question: Why are Matriarchal societies rarer than Patriarchal ones.
comment: Men are more aggressive and violent, speaking anecdotally. Many people claim there is a hormonal difference. Just like with many situations, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If someone is willing to kill anyone in their way to get power, they have it. The history of the world is profoundly affected by groups of people engaging in conquest or attempted conquest, and guess what sex they are?
passages: Among the Mosuo (a tiny society in the Yunnan Province in China), however, women exert greater power, authority, and control over decision-making. Other societies are matrilinear or matrilocal, primarily among indigenous tribal groups. Some hunter-gatherer groups have been characterized as largely egalitarian. Some anthropologists, such as Ciccodicola, have argued that patriarchy is a cultural universal.
  
  Barbara Smuts argues that patriarchy evolved in humans through conflict between the reproductive interests of males and the reproductive interests of females. She lists six ways that it emerged:
  
  BULLET::::1. a reduction in female allies
  
  BULLET::::2. elaboration of male-male alliances
   Kurt Derungs is a non-academic author advocating an "anthropology of landscape" based on allegedly matriarchal traces in toponymy and folklore.
  
  Section::::History and distribution.:By chronology.:Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages.
   Matriarchal cultures are run by women. Women hold primary power, predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property at the specific exclusion of men, at least to a large degree.
   The concept of a prehistoric matriarchy was introduced in 1861 when Johann Jakob Bachofen published "Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World". He postulated that the historical patriarchates were a comparatively recent development, having replaced an earlier state of primeval matriarchy, and postulated a "chthonic-maternal" prehistoric religion. Bachofen presents a model where matriarchal society and chthonic mystery cults are the second of four stages of the historical development of religion.
   BULLET::::- In Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" (1986) and its sequels, the alien pequenino species in every forest are matriarchal.
  
  BULLET::::- In Sheri S. Tepper's book, "The Gate to Women's Country" (1988), the only men who live in Women's Country are the "servitors," who are servants to the women, according to Peter Fitting.
  
  BULLET::::- Élisabeth Vonarburg's book, "Chroniques du Pays des Mères" (1992) (translated into English as "In the Mothers' Land") is set in a matriarchal society where, due to a genetic mutation, women outnumber men by 70 to 1.
   Reed argues there are no credible examples of communities moving from patriarchal to matrilineal, but many examples in history and mythology of moving from matrilineal to patriarchal - though the process is not well understood (p166).
  
  Many of the matrilineal communities studied by early anthropologists changed very rapidly, allowing later anthropologists to believe that patriarchal or patrilineal relations were the norm. Thus was evidence of the original matriarchy written out of history almost before it was written in.
   Section::::Mythology.:Celtic myth and society.
  
  According to Adler, "there "is" plenty of evidence of ancient societies where women held greater power than in many societies today. For example, Jean Markale's studies of Celtic societies show that the power of women was reflected not only in myth and legend but in legal codes pertaining to marriage, divorce, property ownership, and the right to rule."
  
  Section::::Mythology.:South America.
  
  Bamberger (1974) examines several matriarchal myths from South American cultures and concludes that portraying the women from this matriarchal period as immoral often serves to restrain contemporary women in these societies. 
  
  Section::::In feminist thought.
   Eller sets out to refute what she describes as feminist matriarchalism as an "ennobling lie".
   Section::::History and distribution.:By chronology.
  
  Section::::History and distribution.:By chronology.:Earliest prehistory and undated.
   Goldberg reviews literature, gathering evidence from expert witnesses (both primary and secondary sources) to demonstrate that each of three distinct patterns of recognised human social behaviour (institutions) has been observed in every known society.
  
  He proposes that these three universal institutions, attested as they are across "independent" cultures, suggest a simple psychophysiological cause, since physiology remains constant, as do the institutions, even across variable cultures—a universal phenomenon suggests a universal explanation.
   One common misconception among historians of the Bronze Age such as Stone and Eisler is the notion that the Semites were matriarchal while the Indo-Europeans practiced a patriarchal system. An example of this view is found in Stone's "When God Was a Woman", wherein she makes the case that the worship of Yahweh was an Indo-European invention superimposed on an ancient matriarchal Semitic nation. Evidence from the Amorites and pre-Islamic Arabs, however, indicates that the primitive Semitic family was in fact patriarchal and patrilineal.
   Although patriarchy exists within the scientific atmosphere, "the periods over which women would have been at a physiological disadvantage in participation in hunting through being at a late stage of pregnancy or early stage of child-rearing would have been short", during the time of the nomads, patriarchy still grew with power. Lewontin and others argue that such biological determinism unjustly limits women. In his study, he states women behave a certain way not because they are biologically inclined to, but rather because they are judged by "how well they conform to the stereotypical local image of femininity".
   Section::::History and distribution.:By region and culture.:Native Americans.
   BULLET::::- The fact that women are largely absent from elaborate burial urns and number very few at all compared to male skeletons could be regarded as evidence for gender stratification. However, high-ranking women do not always hold political positions and thus their absence from elaborate burials doesn’t necessarily indicate lower status (Roosevelt 1991: 409)
   The structuralist view of kinship was laid out in Lévi-Strauss' grand statement: "Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté" (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). In this, he combined Mauss' ideas about the importance of gifts in primitive societies with the role of the incest taboo in forcing exchanges of mates outside of closely related family groups. The resulting "exchange of women" is asymmetric in that men have power over women which is not reciprocated. The resulting social structures provide a framework for treating the oppression of women as a social construct rather than being a matter of biology.
  
  Section::::Biblical patriarchy.
   On the basis of Michelle Rosaldo’s study and findings of other stateless societies, anthropologists must distinguish between prestige systems and actual power within a society. Just because a male has a high level of prestige, he may not own much economic or political power compared to others that are less prestigious within the society. 
  
  Renato Rosaldo went on to study headhunting among the Ilongots in his book "Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History". He notes headhunting raids are often associated with bereavement, a rage and expiation at the loss of a loved one. 
   The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argues that waves of kurgan-building invaders from the Ukrainian steppes into the early agricultural cultures of Old Europe in the Aegean, the Balkans and southern Italy instituted male hierarchies that led to the rise of patriarchy in Western society. Steven Taylor argues that the rise of patriarchal domination was associated with the appearance of socially stratified hierarchical polities, institutionalised violence and the separated individuated ego associated with a period of climatic stress.
  
  Section::::History and scope.:Ancient history.
   There is considerable variation in the role that gender plays in human societies. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" states, "The consensus among modern anthropologists and sociologists is that while many cultures bestow power preferentially on one sex or the other, matriarchal societies in this original, evolutionary sense have never existed." The masculinities scholar David Buchbinder suggests that Roland Barthes' description of the term "ex-nomination" (i.e. patriarchy as the 'norm' or common sense) is relevant, "[f]or as long as patriarchy remained tacit as a key principle of experiencing gender difference and hence a dominant discourse in the organization of society, it was difficult to contest its power."
   "A Golden Age of matriarchy" was, according to Epstein, prominently presented by Charlene Spretnak and "encouraged" by Stone and Eisler, but, at least for the Neolithic Age, has been denounced as feminist wishful thinking in "The Inevitability of Patriarchy", "Why Men Rule", "Goddess Unmasked", and "The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory" and is not emphasized in third-wave feminism. According to Eller, Gimbutas had a large part in constructing a myth of historical matriarchy by examining Eastern European cultures that she asserts, by and large, never really bore any resemblance in character to the alleged universal matriarchy suggested by Gimbutas and Graves. She asserts that in "actually documented primitive societies" of recent (historical) times, paternity is never ignored and that the sacred status of goddesses does not automatically increase female social status, and believes that this affirms that utopian matriarchy is simply an inversion of antifeminism.
   Section::::In popular culture.:Fine arts.
  
  BULLET::::- In 20th-century modernism, matriarchal archeology and psychology found only few defenders. One of the major exponents was the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen who, in his painting "Pays interdit" ("Forbidden Land") draws an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female goddess and, as symbols of the male gods, fallen, meteorite-like planets.
  
  Section::::In popular culture.:Television.
  
  BULLET::::- Gene Roddenberry's "Planet Earth" (1974) features a matriarchal society called the "Sisters of Ruth", where the men are drugged through their food, according to Jeff Bond.
   Section::::History and distribution.:By region and culture.:Asia.:India.
  
  In India, of communities recognized in the national Constitution as Scheduled Tribes, "some ... [are] matriarchal and matrilineal" "and thus have been known to be more egalitarian". According to interviewer Anuj Kumar, Manipur, India, "has a matriarchal society", but this may not be a scholarly.
  
  Section::::History and distribution.:By region and culture.:Asia.:Indonesia.
  
  Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday said the Minangkabau society may be a matriarchy.
  
  Section::::History and distribution.:By region and culture.:Asia.:Vietnam.
   Rentmeister defined as early as 1980 the term "matriarchy" explicitly not as "inversion formula for patriarchy". According to Rentmeister "... there were and are certainly as many forms of matriarchy, as there are at present - and simultaneously – forms of patriarchy." In 1985, she emphasizes this statement with regard to ethnological findings. 
   BULLET::::- Low-mound and non-mound sites have far fewer, if any, elaborate ceramics. Additionally, elaborate ceramics are found only in garbage and burial contexts, not around hearths (Roosevelt 1991: 339-340). This could suggest that women primarily made and used domestic plainware, while men primarily controlled ceremonial fineware (Roosevelt 1991: 407). Nonetheless, the true relationship between ceramic distribution and social rank is still unclear and needs to be further investigated (Roosevelt 1991: 396).
   BULLET::::- "Primitive social formations" have an institutional core of kinship, with the roles of age and sex making up the principle of organization of these societies. Crises within these formations arise from external factors undermining familial and tribal identities because no contradictory imperatives follow from this principle of organization.
   As Reed says, we should not see this matriarchy as a "lost paradise" (page xviii). One obvious flaw with the early social structure based on totem and taboo was that it always required some people to be outside the favoured kin groups in order to provide sexual partners (pp319,355,381). When men started to cohabit with women as husbands they were divided between their responsibility in their own lineage for their sisters' sons and their responsibility for their wives' children. Reed speculates that this may have been the cause of widespread child sacrifices in many communities at the dawn of 'civilization' (pp403–4).
  