Cultural Feminism

Many cultural feminists support their arguments by examining the behavior of women in both the distant past and the present. Bachoffen's ground breaking work on early matriarchal societies is often used as evidence that women were the earliest and most important members of society. [3] In societies led by women, or "matriarchies, "there are vastly different rules governing sexuality and marriage, property inheritance, and the distribution of power than those rules operative in societies led by men, or "patriarchies." When women have greater social control than men, less stringent social sanctions are imposed on female sexual activities and choice of partners. Illegitimacy is absent, and inheritance and descent are organized through female ancestors. Matriarchal societies are generally non militaristic, with the dramatic exception of Amazons. Religion, arts, and crafts are organized around female symbols of fertility and anatomy. Engels took the archaeological evidence developed by Bachoffen and Morgan and extended their analyses to include changing economic conditions as a cause for the transition from matriarchal societies to patriarchal ones.[4] Succinctly, Engels' argument is that as men accumulated capital, because of technological and social inventions, they altered the norms controlling sexuality, the family, and government. Women became a commodity of exchange who supplied men with both status and heirs. Recent anthropological evidence largely supports the existence of early societies where women had significantly greater power than they do today. [5] A third major theorist of cultural feminism, Otis Tufton Mason, strongly influenced Addams' social thought and is discussed in the next section. All these theorists were part of a school of thought that was never viable in male American sociology. For female American sociologists, however, cultural feminism became the cornerstone of their thought. Almost all women sociologists trained before 1915 were cultural feminists. [6] This branch of feminist thought suffered a severe blow immediately prior to, during, and after World War I. Most of these women theorists opposed the war on the basis that military values were destructive, masculine, and inferior to the more socially advanced feminine values of cooperation and pacifism. Addams, as the leading spokesperson for this view, was also the leading target. Pacifism was only one component in a complex set of assumptions made by cultural feminists, but its threat to patriarchal violence caused a savage response, and repression of this theory soon followed.
ENDNOTES

3. Jacob Bachofen, Das Mutterecht. English translationand condensation. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right,tr. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1967). 4. Friedrich Engels. The Origins of the Family, Private Property,and the State (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. 1902. c. 1884). 5. Kathleen Gough has updated the archaeological findings usedby Engels. She has found his information to be basically soundeven with the addition of new knowledge about early societies.See "An Anthropologist Looks at Engels," in Womenin a ManMade World, ed. Nona Glazer and Helen YoungelsonWaehrer (Chicago: Rand McNally. 1977). pp. 156-68. 6. This is true of Emily Greene Balch and Anna Garlin Spencer,in particular. See Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and AliceHamilton, The Women at the Hague (New York: Macmillan. 1915).See Spencer's Women's Share in Social Culture (New York:Mitchell Kennerley, 1913).
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