These are, unless I am very mistaken, inspired by partnership principles, even if we don't always use explicit partnership vocabulary and don't often ask ourselves how they fit together. As an illustration, let me use the seven Unitarian Universalist principles. Her approach can help us recognize coherence and unity where otherwise a collection of items may appear to be randomly associated. That is the case today with Scandinavian countries, characterized by advanced partnership patterns of social organization and gender relations, unlike, say, the U.S., not to mention Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. In certain places at certain times, whole societies may incline mostly toward Partnership relations, at least in contrast with other societies where Dominator relationships are more prominent. At certain times, the Partnership model makes significant inroads in society and the Dominator model must retreat, but then its devotees may regroup and beat back the progress made by the Partnership model. The real world of human relations over the last four millennia is one in which the Dominator model usually prevails, but it can rarely totally extinguish elements of the Partnership model. But there is also a contrary dynamic in which the corresponding four main features of the Domination model tend to reinforce each other. That makes the Partnership model a systematic reality. We have only to think of how the work of homemakers and caregivers for sick and dying family members, childcare providers, primary school teachers and nurses, is barely recognized.Īs Eisler indicates, these four features of the partnership model-social structure gender relations the emotional dimension and value beliefs-tend to reinforce each other. Yet in the United States and elsewhere it is often unpaid or poorly paid and therefore not socially valued by economists focused on money as a measuring device. Her analysis of economics, carried out in her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations, makes the case that women's work is crucial for early education, language learning, survival, healing, Hospice care, and thriving of the human species in general. Social justice relates to partnership organization at the level of communities larger than the family.
![chalice and the blade eisler chalice and the blade eisler](https://oursecurefuture.org/sites/default/files/styles/blog_704_328/public/Riane_Eisler_summer_reads_0.jpg)
Both caring and equality play a role in Eisler's conception of partnership relations. She has a place for Noddings' appreciation of the importance of caring without being indifferent to the patterns of human interaction that prevail in the larger society. By the time Christianity fused with the Roman Empire under Constantine, it had accepted the Dominator culture of classical pagan antiquity, and once fused with state power it helped to consolidate it.Įisler's approach has the best of these worlds and then some. In other words, the end of gender-egalitarian, Goddess-worshipping civilization occurred more than 1500 years before Christianity appeared on the scene, although pockets of goddess-worship continued to exist here and there. Even the earlier Mycenaean society, the society that produced the early Greeks who conquered Troy, was patriarchal. Pre-Christian Greek and Roman civilization is already patriarchal or male-dominated, although religiously it is still pagan. So although Goddess worship did not at first disappear completely, it tended to take back seat to the worship of male war-gods. Goddess-worshipping cultures were defeated and their new rulers began subordinating goddesses to gods within the mythically portrayed society of deities.
![chalice and the blade eisler chalice and the blade eisler](https://image.cdn0.buscalibre.com/1944421.RS500x500.jpg)
![chalice and the blade eisler chalice and the blade eisler](https://rianeeisler.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/RE-at-50-upstairs-scan0009-1-1024x668.jpg)
4 That started much earlier, in Western Asia and India, probably with the invasion of Indo-European warrior-nomads. On Eisler's account, it is not institutional Christianity that initiated the suppression of women. One difference between Eisler's book and Brown's novel is that for Eisler the chalice represents Goddess-worshipping egalitarian cultures that were overrun at least 1500 years earlier.