The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Updated With a New Epilogue)

by Riane Eisler

Feminist philosophers and activists

Wilma Scott Heide, Helen Caldicott, Betty Friedan, Alva Myrdal, Elise Boulding, Fran Hosken, Hilkka Pietila, Charlene Spretnak, Celina Garcia, Gloria Steinem, Dame Nita Barrow, Patricia Ellsberg, Patricia Mische, Barbara Deming, Mara Keller, Bella Abzug, Pam McAllister, Allie Hixson, and Elizabeth Dodson-Gray.

feminist artists, writers, theologians, and scientists

Jessie Bernard, Carol Christ, Abida Khanum, Susan Griffin, Karen Sacks, Judith Plaskow, June Brindel, Gita Sen, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Dale Spender, Nawal El Saadawi, Jean O’Barr, Betty Reardon, Starhawk, Paula Gunn Allen, Carol Gilligan, Charlotte Bunche, Judy Chicago, Mayumi Oda, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Georgia O’Keeffe, Peggy Sanday, Holly Near, Ursula Le Guin, E. M. Broner, Marge Piercy, Ellen Marie Chen, Alix Kates Shulman

Now even nature seems to be rebelling against androcracy: in soil erosion, resource depletion, acid rain, and environmental pollution. But this rebellion of nature is not, as is sometimes argued, a rebellion against technology. Rather, it is a rebellion against the exploitive and destructive uses to which technology is put in a dominator society, in which men must keep conquering—be it nature, women, or other men.

The problem begins with the fact that the information gathered by most experts chronically leaves out women. Thus, most policymakers work with only half a data base.

The first obstacle is that the models of reality required to maintain male dominance require that all matters relating to no less than half of humanity be ignored or trivialized. This monumental exclusion of data is an omission of such magnitude that, in any other context, scientists would immediately pounce upon it as a fatal methodological flaw. But even when this first obstacle is somehow overcome and policymakers are provided with complete and unbiased data, a second and even more fundamental obstacle remains. This is that the first policy priority in a male-dominated system has to be the preservation of male dominance.

An important lesson to be learned from the rise of modern totalitarianism is that it can be a fatal error to underestimate the power of myth.

The human psyche seems to have a built-in need for a system of stories and symbols that “reveal” to us the order of the universe and tell us what our place within it is.

As many scientists have pointed out, evolution is not predetermined.

power as affiliation. This theme has been explored by Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Elizabeth Janeway, Berit Aas, Peggy Antrobus, Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Tatyana Mamonova, Kathleen Barry, Devaki Jain, Caroline Bird, Birgit Brock-Utne, Diana Russell, Perdita Huston, Andrea Dworkin, and Adrienne Rich,

a new consciousness in which competition will be balanced with cooperation and individualism will be balanced with love.

But what is most remarkable is that what many futurists are actually saying—practically in so many words—is that we must leave behind the hard, conquest-oriented values traditionally associated with “masculinity.” For is not the need for a “spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free partnership,” “a balancing of individualism with love,” and the normative goal of “harmony with rather than conquest of nature,” the reassertion of a more “feminine ethos”? And to what end could “drastic changes in the norm stratum” or a “metamorphosis in basic cultural premises and all aspects of social institutions” relate if not to the replacement of a dominator with a partnership society?

For as many social commentators have observed, at the core of our Western complex of overconsumption and waste lies the fact that we are culturally obsessed with getting, buying, building—and wasting—things, as a substitute for the satisfactory emotional relationships that are denied us by the child-raising styles and the values of adults in the present system.

globally women are half the population, perform two thirds of the world’s work in terms of hours, earn one tenth as much as men earn, and own one hundredth the property that men own.

Just as one cannot sit in the corner of a round room, as we shift from a dominator to a partnership society, our old ways of thinking, feeling, and acting will gradually be transformed.

For me, one of the most evocative images of the transformation from androcracy to gylany is the caterpillar metamorphosed into the butterfly. It seems to me a particularly fitting image to express the vision of humanity soaring to the heights it can attain, as the butterfly is an ancient symbol of regeneration, an epiphany of the transformative powers attributed to the Goddess.

not for a utopia (which literally means “no place” in Greek), but for a pragmatopia, a realizable scenario for a partnership future.

whereas eutopia means "good place"

The most dramatic change as we move from a dominator to a partnership world will be that we, and our children and grandchildren, will again know what it means to live free of the fear of war.

as women gain more equality of social and economic opportunities—so that birthrates can come into better balance with our resources—the Malthusian “necessity” for famine, disease, and war will progressively lessen.

As research to be detailed in the second book of our report shows, these types of problems in large part derive from the high degree of interpersonal tension inherent in a male-dominated social organization and from dominator child-rearing styles heavily based on force. Thus, with the move to more equal and balanced relations between women and men and the reinforcement of gentler, more prohuman and caring behavior in children of both sexes, we may realistically expect fundamental psychic changes.

Instead we can expect that the nonmonetized “informal” economy—of household production and maintenance, parenting, volunteer community service, and all the cooperative activities that permit the now “over-rewarded competitive activities to appear successful”—will be appropriately valued and rewarded.74 This will provide the now-missing basis for an economic system in which caring for others is not just given lip service but is the most highly rewarded, and therefore most highly valued, human activity.

Only a world in which the quality rather than the quantity of human life is paramount can have such a goal.

For in this gylanic world, our drive for justice, equality, and freedom, our thirst for knowledge and spiritual illumination, and our yearning for love and beauty will at last be freed.