Modern Day Matriarchy - The Women’s Kingdom - Women Make Movies - Trailer
“For nearly 2,000 years, the Mosuo (pronounced MWO-swo) have lived in the Yunnan and Sechuan provinces of southwest China, practicing matriarchal traditions.
One of China’s 56 designated ethnic minorities, the Mosuo population of 56,000 people is tiny compared with China’s overall population of 1.3 billion.
The majority of Mosuo families live around Lugu Lake, a region that was isolated from the rest of world until the 1970s.
At 8,580 feet (2,600 m) above sea level, it is the highest-altitude lake in the Yunnan province. It is also the second-deepest body of water in China, at some points deeper than 297 feet (90 m).
Mosuo women carry on the family name and run the households, which are usually made up of several families, with one woman elected as the head.
The head matriarchs of each village govern the region by committee.”
“Using a millennium as the unit of measure, we can gain a new understanding of the time scale of human existence on the planet, how limited a span patriarchy has had, and how new the work of feminist writing is.
There have been 100 millennia since the advent of modern homo sapiens (see timeline).
During almost all of those millennia, human cultures were not patriarchal, according to the work of Gerda Lerner (The Creation of Patriarchy) and of Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade).
For thousands of years before the first movements of patriarchy, the archaeological record is full of female figurines indicating worship of goddesses, female fertility, or matriarchy.
There is a notable absence of comparable male figurines in the period of time.”
