Where are the matriarchs
Part one of a three-part essay on silent, well-behaved matriarchs--who they are, why they are silent today, and how to begin to find them.
Thank you for reading this. You are one of a handful of people who have decided to take a risk on yet another Substack. If I believed what you are about to read was duplicative of what you’ll find elsewhere, I would not be writing it. I would prefer not to, actually, for reasons that are private to me. But in my years of searching for voices like mine, I have not found them and so it befalls me to fill the void.
Who am I? I am a matriarch. This is a term that is new to me. As I wrote in my introductory post, I have borrowed the term from Louise Perry, the creator of the Maiden Mother Matriarch Substack and podcast. When I first heard the term I wasn’t fond of it immediately. But in listening to Louise’s soothing voice and taking time to ponder her thoughtful words, I have decided to embrace the term.
Like a butterfly having progressed from larva to chrysalis to adult, Maiden Mother Matriarch, as I have come to think of it, refers to phases that women are invited to go through, aligning with their unique biology. Males cannot become mothers and as such have a potentially different path to follow. Many women are unable to make the step from maiden to mother, for a variety of reasons, including their own choices. But if history is our guide, more than half of all women who live to adulthood have at least one pregnancy—this is also not true of men, fewer than half of whom across human history have left offspring. The factors that determine which women will cross that Rubicon into motherhood are many, they are shifting, and they are currently in flux in Western society. But having once transformed to the mother stage, do all of those women at least earn the title matriarch?
I have not read everything Perry has written about her model for the path of womanhood. Perhaps she defines this differently and because it is her model I will certainly defer to her should she yet do so. But from my vantage point, I have my own definition of what it means to ascend—and yes, I mean ascend—to matriarch.
What a matriarch is
A matriarch is a woman who mothers seek advice from, take counsel from, and aspire to become like in turn.
That is my simple definition. Note that I do not require that a woman have been a mother to be a matriarch, which is perhaps the most direct deviation from the Maiden Mother Matriarch model as I understand it. But also note that it is implied that a mother would logically seek the most counsel from a women whose advice to a mother is genuinely useful. This suggests that a woman who is merely opinionated, wise in worldly ways, or possessed of a forceful personality does not necessarily qualify. They must have advice to give that will stand the test of living it.
By extension, though mother is a biological category—your womb has carried a child or is has not—the mother referred to in this model should be one that a maiden would seek advice from, take counsel from, and aspire to be like in turn. Regardless of their actual biological status as mother.
I see social media today full of mothers that qualify. Especially if you are willing to look past those who are mere influencers, women who use their motherhood as a way to get attention, draw an audience, show themselves as tradwives, nature-philic post-hippies, or whatever is currently popular in female influencer circles. Beyond these illusory models, there are many good women, mothers, who share what they are learning from enduring their pregnancies, nursing their infants, raising their toddlers, building up their pre-adolescents, and preparing their young teens.
It is a sad observation on my part that many maidens do not seem to be listening to what these women are saying. Or for those that are, at least in social media discourse, they often tune in to mothers to proudly reject the domesticity, sniff for the whiff of housewife servitude, or bemoan the loss of a woman’s “true value” as a free and independent being, whose body has not been distressed by birthing a child and whose daily life is unencumbered.
The truth is likely more encouraging than this, at least off of social media. If what I say here about silent matriarchs is true, I can hope that something similar is at work for the mothers who are modeling for today’s maidens how to become tomorrow’s mothers.
The truth about matriarch silence
It is my belief that matriarchs abound; they are just silent. They are not silent because they have been silenced, no one is in control of their words, hindering their influence. They are silent because it is not in the nature of matriarchs to seek attention for its own sake.
This may not be true for the next generation of matriarchs, raised as they were in a hyper-social media environment. But for now, for the generation of matriarchs that are toiling away in relative obscurity, it is true. And it is good.
Ironically, one of my favorite matriarchs, of the generation that went before me, is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, originator of the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Ulrich, a Pulitzer-prize winning author of historical books analyzing women’s history, is herself a matriarch. But not because people believe the phrase she coined was a clarion call to women to step out of line and be poorly behaved. She originally wrote the phrase to describe how little attention is paid to women in historical analysis, even as their lives yield so much worth reading about if we only took the time to be taught by them.
Today, if a woman is familiar with Ulrich’s famous quote, she hears it as a call to defy convention and be a nonstandard woman. The result is that they continue to follow the pattern she was bemoaning and ignoring the actual matriarch before them, Ulrich herself. An engaged Christian and thoroughly participatory member of her faith tradition (Mormon), Ulrich has never contented herself with simply egging independent women on. In fact, my favorite book of hers is the one that preceded A Midwife’s Tale, called Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. It was in this book that I found in her a true matriarch. In her analysis of the women of New England from the pre-Revolutionary War period, from the Indian wars through witch hunts and religious reform of the post-Puritan era, Ulrich describes women in full. Not as handy models for proto-feminism, but as women who thoroughly enjoyed their lives, played meaningful roles in their families and communities, and were equal part community enforcers and ideological rebels over the span of one hundred years.
If I had known to call her a matriarch when I first read Good Wives, I would have. I did not because I did not know I needed to look for matriarchs, catalog them, ensure their robust influence in my family’s life. This lack of interest I take full responsibility for. It was a poverty within me that I did not recognize and which I now repent of.
Fortunately for me, I did not suffer too much for this lacuna. Because, in fact, without me actively seeking out matriarchs, I was surrounded by them. The silent women who had progressed beyond motherhood and who were guiding me at every turn did so without putting on a title, desiring a pulpit, or asking for accolades. They merely performed their duty.
By doing so, behaving well, these silent matriarchs were not making history if that term means merely to be visible, to be sufficiently deviant from the norm to be noted in a history book; they were literally building the lives, families, and communities that become actual history.
Well-behaved matriarchs are the women who did not make it into the history books, they are the women who made history possible.
They made me possible. They buffered my family; gave me strength; extended wisdom when needed; and rescued me from ignorance, pettiness, and doubt. This they did without fanfare, without sponsors, and for the sake of doing it. But they did so from within social structures that are fading. From within the bonds of extended families, from deep inside church congregations, and as keepers of their neighborhoods. Their presence, though constant, was among the first things to wane when the social connections we once formed through foundational though often informal community ties were replaced by parasocial “relationships” with television personalities. Where there were once warm bodies there to lift you when your shoulders sagged, there is now the blue glow of an iPhone screen, encouraging you to use a meditation app or listen to a podcast.
I am not a Luddite nor a traditionalist; I do not wish to return to a supposedly golden era. I am a realist in this regard. But I am also a realist in this specific way: The matriarchs that women like me relied on to get to where I am—a grandmother of several beautiful, busy grandchildren—are fading away. Many, many mothers need them and cannot find them, often unaware that seeking advice from their peer mothers, though useful, cannot convey the wisdom of the generations that came before them.
That’s why I have created this Substack. There are better matriarchs out there than me. But because I can’t find them, I fear these mothers cannot either, so I will attempt to offer the support of a matriarch in concept, in hopes that I will stimulate other matriarchs closer to you to invite themselves to take the role that nature equipped them for. And in hopes that you will ask the matriarchs around you to fill this gap. Ask them for their advice, take their counsel, and aspire to be like them in turn.