After 240 Years in the Background, Matriarchy is Due for a Comeback, Historian Says.

By JAMES M. CULLEN

Harvey Wasserman sees the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision as an attempt to stop the re-establishment of matriarchy in North America, but he doesn’t think it will work.

Wasserman is a historian, renewable energy advocate and author of “The People’s Spiral of US History,” recently reissued as a paperback. For 20,000 years before Europeans set foot in what would become known as America, he said in a recent interview, “Women were in control of indigenous society as they were matriarchies, and the idea of banning abortion was ridiculous; the women ran the show and they controlled their own pregnancies with remedies and if they had a pregnancy they wanted to get rid of, they did it, and there was no interference from the men.”

The Iroquois Confederacy, in what is now upstate New York, “was run by women and they were the most democratic society in world history and the idea that they would ban abortion … is too ridiculous.”

Some of the founders of the United States were respectful of the Iroquois Confederacy, and very curious — the most important being Benjamin Franklin, who knew a lot about the Indian society, and he deeply respected it, Wasserman said, “When he convened a meeting in the 1750s to form a union of the colonies, he requested an Iroquois chieftain to preside.” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison also knew the Indian society was very sophisticated and advanced.

Among the Iroquois, men were chiefs, but the women selected them and could remove them, Wasserman said. “There’s a great quote in a documentary film about the Iroquois and they asked an Iroquois woman why, if the women run the tribes, the man were the chiefs and she responded, well it gives them something to do and it makes them feel important.

“The women raised the children and they ran the house and they ran the garden, and that was the core of the indigenous society. The children also were counted to the line of the mother and in most systems of Iroquois societies, the uncles, the brothers of the women were the principal male figures, not the father.

In North America, most of the tribes were matriarchies, especially in the East, among the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole.

But when it came to the Constitutional Convention, there was no role for women. “Franklin would have supported woman’s right to vote. but I don’t believe it was discussed at the Constitutional Convention. There was no official transcript of the convention, which was discussed in secret. Madison took notes but there’s no mention of a discussion of women being given equal rights at the convention.”

After 240 years of rich white men being in charge in the United States, he said, it’s time to give women a shot at running things. “In all the world, of all the chaos and all the cultural and political upheaval, the most important transition that we’re involved in as a species is the reversion of control of society to women as opposed to men, Wasserman said. “You’re seeing it happen. We almost had a female president. [Hillary Clinton] in fact won the vote count, and would have won the presidency except for the Electoral College in 2016. We now, of course, have a female vice president, who could become president immediately, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

He added, “We now have way more college students who are women than men — 60%. And the law schools are evenly divided, of which I am well aware, because my wife is a lawyer, so the transition is well underway, and this is one of the things the men are resisting, and that’s really one of the real issues of Roe v. Wade — that men are demanding control of women’s bodies, and essentially they view women like in the old Puritan culture, where they consider women really to be cattle. How do you refer to a woman who does not have control of her reproductive rights? Basically they’re viewed as breeding stock by the right wing in this country, and that’s the reality we’re facing and that’s how you get state governments claiming they can prevent women from having an abortion.”

Wasserman also disputed the claims the Right Wing Court embraced that the Founders intended to give individuals the right to own and carry guns and, if necessary, overthrow the government. The Founders didn’t believe any such thing. “It was all white men [at the Constitutional Convention] — but there were no farmers there, there were plantation owners, and there were no working people. It was rich white men who wrote the Constitution. And far from being divinely inspired, it was basically an economic document designed to protect the rich white men from further rebellion. There had just been a rebellion in Massachusetts called Shay’s Rebellion against taxation by the state of Massachusetts, and these farmers in western Massachusetts, where I lived for many years, took up arms and fought the state of Massachusetts, and this freaked out the ruling elite around the country, and that’s why they got together, so they could have a federal army and a strong president and the right to tax by the federal government. And it was not divinely inspired, it was inspired by greed.”

The Second Amendment was written by James Madison with great care, Wasserman noted. “If he saw a kid walking into a gun shop using the Second Amendment as an excuse to buy an automatic weapon, he would be beyond rage. The Second Amendment is very clear. It says, ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’”

But that only applied to members of a militia — and militias were established to do two things, to catch runaway slaves and to fight Indians. “Madison said we have militias, and if you belong to one — and they need to be well regulated — and if you can show that your owning a weapon serves the security of a free state, then you can have a gun. If you don’t belong to a militia, and if you can’t show that your owning a gun contributes to the security of the free state, then you don’t have right to a gun. And it was unacceptable to the society in 1789 or 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, if you walked around with a gun you were frowned upon. It was not part of the society to walk around armed just for the heck of it.”

Wasserman added, “I guarantee you 100%, James Madison in no way shape or form would endorse our current situation with the so-called right to keep and bear arms. He’d be horrified. Every one of the Founders would be horrified to see what has happened with gun ownership in this country. … It’s absolutely insane that people are walking around with concealed weapons, using the words of James Madison as their rationale. It’s completely counter to everything those guys believed in.

“These people [in the right-wing majority] claim to be so-called strict constructionists. It’s absolutely ridiculous these interpretations being thrown on the Founders. Those people weren’t stupid.

“These six so-called conservatives are anything but. They’re basically fascists, favoring corporate control of the state. These horrifying fascist judges — I won’t call them justices because there’s nothing ‘just’ about anything they do. They are the servants of the corporations against the wellbeing of the public. This is beyond appalling. It’s suicidal and has nothing to do with the law.”

And don’t get him started on the right wingers who ruled the Environmental Protection Agency had no authority to regulate the environment. “The indigenous did everything to protect the natural ecology. They understood if you destroyed your only home you’d perish. … This Supreme Court doesn’t have the integrity, or the understanding to know the purpose of the community as a whole is to protect our natural environment. And if they’re saying we don’t have the right to do that, they’re clinically insane, and every legal or nonviolent means needs to be found to circumvent their lunacy.”

He’s not happy with the leadership of the Democratic Party, which he says “has to be taken over by a progressive young movement. The biggest political problem we have in this country today is the Democratic Party is an obsolete gerontocracy that has no apparent understanding or ability to run grassroots campaigns. The Democratic leadership needs to be overthrown and replaced by progressives,” whose proposals for Medicare for All, getting rid of poverty, homelessness and hunger, providing free education through the community college level for everyone, saving the environment, switching from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energy and protecting women’s control over their bodies are popular.

But Progressives and Democrats are up against a Supreme Court that is backing up a fascist Republican movement that hates democracy. And we don’t have much time.

“Mother Earth has limited tolerance for this kind of lunacy and we’re at the brink of so thoroughly pissing her off that she’s probably going to get rid of us pretty soon, so we need to work fast,” he said.

See Ed Rampell’s review of “The People’s Spiral of US History” in the 7/1-15/22 TPP and find it at solartopia.org/. if your favorite bookstore doesn’t carry it.

James M. Cullen is editor of The Progressive Populist.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2022

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