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PARTISAN REVIEW
head of family, and as deity-the Great Goddess who appears
throughout early mythology, as Tiamat, Rhea, Isis, Ishtar, Astarte,
Cybele, Demeter, Diana of Ephesus, and by many other names: the
eternal giver of life and embodiment of the natural order, including
death.
For Diner and Davis, Woman as Mother naturally led to gynar–
chy: to societies headed by and marked with profound reverence for
women. Other writers, including Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith
Firestone, deny that either a "matriarchal" or ..gynocratic" order
ever existed and perceive women's maternal function as, quite
simply and precisely, the root of our oppression. Whatever the con–
clusion drawn, there is an inescapable correlation between the idea of
motherhood and the idea of power .
The social philosopher Philip Slater, for example, sees real evi–
dence for an early matriarchal culture in Greece, supplanted by
patriarchy in later times, although he hesitates to assume a like transi–
tion from matriarchal to patriarchal power in other cultures, since
"the
ontogenetic
experience of primeval matriarchy is universal, and
may provide the source of much of this tradition" in mythology and
folklore. In other words (and this was Freud's view) each woman and
each man has once, in earliest infancy, lived under the power of the
mother, and this fact alone could account for the recurrence of
dreams, legends, myths, of an archetypal powerful Woman, or of a
Golden Age ruled by women. Whether such an age, even if less than
golden, ever existed anywhere, or whether we all carry in our earliest
imprintings the memory of, or the longing for, an individual past
relationship to a female body, larger and stronger than our own, and
to female warmth, nurture, and tenderness, there is a new concern for
the
possibilities
inherent in beneficent female power, as a mode
which is absent from the society at large, and which, even in the pri–
vate sphere, women have exercised under terrible constraints in
patriarchy.
If such a thing as a historical moment exists, we arrive there
mysteriously and unintentionally . Yet people whose individual lives
have to some extent mirrored or generated the historical process can,
at least, say what influences we think brought us where we are. The
