Johann Jakob Bachofen

Johann Jakob Bachofen before 1888.

Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845.

Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding ancient matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen asserted that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion.

Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century proposals of the ancient matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism.

Ancient Matriarchy

The ancient matriarchy is a discredited view that ancient human cultures were matriarchal. Some feminists claim that these ancient matriarchal cultures were taken over or defeated by aggressive patriarchal cultures and that evidence of the past matriarchy was systematically hidden by The Patriarchy.

Some proponents of ancient matriarchies have claimed that ancient human cultures did not understand the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. Modern research has completely debunked this. There are no known human cultures, today or in the past, that did not know of the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy.

The notion of the ancient matriarchy was invented by Johann Jakob Bachofen and then further developed by other 19th-century European men. The ancient matriarchy is a variant of the now-discredited notion of the noble savage, which is also widely considered to be racist.

The ancient matriarchy was popular among feminists from the 1970s to the 1990s. Most feminists today that have heard of it are aware that it is untrue, although they are often unaware of its origins.

Any society claimed to be matriarchal is some combination of matrifocal, matrilineal and matrilocal.

See Also

• Ancient matriarchy
• Matriarchy

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