An American Matriarchy
An Essay by Jennifer E. Morel, S.T.D.
Most of us probably consider the United States a patriarchy. Women were not given the right to vote until 1920 – almost a century and a half after the founding fathers in 1775 declared their opposition to “taxation without representation.” Married women had only begun to gain property rights slightly earlier, around the mid-19th century, state by state. With overwhelming political control and decision-making power belonging to men, it would seem almost rash to argue that our American culture is anything but a patriarchy. However, as I began a series of interviews on masculinity and femininity in various cultures in 2019-2020, I encountered early on in the Crow and Blackfeet Native American Nations, matrilineal and matriarchal cultures within the United States. Then, when I began to speak with Cajuns and Creoles, asking about the personal experiences of Acadiana women and men, it became even clearer that a patriarchal model did not govern all of America.
Dr. Barry Ancelet, the pre-eminent scholar of Cajun and Creole folklore, ruminated, “Most of the women I know are tough and strong and smart and doers...Now, does that mean that we had a sort of matriarchal society?” While Dr. Ancelet is cautious in answering his own question, the very act of raising it, considering the popular picture of the United States, should give us pause. Is Acadiana a matriarchy? If so, how would we know that? And what would the consequences of such a reality be?
Our first instinct might be to conceive of a matriarchy as an inverted patriarchy, a society in which women exercise overwhelming political control and decision-making power; clearly, looking at the political picture in Acadiana, we are not a matriarchy in this sense. As the National Conference of State Legislatures shows, only 18% of Louisiana legislators are women. Yet the anthropologists and sociologists who study matriarchal societies will tell us that political control is not the litmus test of a matriarchy. The values which distinguish a matriarchy are found elsewhere.
To better understand, we can think of the last Creole or Cajun social gathering we went to. As Mrs. Kristi Guillory Munzing, Cajun folklorist and musician, reminisced,
[A]ll the old ladies would…be speaking…in the kitchen; cooking, doing stuff…And they’d all just be talking about their family, because that's generally what all ladies would talk about is gossip, and about the family, and who's in town…The men were outside, probably smoking cigarettes, drinking some beer, talking. They were generally talking about the weather, oilfield, maybe some politics, maybe a little bit of that.
So, in our gatherings, typically, the men gravitate to the other men, and they discuss politics and business. The women gather with the other women, and they discuss husbands and babies. Perhaps, then, social realities are not determined by political control of one sex or another, but by whether the values most espoused and incarnated in the society are more masculine or feminine values.
A patriarchy, from the Greek “the rule of the father,” seems to espouse values more apparently important to men: politics, efficiency in business, hierarchical organization. Arguably a matriarchy, then, “the rule of the mother,” would incarnate those values which seem more important to women: family, relationships, and collaboration.
Hence, academics will tell us that these feminine values – the importance given to family, women’s property rights and an economy of gift or mutual support, and the transmission of the culture, all with women taking a leading role – are those which distinguish a matriarchy.
Reflecting on our own experience, we can ask if Acadiana lives out these values and if so how.
Does Acadiana value family? Do women take a leading role in the family? Overwhelmingly, Creoles and Cajuns answer “yes.” As Dr. Marcia Gaudet, founding director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center and professor emerita of English, noted,
that sort of commitment to family bonds is so strong, and I think it is sort of a gift…And it's not that you don't value the individual, or you don't value yourself…But the acknowledgement of how strong that tie is to family and what your connection with the family adds to the group. And…that no matter what decision you make, you're always making it in terms of the group or the family.
The family is not just present in decisions, but the physical proximity of a family is also highly valued. One matriarchal expert noted, “everyone in a matriarchal village or neighborhood of a town is related to everyone else by birth or by marriage.” And this familial sense pervades Cajun and Creole culture. The importance of being related, of understanding how one is related, and knowing exactly “Who’s your mama?” permeate most first encounters in Acadiana.
As I shared with Dr. Gaudet as we reflected on the cultural bonds between Cajuns during our interview, there is a difference that comes from this relatedness in Acadiana: “You walk into the classroom and…already you understand the people and the people understand you. And all you have to do is say like, ‘My mom is from Mamou, and if you know where that is, she's from L’Anse Meg -and my daddy is from Opelousas.’ And obviously, you're fifth cousins with everybody in the place, third cousins with somebody.”
Moreover, it is clear that Acadiana prizes not just the family but especially the central role of the mother in the family. Mrs. Rebecca Jones, a Creole and member of the St. Augustine Historical Society, laughed, “Our family ties are so big, and we women help keep these ties together.” Fr. Michael Champagne, a Cajun priest, ruminated, “A Cajun queen, that CCR, ‘Rollin with some Cajun queen.’ She's a queen, and she has a lot of stroke and everything else, but when she's no longer there, then it'll come unraveled.” He recounted how men after retirement, in the nursing home, and then, in dying, need the strength and support of their women to help them continue, to facilitate these changes and transitions. For example, “in nursing homes,…the men have already ‘died’ but how the woman is able to give that man strength is very important. I see that whole thing with, ‘Let us make a suitable helpmate,’ so God present, helping man.”
Finally, the values of family and kinship are not just important to women, but also to men. Cajun and Creole men espouse these same feminine values, but without being feminized by them. Dr. Barry Ancelet, together with Jay Edwards and Glen Pitre, writes: “the Cajun father interacts intensively with his wife and children. Typically, he shows great compassion for children of all ages.” The father’s job, they continue, is that of a gentle but firm disciplinarian who allows the family to return to the joie de vivre of the family get-together. Contrary to the male domination that is often envisioned in a patriarchy, in those moments in which it might seem that women are less valued – such as fixing a man’s plate or eating after him – Mrs. Guillory Munzing argued that it might actually be part of the way that women exercise leadership in the family. These acts of service allow women to demonstrate their love for their husbands and to continue to lead in a discrete, rather than dominating, manner. In this way, both sexes maintain their dignity and mutual affection.
If Acadiana is clearly a matriarchy in its espousal of the maternal value of family, is this also the case in its understanding and application of property rights? In a matriarchy, property is usually handed down matrilineally, through the female line, and the economic structure focuses on the feminine values of gift and collaboration between family members, not competition. In Acadiana, although property was not handed down through the female line, neither was it reserved exclusively to males. Cajuns continued the transmission of property as they had done traditionally – to both sexes. Typically, the father divided his property equally between all of his children, which assured property rights both to men and to women. This kept families close together – meaning, again, that almost everyone in a small town or area was related. Moreover, as noted before, until the mid-19th century, most married women in the United States did not have property rights; all that they had was subsumed under the legal person of their husband. However, in a legal marriage in Louisiana, the husband and wife were considered to possess a community of goods, allowing women ownership and inheritance rights. Married women were also able to maintain and administer separate property.
And, as occurs in matriarchies, the economy is one of mutual aid. Instead of a laissez-faire economic structure, where each person is called to self-reliance and competition is foremost, goods and aid circle as gifts between families. Creoles and Cajuns have traditionally worked together to make sure that each person had what they needed. For example, in a boucherie, they aid one another in the killing, preparation, and storing of meat – sharing it out to all those who participate. And, as Dr. Ancelet noted, “If somebody around here got sick and couldn't pick their crop, the neighbors would all go and pick it, because they knew that if they got sick, he would go. Somebody's roof blew off, everybody goes, it's called the coup de main. Everybody would show up and pick and fix his roof because they knew that if their roof blew off, they would need to count on everybody.” Women, men, and children worked together for all of these events. Or as Fr. Champagne recounted,
I remember as a kid my dad broke his leg. He jumped off the truck, he was sweeping a bean truck and his foot slipped in a bracket on the back of the truck and his leg went over. So he had bones popping out and he had crushed his leg all up and he was in a cast for nine months…And then I remember the neighbors,…they were all bean farmers around, stopped what they're doing and they sent their combines and cut all my dad’s beans. Brought it to the scales for him, you see. And there was a lot of that. If we finished early, we would go help them cut. There was no paying for the gas or something. You just did that. Everybody did that before the rains would start.
Hence, in the economy of a matriarchal society, what belongs to one member of the family – time, gas, combine harvesters – automatically is gifted to another in times of need or desire. Mrs. Jones summed it up by saying, “with the Creole culture,…even though every family has their issues…If they called us right now in the middle of this interview we'd be like, I'm sorry but we got to go, you know. That's just how our culture is.”
Last but not least, we ask, do women take a leading role in the transmission of culture in Acadiana? As Dr. Gaudet noted, reflecting on her own family, “women are much more, not only aware of their ancestry, but they’re also much more aware of their identity as part of a culture and…whatever ethnic identity they’ve taken on.” Keeping this in mind, it is important to know that originally, the Acadians who immigrated to Louisiana were not the majority of the population. Spanish, Germans, Native Americans, Africans who had been brought as slaves, as well as Anglo Americans, all lived in Louisiana. Yet the Acadian mothers, strongly aware of their cultural identity, were transmitting Acadian culture not only to their children, but also to their neighbors, welcoming one and all, offering a cup of coffee and their culture to each passerby. As Barry Jean Ancelet, Jay Edwards, and Glen Pitre write in Cajun Country: “Considering the tiny size of the original Acadian population…and the enormous number of outsiders who have been assimilated into the Acadian way of life, the ability of the Acadian woman and mother to maintain and preserve the culture must be considered nothing short of miraculous.”
As leaders aware of their culture and actively transmitting that culture within their families and neighborhoods, women also work within the Church and the cities to preserve those Creole and Cajun traditions. In fact, until the foundation of the Knights of Columbus, lay men did not even enter the churches, as Msgr. Teurlings humorously illuminates in his One Mile an Hour. Dr. Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate, similarly recounted, “Men often went up to the church, but didn't go in church. My father often took us to church and went to the pool hall….And that wasn't unusual at all, and lots of times in Creole communities the men went with their wives to church, but they often stayed on the grounds and negotiated business with the Cajun landowners…in the communities that they lived in.” It was the women who set up the home altars, taught their children their prayers, and initiated them into the Mass – continuing the faith that had characterized Cajuns and Creoles for the last four centuries. Hence, as in other matriarchies, women in Acadiana lead in transmitting their tradition and culture, in the home and outside of it.
We began our discussion of a matriarchy by pointing out that the feminine values of a matriarchy, “the rule of the mother,” are not incarnated in female political control, but in the importance given to family, to female property rights and to gift and collaboration in the economy, and to the transmission of the culture, all with women taking a leading role. Acadiana, in Cajun and Creole families, does seem to be such a matriarchy. What then are the consequences for such an affirmation?
Above all, Acadians should recognize and be proud of this contribution to American society as a whole. While the Crow and Blackfeet Native American Nations are also characterized by the rule of the mother, both the majority of the United States and Mexico are strongly marked by masculine values. In an age that is more concerned with female participation in all areas of life, the feminine values characterizing life in Acadiana deserve to be more loudly proclaimed in the North American context, balancing out and complementing the prevalent masculine virtues. As Acadians, we should be proud of our American matriarchy, in which both women and men proclaim the beauty of family, gift, and culture.
Jennifer E. Morel is a former professor of moral theology at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Her studies of gender and culture have led her around the world and in particular into the heart of Cajun and Creole life.
