15. The Matriarch: Sovereign of Her Nest

Disguise our bondage as we will, Tis woman, woman rules us still.⁹⁴94 F.P.A.'s Book of Quotations, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1952, p.859.

Whatever power it is that woman wields knows no bounds.⁹⁵95 National Concord (Lagos), p.1.

As we have by now seen, contrary to what some feminists would have the world believe, female power exists, every man alive is under its sway, wives rule and exploit their husbands, and the domination of man by woman is not “an inversion of fact”. Let me recapitulate.

Motherpower takes charge of a boy-child at his birth, when he cannot contest it. Luckily for him, it is the protective mode of female power, and has a benign texture. At puberty, however, motherpower begins to wane, though its grip on him never completely vanishes while he lives.

At puberty, a boy’s hormones shove him into the arena of bridepower where he is raided by the nest-making woman looking for a nest-slave. Behold the slave-huntress armed with the weapon of female beauty. See her prowling the promenade, eyes out for a suitable catch. See her lure him with her body bait. As he follows, desperate for a bite, see her smite him with her love harpoon and derange his mind. See her lead the smitten prey through a courtship maze, stopping here and there to rub him with balms that calm his anxious nerves, till he is well and truly tame. Now see them exit from the maze. See her gather him up in her wedding net; see her hold the net aloft, displaying to all what she has caught. See her march off to her nest, holding the newly-won slave by the matrimonial yoke around his neck.

Behold the new husband, our brawny and brainy one, smiling as he is led into the fortress of wifepower. There he is, a little while later, tied down to his nest duties by the foetus in her bulging womb. With the power she gathered on their wedding day at last confirmed by the birth of their child, watch him now toil without cease for his nest queen and her nest. Whatever wealth he reaps he must bring home to his ruler; if he wins honour or fame, he must share its privileges with her.

Behold how she now rules him, using the tricks she inherited from her predecessors in husband management. Behold how she exploits him through a covert matriarchy that wears a patriarchal mask; through the formidable handicaps imposed on him by a hallowed double standard; through his ingrained fear of women, whom he sees as mysterious beings; through his silly soul that is befogged by sentimental illusions; through their baby whom she wields as a weapon against him. Behold how she keeps him trapped, through the mighty penalties which law and custom have decreed against him in the event of a divorce, penalties which a thwarted slave-holder would most vengefully enforce.

Yes, indeed! Where, on any day of his life, does a man evade the sway of female power?

In the course of a woman’s life, she first exercises bridepower in order to win wifepower and motherpower for herself. These latter powers she holds conjointly in her ultimate position as married mother or matriarch. As matriarch, she rules her husband through her powers both as his wife and as the mother of their children.

The nest, that terminus of bridepower, that locus of both wifepower and motherpower, is woman’s sovereign estate; and the nest queen or matriarch is its monarch. Accordingly, the politics of the nest is the politics of a monarch’s court, with her courtiers (her husband and children) competing for her approval and favours. Matriarch power is exercised over them as she distributes the resources, commodities and opportunities which her husband procures for her domain. Her control of the womb, kitchen and cradle in her nest gives her the power to decide who shall do or get what. Her authority in her nest is buttressed by custom, law, habit, education, propaganda, sanctions and rewards. While her children are her dependent wards, her husband is simply her consort, and her one-man ministerial cabinet which helps her exercise her monarchical powers. With all her court being subject to or dependent upon her, a matriarch is a monarch — sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent, sometimes constitutional, sometimes despotic — but a monarch nonetheless, with sovereign powers over her nest.

Indeed, like any potentate, a matriarch wields over her court powerful weapons of persuasion and coercion. She can suggest or command or nag-nag-nag. She can quietly veto any of her husband’s decisions which do not suit her. She can reduce the flow of her favours, or cut it off altogether. She can expel recalcitrant members from her nest — boys by sending them off to borstal or its equivalents; her husband by divorcing him, and on punitive terms.

Such is the power of a nest queen that it is far more difficult for her subjects to withdraw from her nest than it is for a citizen to emigrate from a state. A boy-child may run away from home, but the matriarchist laws and customs of the larger society will seek to return him to his mother. If a husband absconds, the matriarchist laws of the larger society will seek to return him to his nest duties, and to punish him for nest desertion; and should he decide to quit his nest duties permanently, he may find himself paying wife and child support dues in lieu of services he has chosen to default on. In contrast, only in cases of serious crime is an emigrant from a state extradited back for trial and punishment; and only by totalitarian tyrannies are emigrants treated as they are by matriarchs — as traitors and defectors.

Like all secure and hallowed despotisms, matriarch power does not show its harsh aspect unless it is either flagrantly thwarted, or on the verge of being cast off. When a husband attempts to break from the yoke of matriarch power, he is liable to be severely punished: he is either wilfully denied a divorce, so he can be imprisoned in the nest and tortured, or he is made to pay a grievous price for the divorce.

Casting back to the issues raised in the prologue, some questions can now be addressed. Why does female power not manifest itself through councils of matriarchs or other large and formal organizations? In the absence of such organizations, in what sense could one still speak of matriarchy? And why has conventional knowledge failed to acknowledge female power?

If female power does not operate through large, formal organizations, it is because it doesn’t need to. As this inquiry has shown, female power has different purposes from male power, and it has resources peculiar to it. Since function and context help to determine form, we ought not to be surprised that the structures of female power differ significantly from those of male power.

Since the cardinal aim of female power is the procurement and management of a nest-slave by a nest-queen; and since, as we have seen, this one-on-one control operates mainly through intimate psychological manipulation; female power does not need those elaborate structures of formal authority which have evolved to control the large aggregates of persons required by the specialist activities of the male domain — namely, hunting and war and their modern extensions. In particular, grand councils of matriarchs are not necessary for the effective exercise of female power.

As we have seen from this inquiry, marriage is the central institution of female power — not political parties, parliaments, armies, business enterprises, bureaucracies, etc. The nest or family home, where a woman is both mother and wife, is the seat of female power — not barracks, factories, offices or other such places where large numbers of persons gather to work together. In making marriage its central institution, female power has chosen the organizational form most suited to its nature and its needs.

As buttresses to the marriage institution, female power also operates informal consultative bodies like sororities, kaffee klatches, gossip groups, and associations of the wives of generals, politicians, businessmen, etc. These suffice for exchanges of ideas on how to manage men, and for conspiracies against men which each wife then implements on her husband.

Even where women have thought it useful to have their own organs of political authority (female councils which are counterweights to male councils), these are auxiliary to the central institution of female power. Whatever powers all-female councils wield are extra to the overwhelming powers which women wield through marriage.

Because of the functional and contextual differences between female power and male power, matriarchy cannot be properly defined as what would obtain if women were substituted for men in patriarchal structures. To avoid the confusions of over-sophistication, we need to remind ourselves that, in down-to-earth terms, matriarchy and patriarchy are, respectively, mother-rule and father-rule. We need, therefore, to define them, each in terms of the realities of power and authority in the nest organization. Let us begin with some preliminaries.

A nest (mother, father and children) has two heads: a female head and a male head. A matriarch is the female head of a nest. A patriarch is the male head of a nest. Unlike a pair of Roman consuls, these two heads are not co-equal in power and authority. Whereas the matriarch is the real head, with more of the actual power, the patriarch is the figurehead, with more of the aura of authority. Indeed, the matriarch holds the power behind the authority of the patriarch. Now to the main definitions.

Matriarchy is a form of social organization in which the female head of a nest exercises dominant power in it, while the male head is her lieutenant who operates its formal machinery of authority.

Patriarchy is a form of social organization in which the male head of a nest operates its formal machinery of authority, while giving the impression of exercising dominant power in it.

These definitions, I submit, capture the realities far better than the conventional ones accepted by anthropologists and sociologists. For example, this definition of matriarch does not require us to treat the idea of a matriarch as a joke; nor does it place us in the quandary of denying the name to those matrons who, in addition to exercising dominant power, also wield familial authority in the style usual for patriarchs. Such a matron is like a monarch who also acts as her own prime minister.

Secondly, on this definition of matriarchy, women do not have to exercise any formal authority in order for a social system to be matriarchal. Where women confine themselves to exercising power within the marriage institution, we have a matriarchal system. If they, in addition, operate all-female associations that exercise political powers that are zoned to women, then the scope of matriarchy in that system is enlarged. So long as women exercise dominant power somewhere in the social system, that system is matriarchal, for it features mother-rule.

Thirdly, matriarchy and patriarchy, as now defined, can co-exist, as they indeed do in actual societies, the latter mostly as the authority system for routinely applying the power of the former. A society cannot, therefore, be either “strictly matriarchal” or “strictly patriarchal”; rather, a society can have matriarchal and patriarchal subsystems, and these usually complement each other. The notion that a society has to be either entirely ruled by mothers or entirely ruled by fathers is a piece of over-sophisticated nonsense. In reality, mother-rule and father-rule each has its own sphere in each society: some powers are in the keep of mothers, and other powers are in the keep of fathers.

It ought to be noted here that, in any organization, there are front structures of formal authority as well as back channels of unformalized power. In society as a whole, whereas the patriarchal subsystem specializes in the front structures of authority, the matriarchal subsystem specializes in back channel power. The supremacy of the matriarchal subsystem explains why, even in an all-male organization, advancement comes easier to those men who are championed by the wives, mistresses, daughters and female confidantes of powerful men — i.e. by women who are nominally not even part of the organization.

Why has female power proved elusive to conventional observers and investigators? It is not surprising that they fail to find female power who expect its manifestations to be mirror images of those of male power. After all, an anthropologist or sociologist who is looking for elephants is not likely to find any, even while standing in the midst of a herd of elephants, if he believes that an elephant is built like, and flies like, an eagle. If the consensus of the experts is that neither matriarchs nor matriarchy exists, and hence that female power does not exist, then theirs is a consensus of errors based on unwarranted analogies and inappropriate definitions. And as history has all too often shown, the consensus is not always correct.

It is typical of feminists not only to deny female power, but to specifically deny matriarch power. For example, Germaine Greer has declared:

If you look at wives in general they don’t have much power over their husbands. Most of them have only the vaguest notion of what their husbands are doing.⁹⁶96 Kim Fletcher, "Behind Every Bad Man?", The Sunday Telegraph (London), December 31, 1989, p.21.

That second sentence may well be true; however, their ignorance of what their husbands are doing does not prove that wives have no power over their husbands. After all, the Chairman of the Board of a corporation need not have more than the vaguest notion of what his field technicians are doing; yet he has power over them, and they work for him. And as the anti-feminist woman, Esther Vilar, has illuminatingly put it:

Women are to the world what stockholders are to corporations: although they understand nothing of what is involved, and although they themselves do nothing for the corporation, everything that is done is being done in their interest.⁹⁷97 Esther Vilar, The Polygamous Sex, tr. by Sophie Wilkins, London: W.H. Allen, 1976, pp.86-87.

Yes, to have others work in your interest, isn’t that power indeed?

An acknowledgement of matriarch power will necessarily affect our understanding of society’s power structure. In the standard perception, elite men are the lords of society. Once matriarch power is taken into account, and it is acknowledged that elite women (as mothers and wives to elite men) rule elite men, it then has to be conceded that the topmost layer in society’s power hierarchy is occupied by elite women. The grand matriarchs (the Nancy Reagans, Clementine Churchills, Livias and Lady Macbeths of history and fiction), who rule the grand patriarchs who rule the world, are indeed the overall bosses of the world. The relationship between grand patriarchs and grand matriarchs is this: the former, like a management team, run society in the interest of the latter who are, indeed, society’s supreme stockholders.

When we acknowledge matriarch power, we are obliged to admit that matriarchy, a system in which ultimate power in society resides with matriarchs, is the human norm. Yes, penultimate power and the structures of authority may be in the hands of patriarchs, but ultimate power lies in the laps of matriarchs. As the Igbo say: Mother is supreme. It has been so since the original division of labour by gender which took place at the beginning of human society; it remains so to this day. Contrary to conventional opinion, matriarchy operates everywhere, no matter how ubiquitous the facade of patriarchy may be.

The grand matriarch enjoys, at its most spectacular level, what every married mother enjoys, and every man-hunting woman aspires to. In this sense, the overwhelming majority of women are matriarchists, for their life ideal is to be matriarchs. Most women like being women, they are keen to get husbands to support them in the style they aspire to, and they wouldn’t like to be men, or to live the way men do.

I once asked a Lagos girl why she liked being a woman. She replied:

As a woman, you can afford to be lazy and still be fed and clothed and taken care of. And you don’t even have to be beautiful; you just make yourself attractive. If you don’t have money, your boyfriend will give you money. Men give money to their girlfriends; girls don’t give money to their boyfriends.

Asked why she was keenly looking for a husband, a young Nigerian woman journalist said:

Seek ye first a husband, and everything else shall be added unto you. Instead of hunting for a house and a car, you find a husband and he’ll give you the house and car, and do so on his knees.

Asked what she thought of a man’s life, a young Nigerian woman said: “To be a man is punishment.”

In another encounter, a young Nigerian school leaver, who had just been spouting bits and pieces of feminist propaganda about how it is all “a man’s world,” was cornered with the question:

‘In your next incarnation, would you like to come as a man?’

‘Do you think I want a life of suffering?’, she exclaimed without hesitation.

Asked whether she would like to be a man, Miriam Ikejiani, a Nigerian university lecturer in Political Science, declared:

Certainly not. I enjoy being a woman. I enjoy being attractive and being pampered. I also enjoy getting what I want because I’m a woman. I enjoy looking after my children as well as cooking.⁹⁸98 Interview by Charles Okechukwu, The Guardian (Lagos), November 1, 1987, p.4.

One evening, in a London brasserie, an English woman firmly told another, who was half her age and full of feminist chatter: “I like being a kept woman.” This happened when the man they were with offered to buy them drinks and the young feminist insisted on paying for her own.

Why were these women, like so many, so gladly attached to woman’s way of life and so unattracted to man’s life? Well, woman’s way of life is full of exemptions from unpleasant things like the burdens and anxieties of public office; like the biting cold of winter lumbering in the frozen forests; like the heat and dust and dangers of coal and gold mines deep in the bowels of the earth; like the mud and wounds and bloody stench of battlefields. Women are routinely exempted from such unpleasant things which men may not shirk. These hallowed exemptions do not in the least interfere with a woman’s right to share the pleasures of the wealth, fame and status which the men in her life (father, brothers, husbands, lovers) secure by the very toil and high risks she is exempted from.

These privileges, which are available to all women, turn the lives of grand matriarchs (who enjoy them at the highest level) into the closest thing to paradise on earth. Unsurprisingly, the cardinal aim of elite matriarchs is to preserve the social arrangements which bestow these paradisiac privileges upon all women. And in furthering this aim, they can count on the support of the matriarchist majority of women.