange to see kind put in conjunction powerlessness, and humane with passiveness as I’ve not seen them these ways. Kindness can be pretty fierce in my experience and being truly humane has always been associated with courage for me. Really enjoyed your reply. Thank you.
You’re right to question the assumed overlap. Matrilineal doesn’t always mean matriarchal. Sometimes the line is inherited through the mother, but the authority remains patriarchal. That distinction is part of what I explore in the next piece.
And I’m with you kindness isn’t weakness. Performative niceness is actually what’s harmful and uses plausible deniability when confronted “but I am nice”. True matriarchs embody fierce care, generational memory, and strategic grace. It’s not passive. It’s deeply human and deliberately held. My grandmother took out a predators eye once it’s in my notes somewhere on the timeline….that was kindness to the child harmed she didn’t perform niceness politics. She acted out swift accountability on someone who would have weaponised performative niceness after viciously harming a child and undoubtedly used niceness to gaslight her. No one could gaslight her. She marked him for life as he marked that child’s psyche. She was backed by community after.
Excited to share more soon. 🙏🏾
My mother was appropriately protective of her children, she was definitely not always ‘nice’ in service of it. I don’t think she ever took anyone’s eye out but would have done, in a moment, had the need arisen! Thanks for your reply and looking forward to more of your sharing.
Living in the dumpster fire that is the US, is a constant battle of what my spirt tells me is true and what I see. The level of lost is deeply from a lack of listening. We have no idea how to listen and return. It’s a violent culture of reinventing what already exists and still performing it incorrectly because it ain’t pure! We have a real complex of ownership and claiming what can never be contained. So self centered.
I deeply appreciate your writing. What you speak on is the way of a matriarch that I know to be true in the depths of my soul. I am grateful to you for sharing your experience, preserving truth, and speaking on what need be said. I got some more reflecting and releasing to do!
Sage Aja Ra, your words as always 😭 land with the weight of someone who knows. I’ve been deeply moved by your writing too, it carries the kind of remembrance that can’t be taught, only remembered through the body, the blood, the lineage. Cross seas and continents it lives in the DNA.
You’re right: this culture’s obsession with reinvention without reverence is violent. It’s not creation it’s extraction dressed up as originality. The matriarchal way isn’t loud or performative, it’s rooted. And it refuses to be contained or diluted.
Thank you for reading me with such presence. May your reflecting and releasing be held by the ancestors who already saw all of this coming. We’re walking it together, even across oceans. 🙏🏾✨
Even across oceans ✨
Phenomenal. First writing of yours I’ve read since I fan girl crushed finding you the other day.
Your piece demanded I listen… “matriarch?” I’m a matriarch….but wait. Listen. Read.
That’s what I did.
I see that you’re not offering opinion. You’re archiving truth, that’s been protected by oral contract, not paper citation. You’re speaking from a place that predates what most of us even think of as time. Your definition of matriarch is not metaphorical. It is bloodline, land, governance, memory, and law.
I honor every piece of that.
I come to you not as someone who shares your lineage, I don’t.
I’m not Black. I don’t live anywhere in Scandinavia. I don’t speak 7 languages, oral and written. I wasn’t raised inside a tradition like yours. But I am a matriarch. 👑
Not because of title or platform.
But because I was raised by a matriarch, raised by a matriarch, by a matriarch and I am -#4, and I had to rise from the ashes of my broken heart when I had to, cremate my son. Walking through loss that nearly took everything, my abusive marriage ending, a special needs daughter and neurospicy AF, immigrating as a single mother from the US under T.1 to NZ, traveling the world the last 1.5 years with my incredible daughter, raising her to be a leader in her own life…and most of all, I have led over 1000 women through birth and grief for 25 years, through sovereignty reclamation, through rewriting motherhood, partnership, and selfhood from the inside out.
I am SO priveledged to have been bathed in the strength of women like this. So grateful to find such powerhouse female and/or queer leaders such as yourself.
Such power we hold. 🔥🔥
Matriarch, in my language, isn’t metaphor either. It’s identity. Responsibility. Devotion.
I bow in reverence to your ancestral definition, I offer mine beside it, not in defiance, not as replacement, but as another flavor of truth.
The dictionary says a matriarch is “a woman who is the head of a family or tribe.”
That part, I understand deeply.
But where yours is protected, passed orally, and built for sacred endurance, mine is intentionally accessible.
But open to women who were not given language or lineage, but still knew.
Knew there was more. Knew they were meant to lead.
Even if they’ve never seen it done.
My work invites those women in.
Not because I’m trying to replace what your grandmother carried under the sacred trees, but because I believe that, across the world, different matriarchs are rising.
Each with their own tongue. Their own map. Their own remembering.
Like you, I center children.
Like you, I believe in systems that do not pathologize difference, but prepare for it.
When I say children are the future, I don’t mean potential workforce.
I mean the breath that will carry our survival forward.
I mean our last chance to live in something better.
So yes, I see what you’re protecting.
And I agree: it should be protected.
But what I hold is meant to be shared.
Not because it’s lesser. But because it was built for women who were never handed anything at all.
I don’t require credentials. Or bloodline.
Just willingness. Curiosity. Courage.
I read your piece and I didn’t feel defensive, I felt invited.
Not into your gates, because I honor that they are closed.
But into alignment. Into clarity.
Into remembering that there are matriarchs walking this earth right now who have never met and yet are somehow part of the same revolution.
Thank you for this essay. For the fire. For the memory.
I will not extract from you.
But I will walk beside, if ever that becomes possible.
~Starlight Magik
The way I have chills reading this, I'm so grateful to have found this and read this today <3 thank you so much for speaking on this!! I know I'm white but, I feel seen as someone who's neurodiverse and has always seen beyond the current structure. Thank so SO MUCH for the validation and education!!! I so needed this 💖
Thank you for reading and for sharing this. I appreciate your reflection and the energy you brought into this space. Feeling seen across race, neurology, or experience matters, and it’s always powerful when readers come with openness and respect. I’m glad this met you where you needed it today. Seeing others in their fullness is a blessing for the one who is often unseen. Stay steady. 🙏🏾🫶🏾
Thank YOU so much!!! I so appreciate your perspective and your time spent cultivating a space where folx can come in with open hearts and minds and discuss!!! Non-judgement is increasingly important so, I'm very grateful for you!! 💛🫂 blessed be!!
Yes! We know what we know it's in our blood and lineage. I don't look to nurture it in those it's alien to, but I do often consider how I embody and celebrate it in myself and others.
Beautifully said, Gurjinder. That knowing really does live in the blood, your DNA unchangeable, unmoved by outside recognition. I’ve stopped offering it where it’s unwelcome too. These days, I’m more interested in how we honour it out loud, in ourselves and with those who carry that same ancestral rhythm. Wherever it calls you answer 🙏🏾✨