ABSTRACT
The patriarchy's triumph may even render the true and proper father invisible. He finds himself with the task of silently constructing the possibility of becoming the kind of personal presence that social conventions and collective codes refuse to allow him to be. A mother can become a matriarch in more harmonious ways, without losing herself in institutions, by as well remaining a mother, without altering her personal relationship with her children. The matriarchal hypothesis is not necessarily equivalent to a feminist point of view, and women stand on both fronts. Hypotheses concerned with a primeval matriarchy turn their attention to epochs which long predate writing. The great matriarchy would find its site in the era of the passage from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic age: in the era to which Gordon Childe and Hermann Muller-Karpe refer as having fostered the greatest and most thorough revolutions which human history has ever known.
