The Matriarchal Moment: Feminist Theory and Conceptual History across the Indian Ocean

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the concept of matriarchy drew heightened attention around the world. From anthropologists in Germany to socialist thinkers in China and Japan, from feminists in America to colonial officials in India, people from diverse social and intellectual backgrounds contributed to the imagination of a pre-patriarchal stage where society was governed by women and inherited through the female line. The concept of matriarchy thus became a juncture point from where nationalist histories, colonial legislations, and radical visions of human society all derive inspiration. My paper approaches this global intellectual history of matriarchy by focusing on the connection between the different receptions of the concept in two hitherto under-studied spaces during this period: Dutch colonial courts and schools in rural Sumatra and the Arabic intellectual world in Egypt. I select these two cases because they illustrate how tracing the circulation of a Dutch official’s writings among litigants, students, writers, and journalists in these two places allows us to see the different social and intellectual projects behind the varied interpretations of matriarchy from historical, ethnographical, and legal perspectives. My paper will further show that these projects were in conversation but not wholly align with the more familiar debates around matriarchy in Euro-America. Except for the works of a specialized group of feminist scholars, current literature largely treats this ‘matriarchal moment’ as an intellectual detour that only contributes to feminist theory and not so much to the historical study of human societies. This paper challenges this dichotomy between theory and history by demonstrating that the debate around a matriarchal stage of the deep past was intimately tied to issues of feminist thought, nation-building, and legal reform between Sumatra and Egypt at the turn of the century.