Johann Jakob Bachofen

The Swiss Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815?1887), is most often connected with his theory of matriarchy, or Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. This presented a radically new view of the role of women in a broad range of ancient societies. Bachofen assembled documentation meant to demonstrate that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum and he drew upon Lycia, Crete, Greece, Egypt, India, Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. He concluded the work by connecting archaic mother right with the Christian veneration of the Virgin Mary. Bachofen's conclusions about archaic matriarchy still echo today.

There was little initial reaction to Bachofen?s theory of cultural evolution, largely because of his impenetrable literary style, but eventually, as well as furious criticism, the book incited several generations of ethnologists, social philosophers, and even writers: Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, who drew on Bachofen for Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Thomas Mann, Jane Ellen Harrison, who was inspired by Bachofen to devote her career to mythology, Erich Fromm Robert Graves, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Joseph Campbell.

Friedrich Engels analysed Bachofen's views as follows:

"(1) That originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term "hetaerism";

(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity;

(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen's conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);

(4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period." (Friedrich Engels, 1891: see link below)

Though Bachofen applied evolutionary theories to the development of culture in a manner that is no longer considered valid, and though modern archaeology and literary analysis have invalidated many details of his historical conclusions, the origins of all modern studies of the role of women in classical antiquity begin with Bachofen, extending him, correcting him, denying his conclusions.

A selection of Bachofen's writings was translated as Myth, Religion and Mother Right (1967). A fuller edited English edition in several volumes is being published.