20
PARTISAN REVIEW
Robert Briffault goes to some pains to show that matriarchy in
primitive societies was not simply patriarchy with a different sex in
authority; he reserves the term "gynocracy" for a situation in which
women would have econom.ic domination and control through prop–
erty. He points out that the matriarchal elements in any society have
had a
functional
origin-i.e ., the maternal function of gestating,
bearing, nurturing, and educating children-and that with this func–
tion in early society went a great deal of activity and authority which
is now relegated to the male sphere outside the family . Briffault's
matriarchal society is one in which maternal concerns and instincts are
pervasive and women have organic authority, rather than one in
which the woman establishes and maintains domination and control
over the man, as the man over the woman in patriarchy. There would
be, according
to
Briffault, a kind of free consent to the authority of
women in a matriarchal society, because of her involvement with the
essential practical and magical activity of that society . He thus sees
matriarchy as organic by nature: because of the integration of agri–
culture, craft , invention, into the life centered around the mother
and her children, women would be involved in a variety of creative
and productive roles. Patriarchy, in Briffault's view, develops when
men revolt against this organic order, by establishing economic dom–
ination and by taking over magical powers previously considered the
domain of women. Gynocracy, like patriarchy, would be a holding of
power through force or economic pressure and could only exist with
the advent of private ownership and the economic advantage of one
group over another .
At the core of patriarchy is the individual family unit which
originated with the idea of property and the desire
to
see one's prop–
erty transmitted to one's biological descendants. Simone de Beauvoir
connects this desire with the longing for immortality-in a profound
sense, she says, "the owner transfers, alienates , his existence into his
property; he cares more for it than for his very life; it overflows the
narrow limits of his mortal lifetime , and continues to exist beyond
the body's dissolution-the earthly and material incorporation of the
immortal soul. But this survival can only come about if the property
remains in the hands of its owner ; it can be his beyond death only if
it belongs to individuals in whom he sees himself ptojected, who are
his ."
A crucial moment in human consciousness , then , is when man
