Matriarchal Societies

Heide Goettner-Abendroth is a German philosopher and researcher of culture and society who is focused on matriarchal studies. She taught at the University of Munich and was visiting professor at the University of Montreal, Canada and the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She organized and guided two World Congresses on Matriarchal Studies in 2003 and 2005. She was nominated as one of the «1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize» in 2005.

«For decades, Heide Goettner-Abendroth has been a serious scholar of the deep history and ongoing traditions of matriarchy in Europe. Her extensive research has taken her through strong historical matriarchies on several continents, drawing together the research of the most modern international scholars on matriarchy. Her book now brings to undeniable light the matriarchal alternatives available to humanity. Goettner-Abendroth should be on the reading list of every women's studies program.» (Barbara Alice Mann, Ohio Bear Clan Seneca, Assistant Professor in the Honors College of the University of Toledo, and Co-Director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio)
«If in the millenium of women, future generations look back to find the origin of their peaceful societies, they will find that the work of Heide Goettner-Abendroth opened the way. Modern matriarchal studies break through patriarchal capitalist ideology and provide the new/old models for viable ways of life of which our present globalizing market is only a destructive abberation.» (Genevieve Vaughan, Author of 'For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange' and 'Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview Is Possible', and 'Founder of International Feminists for a Gift Economy')
«With the publication of this important book, Heide Goettner-Abendroth's brilliant critical conceptualization of the deep structures shared by matriarchal societies around the world becomes fully available in English. Her theory has developed, not abstractly but inductively, from the analytical investigation of numerous societies by non-indigenous and indigenous researchers. It provides the basis for a full-fledged interdisciplinary and cross-cultural field of matriarchal studies where previously only isolated studies were possible. Matriarchal studies is a deeply political and liberatory field grounded in an understanding that the destructive patriarchal power structures pervasive today are a historically recent