Gentlemen and Amazons

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900

Cynthia Eller

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780520266766
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520948556
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

Gentlemen and Amazons traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. Cynthia Eller explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. Eller tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for understanding how feminists of the 1970s and 1980s embraced as historical "fact" a discredited nineteenth-century idea.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Gentlemen and Amazons
• Title
• Copyright
• For Teresa M. Shaw, my favorite historian
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 The Travels and Travails of Matriarchal Myth
• 2 Amazons Everywhere: Matriarchal Myth before Bachofen
• 3 On the Launching Pad: J. J. Bachofen and ‘Das Mutterrecht’
• 4 The Matriarchal Explosion: Anthropology Finds Mother Right (and Itself )
• 5 Making Matriarchal Myth Work:Communists and Feminists Discover the Mother Age
• 6 Mother Right on the Continent
• 7 Struggling to Stay Alive: Anthropology and Matriarchal Myth
• 8 Matriarchal Myth in the Late Nineteenth Century: Why Then? Why Not Before?
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX