Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A social system in which the mother is head of the family.
- noun A family, community, or society based on this system or governed by women.
- noun The collection of women in positions of power, especially in such a social system or community.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Government by a mother or by mothers; specifically, an order of society, as in certain primitive tribes, in which the mother in certain important respects, especially in line of descent and inheritance, takes precedence of the father; descent or inheritance in the female line.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A social system in which the mother is
head of household , having authority over men and children. - noun A system of
government by females.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a form of social organization in which a female is the family head and title is traced through the female line
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Man – I really need to figure out where the secret lair of the matriarchy is so that I can infiltrate and become one of them.
Desperate Feminist Housewife Moms Rule The World! | Her Bad Mother 2007
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That is why the translators have seldom used the terms matriarchy and patriarchy; and for this and other reasons they have passed over Bachofen's terms "androcracy" and "gynecocracy" in favour of Anglo-Saxon equivalents with somewhat different implications.
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More generally, a matriarchy is a society dominated by women.
matriarchy 2002
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In formulations that still haunt us today, they treated African American and other minority female breadwinning as an expression of cultural pathology, a "matriarchy" that prevented men from taking their rightful roles as household heads.
Alice O'Connor: The Myth of the Mancession? Women & the Jobs Crisis -- Fact, Fiction, and Female Unemployment Alice O 2010
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In formulations that still haunt us today, they treated African American and other minority female breadwinning as an expression of cultural pathology, a "matriarchy" that prevented men from taking their rightful roles as household heads.
Alice O'Connor: The Myth of the Mancession? Women & the Jobs Crisis -- Fact, Fiction, and Female Unemployment Alice O'Connor 2010
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In formulations that still haunt us today, they treated African American and other minority female breadwinning as an expression of cultural pathology, a "matriarchy" that prevented men from taking their rightful roles as household heads.
Alice O'Connor: The Myth of the Mancession? Women & the Jobs Crisis -- Fact, Fiction, and Female Unemployment Alice O'Connor 2010
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Among Marston's many world views was that civilization was reverting into a 'matriarchy' and that females would ultimately use innate powers of 'sexual enslavement' to achieve dominance over men.
Archive 2007-02-01 Michael Stevens 2007
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I don't think this is indicative of approval, nor promotion, by the "matriarchy" in general.
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It's strange that 70s feminists came to use the term "matriarchy" as synonymous with "rule by women" as the Nurse Ratched character might symbolize.
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Ann Althouse 2006
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Not many years ago when the word 'matriarchy' came into popular use it was often assumed that in primitive times women enjoyed a freedom and a superiority which in a later age she lost.
Militarism versus Feminism: An Enquiry and a Policy Demonstrating that Militarism involves the Subjection of Women Charles Kay 1915
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