Patriarchy's border guards are women

When I became a mother, aside from my ex, the three people who hurt me the most were all women. In today’s letter, I want to talk about why the idea that women are innocent victims of patriarchy actually diminishes our power.

My mother pathologized my pain, coldly telling me “you need help” after I was vulnerable with her about my struggles postpartum. When my daughter was 14 months old, she raised the rent on us and told me to abandon my matriarchy work and get a “real job”.

My ex’s mother downplayed her son’s infidelity and insisted on protecting his image as “leader of the pack” (her words) despite his complete lack of fatherhood.

My grandmother chose neutrality, and expected me to play the role of the “good daughter” and forgive without accountability.

In my deep study of matriarchal societies shortly after my daughter was born, I learned that fatherhood was not important in many of these cultures. The maternal family, the women around the mother, were the mother’s true support system.

So when my ex failed to show up, I did not truly see it as a crisis. I didn’t expect one man raised under patriarchy, who has never and will never create another person, to replace the maternal support I knew human mothers had received throughout history. His failures, while still painful, had a kind of legibility to me.

I expected the maternal network around me to be my scaffolding. It was not. And now society has handed me the blame for my choice of man, rather than the absence of any kinship and solidarity beyond him.

There is an idea, especially in existing matriarchy/feminist work, that women are simply the oppressed class under patriarchy. That if we restore power and authority to women, society will be better again. My experience says otherwise.

These three women, all over 50, have been deeply wounded by patriarchy. Everything they have done to me was done to them. I understand that. Which is why I know that, because these individuals are deeply conditioned to interact within a framework of domination, simply handing them more power won’t restore peace. There has to be a deep reckoning with the harm that has been perpetuated by women under patriarchy.

Anyone who wants to create matriarchy, regardless of gender, will need to feel comfortable not dominating others. They will need to rewire their conditioning to see the world through a lens of “more power” and “less power”. “More worthy of respect” and “less worthy of respect”. They would need to rethink everything they believe about human nature.

We cannot live in an egalitarian society where decisions are made with consensus, where the economic system is based on trust, where children are honored as much as elders, where life is treated as sacred, without intense personal and interpersonal transformation.

There will not be a ready-made structure that will teach us how to do this. We will need to create it ourselves, and this is the only way matriarchy will return.

The idea that women are helpless victims of patriarchy can perpetuate the idea that women are naturally powerless, which is the exact script that patriarchy needs to keep going. When we see grown women as people who make choices, we restore their agency.

No grown adult is innocent in this system. It requires us all to abandon our humanity and dominate each other, and depending on our gender, this happens in different ways. A hierarchical system only functions when those in the middle of the pyramid are incentivized to keep it intact. In patriarchy, women generally have less power than men, but more power than children. The hierarchy of the nuclear family extends out to our entire society, normalizing uneven power structures.

For our foremothers, many of them had no choice but to comply with patriarchal norms. The number one norm of patriarchy is that it is natural and that any other way of being is unrealistic or impossible. Many women become enforcers of patriarchy because they have unconsciously believed this story.

When they expect us to endure quietly, they don’t think “I’m harming a new mother”, or “I’m betraying my daughter”. They think “This is reality, this is womanhood, this is what family means”.

When I became a mother, I refused this script completely. I found matriarchy, which gave me validation that mothers can be sovereign and fully nourished, and that this is our birthright.

But for women who have spent almost their whole lives self-sacrificing, my choices have been unthinkable.

I was supposed to stay in the daughter role, and then one day offload my frustrations onto the next generation. I was supposed to seek approval from them and allow them to define reality simply because they were older women.

My mother has spent her life deferring to male authority and male-dominated institutions. She could not imagine a safe career or life outside of these structures. My grandmother endured years of public humiliation from her husband being unfaithful, and stuck around because “that’s how men are”. My ex’s mother buffered the failures of the men around her and expected me to do the same with her son.

This is profoundly tragic, and I have deep compassion for the pain that made them this way. But their choices and actions in relationship with me have caused real harm, and I cannot pretend otherwise.

A previous, perhaps more naive version of me would have kept lines to them open, hoping that one day they might change. That if I explained well enough, that if my work were successful enough, they could come around. But as a solo mother building an independent creative career, as a woman trying to create a matriarchal family, I simply cannot afford any energy drain. I have made peace with my decision to cut contact with all three of them.

Their own conditioning will never allow them to see me as a sovereign woman, only as the daughter who will one day “come to her senses”. Every interaction with them will be shadowed by the harm that was caused, and their inability to metabolize their part in it. This is another script I have refused: that because they are biologically related, I must keep the ties alive no matter what.

It’s not easy for me to tell my story so publicly. But this is a conversation that needs to be had, because so many of us have the same experiences. I hope that my insistence on receiving respect will show others who have been conditioned to stay in the daughter role that they do not need to accept this as normal.

When I say women are not innocent, I am really saying that women are not powerless. I am saying that I take the power of women seriously. This is completely counter to patriarchal narratives that women innately have no power or agency.

The elder women in my life believed certain stories about the world and then wanted me to accept their version of reality as fact. They believed motherhood was about accepting pain and struggle as inevitable, that asking for nourishment and support was indulgent or entitled. They believed that when men fail, women clean up the mess. They believed that my refusal to normalize all of this was the problem, not what was actually happening. They believed that the only way to survive patriarchy was to accept the structure as natural, and that questioning it was dangerous or immature.

As women, we can choose to believe these stories and then force our daughters to comply. Or we can understand that we have the power to set boundaries, to choose sovereignty, and to ultimately create a society for our daughters to be powerful themselves. The power to replicate patriarchy and the power to create matriarchy are the same.

This is an incredible revelation. It means we don’t have to wait for a global generic overthrow of “male power” to begin to create matriarchal structures. We can realize that we have been powerful enough to create matriarchy in our own homes, with our own choices, all along.

We can only step into our roles as matriarchs when we are nourished, and when the people around us respect our sovereignty. We can only create a world where our daughters are cherished when we refuse the pressure to comply with patriarchal norms. We can only have the energy to create the future we deserve when we protect it as fiercely as we would a sacred garden. That’s how matriarchy is made.