Other recent scholars have painted a happier face on Neolithic farming cultures, but agree that the arrival of patriarchy brought misery to women. Harvard anthropologist Marija Gimbutas claimed to find this better world on the Steppes of “Old Europe” (pre-3000 B.C.). Author of The Goddessess and Gods of Old Europe, she sees in the archaeological record a “matristic” society of farmers combining matrilineal, matrifocal, matricentric and egalitarian qualities, where the sexes were balanced and complementary; where there were no hierarchies. These communities prized figurines featuring pregnant women, which the Harvard don saw as representing a sacred cosmology within a mother-kinship social structure.

Alas, according to Gimbutas, this nearly Edenic existence was undone by the Kurgans. Over 2500 years, three waves of these strange invaders violently introduced a new value system. Their patriarchal, hierarchal social structure featured bronze metallurgy, weapons, warfare, horse riding, and elite burials often involving human and animal sacrifices. The Kurgans also celebrated bride stealing, cattle rustling, and heroism in combat and they worshipped sky gods and male warrior gods. These patriarchal peoples were organized for “predatory expansion,” [12] which they proceeded to do, accidentally creating Western civilization in the process. As with Engels, though, the presumed existence of a non-patriarchal “golden age” in the pre-Kurgan era suggested that some form of matriarchy might be possible in the future.

And yet, another batch of feminist scholars are reluctantly concluding that there will be no shining future free of the patriarchs. Rather, the wily and clever foe has taken on still another form, intent on continuing the suppression of women. They call the new strategy “public patriarchy.”

Sylvia Walby lays out the way in which “progressive reforms have been met with patriarchal counterattack.” Specifically, feminist-inspired laws that opened education, jobs, and professions to women combined with welfare benefits such as public daycare and nationalized health care to produce a curious result:

While [women] lose their own individual patriarch, they do not lose their subordination to other patriarchal structures and practices. Indeed, they become ever more exposed to certain of the more diffused sets of patriarchal practices.