Gaiman
Tiffany: What's a - - a matriarchy?
Ishtar: A society run by women.
Tiffany: You mean like the Girl Scouts?
Nancy: Nope. Nothing like that.
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Brief Lives (New York, 1994), Chapter 5, p. 13, panel 2.
Anderson, "Flight to Forever"
Traveling futureward in the time projector, Martin Saunders and his companion, Belgotai, arrive in 31,000 A.D. when:
"They were received by tall, stately women in white robes of classic lines. It seemed that the Matriarchy now ruled Sol, and would they please conduct themselves as befitted the inferior sex?"
-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER THREE, p. 245.
Anderson, Time Patrol
A grizzled veteran of the 3890 Martian war, now a spaceship instructor at the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene period, praises the Patrol to some of his trainees:
"'Good company, easy living, and furloughs in a lot of eras.' The spaceman grinned. 'Wait till you've been to the decadent stage of the Third Matriarchy! You don't know what fun is.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 14.
So the Time Patrol guards a timeline with at least three Matriarchies but how will they arise? We are not told.
In the company of his colleague, Feliz a Rach, Tom Nomura thinks:
"How does a new-minted Patrolman - not even slated for police duty, a mere naturalist - how does he tell an aristocrat of the First Matriarchy that he's fallen in love with her?"
-Poul Anderson, "Gibraltar Falls" IN Time Patrol, pp. 113-128 AT p. 115.
- and says:
"'I'm not trying to boss you or anything. I'd better not. I, a plebe and a male." (p. 119)
We learn that she is not "...a strident militant..." (p. 120), that she strives to treat Nomura as her equal and that she learns what is wrong in her own period. But how did that period arise?
James Blish
sperm electrophoresis enables parents to predetermine a child's sex, thus causing a glut of males;
Earth becomes a Matriarchy;
-copied from here.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Alternately to Blish's scenario a matriarchy might have arisen if, for any number of reasons, males might have become dangerously few. So women might have found themselves the mistresses of their society by default as they strove to prevent the male sex from dying out and thus prevent natural reproduction of the species.
And we see another kind of matriarchy in VIRGIN PLANET, where a planet of women reproduced by cloning themselves via parthenogenesis.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I didn't think of VIRGIN PLANET as a matriarchy because it was women only.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But the societies on that planet are literally matriarchal.
Ad astra! Sean
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