There are 6 matrilineal societies today (although there has never been a female led dominance hierarchy, which is technically what a matriarchy would be). Matrilineal cultures believe in balance between the sexes, not female domination. And, we also have hundreds of thousands of years of much more egalitarian cultures before patriarchy ever took hold. There was no need for men to defend their homes because nobody was attacking - for hundreds of thousands of years. And when they did start attacking each other, female soldiers often played a part in that. The shieldmaidens of the Vikings, the onna-musha female samurai, the wide variety of female soldiers in Africa, etc.
The Smithsonian says the first war was about 10k years ago in Kenya, and even that was actually a fairly small scale massacre of 23 people. Large scale, organized raiding of other settlements and cities only became common around 5 or 6 thousand years ago.
Read this for more on that:
“From about 100,000 BC until 10,000 BC, the world population stayed fairly close to 1 million people. In 10,000 BC, the population of Europe was only about 482,000 people — around the same as that of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
It is only as population density increases and food or other resources begin to become scarce, that there is any particular reason to kill others beyond occasional skirmishes or limited interpersonal violence. Mobile foragers don’t need to acquire belongings. They don’t want or need additional land if theirs is providing well for them. In addition, we see overwhelming evidence of the cultivation of mutually beneficial relationships.”
These guys don't know what they're talking about. They've generalized really recent social dynamics to all of human history and that's just demonstrably wrong — in what is essentially a half-baked bid to justify patriarchy. In addition, a lot of AmerInd cultures (and others around the world) that seem to be male dominated actually aren't. Most Native American tribes were/are matrilineal and women had a huge amount of social power and say about their own lives and about the life of the tribe. I'm hoping to write something about that sometime soon.
This may be more than you want to read, but here are some other stories that support what I’ve said:
Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself.
The Akan people of Ghana have a social organization that is fundamentally built around the matriclan, which determines lineage, inheritance, and position in the group. “All matriclan founders are female, but men traditionally hold leadership positions within the society. These inherited roles, however, are passed down matrilineally — meaning through a man’s mothers and sisters (and their children).”
Many indigenous cultures have this sort of power balance as an intrinsic aspect of their societies. Men may hold political power, but only with the support and consent of women. Land is nearly always held and passed down through the female line. Clan mothers or other female elders may wield as much power as a chief, albeit a slightly different kind of power.
The Iroquois clan mother is responsible for the welfare of the clan. She names all the people of the clan and holds a position in nominating the next Chief, where then the members of the clan have the final say whether the nominee is suitable for the position. They are considered the life givers. The clan mother’s position is hereditary; her title rests within the clan and is usually passed on to her female relatives, looking first at her eldest sisters, other sisters, then her eldest daughter and other daughters.
For the Mosuo of China, it’s typical for women to handle business decisions and men to handle politics. Children are raised in the mother’s household and take her name. There’s functionally no such thing as marriage or even fatherhood, although men living in their mother’s houses help to raise the children of their sisters and cousins and are much more involved in their day-to-day care than is typical in the West.
“Mosuo men are feminists by any standards,” says (author Choo) Waihong. “Boys think nothing of looking after their baby sisters, or taking their toddler brothers by the hand everywhere. I was once made to wait before talking business with an elderly Mosuo man until he had bathed his family’s twin baby girls and changed their nappies.”
The settlement was on a wide and open plain on either side of a river, with no defensive properties and although they were the first to smelt ore to make lead, no thrusting weapons have been found. In other words, this large settlement existed for over two thousand years without defensive capabilities or weapons that could have been used to fight off invaders. This would hardly have been possible if warfare were a common part of life in that part of the world at that time.
