In any case, another term – ‘gynarchy’, or ‘gynaecocracy’ – describes the political rule of women. The word ‘matriarchy’ means something rather different. There is a certain logic here: ‘patriarchy’, after all, refers not primarily to the fact that men wield public office, but first and foremost to the authority of patriarchs, that is, male heads of household – an authority which then acts as a symbolic model for, and economic basis of, male power in other fields of social life. Matriarchy might refer to an equivalent situation, in which the role of mothers in the household similarly becomes a
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