Articles & Papers

Dr. Riane Eisler has authored a plethora of papers and articles for progressive policy makers. Including all of them on this page would be too overwhelming, which is why Eisler hand picked ten of her most important papers and ten of her most important articles that are available to read and download below.

Find the entire list of papers and articles authored by Dr. Eisler here.

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The Politics of Partnership: Four Cornerstones

Policy-makers who believe that top-down domination systems are the only option recognize the foundational importance of early human relations. For them, “return to the traditional family” — an authoritarian, male-dominated, highly punitive family — is a top priority.

Progressives, by contrast, have marginalized parent-child and gender relations as “women’s and children’s issues,” leaving the base for domination systems to rebuild themselves in place.

The Politics of Partnership focuses on four cornerstones: childhood, gender, economics and narratives/language. These are the cornerstones that regressives have successfully focused on as the foundation of their domination politics. Rebuilding these four cornerstones with the values of partnership, is the long-term work that must start now to build a solid foundation that supports more equitable, sustainable and caring societies.

Partnership and Domination Societies

Partnership and domination societies describe two contrasting social configurations that support either equitable or inequitable relations in all spheres of life. These categories are also known as Partnership Systems and domination systems.

In the paper, The Partnership and Domination Societies published in the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace & Conflict, Dr. Riane Eisler introduces Partnership Systems and domination systems as new social categories needed for a successful social, economic, and political agenda, beginning with four cornerstones for an equitable and sustainable Partnership system. These cornerstones, which are laid out in this article, are: childhood, gender, economics, and  narratives/language (Eisler, 2002; Eisler and Fry, 2019).

Family Structure and Family Violence

In this article, Family Structure and Family Violence, Laura A. McCloskey and Dr. Riane Eisler explore the social conditions and changes in family structure which serve to shield or expose women and children to abuse. The research on family violence focuses on the harm people do to one another rather than the potential support they provide. Families reveal the best and the worst of human social potential and this article explores how family structure, kinship relations, and the lens of culture shed light on such dynamics.

Cooperative and mutually supportive families have been achieved despite ideologies that construct adversarial sexual relations and men’s domination as the chief organizing principle. Still, if the dominant culture is rooted in a set of beliefs of women’s inferiority, the walls are well mortared against intimacy and communication across strict gender boundaries.

The Caring Family Policy Agenda

As practical as it is principled, the Caring Family Policy Agenda is based on the shared core moral principles of religion and humanism: caring, compassion, justice, and nonviolence. Its Partnership principles and programs are easily articulated and have powerful emotional appeal.

The Caring Family Agenda has three interacting components:

• Children’s Bill of Rights
• Caring Family Values
• Family-Friendly Economy

The Family Security Agenda

The Family Security Agenda recognizes the economic value of the care work provided for free in families and low-wage jobs. This is key to reducing family stress, cutting through cycles of poverty, and producing the “high quality human capital” needed for the new postindustrial age.

The Center for Partnership Systems’ Family Security Agenda provides hard working, self respecting American families real support for the work of caring for children, seniors, and other family members and prepares the next generation with an education that can meet the challenges of our new, automated world.

Truly valuing family, the Security Agenda will greatly reduce the immediate expenses of healthcare, addiction, crime, courts, prisons, and lost human potential that often fall to the tax-paying public.

Protecting the Majority of Humanity: Toward an Integrated Approach to Crimes against Present and Future

In the wake of the World Health Organization’s report showing that violence against women and girls is a global health problem of epidemic proportions, the publication of Riane Eisler’s chapter “Protecting the Majority of Humanity: Toward an Integrated Approach to Crimes against Present and Future Generations” in the new Cambridge University book Sustainable Development, International Criminal Justice, and Treaty Implementation edited by Sebastien Jodoin and Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger is both timely and practical.

Continuing her work of placing the rights, problems, and aspirations of the majority of humanity — women and children — on the international agenda as integral to a sustainable and just future for all, Eisler proposes that the international legal foundations of the Rome Statute and R2P (Right to Protect) can, and should, be used to end traditions of violence that not only take the lives of millions of women and children but also have very adverse impacts on economic and social health.

Social Wealth Economic Indicators: A New System for Evaluating Economic Prosperity

The Social Wealth Economic Indicators (SWEIs) developed by the Center for Partnership Systems demonstrate the enormous economic benefits of investing in the work of caring for people and our environment.

Unlike conventional measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and unlike most GDP alternatives, the SWEI demonstrates the substantial financial return from caring for people and nature – and the enormous costs of not doing so.

Social Wealth Economic Indicators also differ from other metrics in that they not only measure where we are (outputs) but also what investments (inputs) are needed for a healthy and sustainable economy and society.

Unlike other measures, the SWEI pay attention to the status of the majority of the population (women and children) and how this affects everyone’s well-being. It are essential for a strong and sustainable economy and to reduce the disproportionate poverty of women and children worldwide.

The Social Wealth Economic Indicators reveal that the U.S. lags badly behind other developed countries in investing in its human and natural capital provide policy makers with the missing tools to steer us in healthier, more realistic directions.

Building a Caring Democracy: Four Cornerstones for an Integrated Progressive Agenda

Why do people vote for “strong” leaders who condone violence, debase women, and stoke fear and scapegoating? If free elections alone are not the answer, what will it take to build a caring democracy that promotes the wellbeing and full development of all people?

This paper examines these questions from a perspective that takes into account the connection between politics and economics, on one hand, and what children first experience and observe in their family and other intimate relations, on the other.

It describes the study of relational dynamics, a multidisciplinary method of analysis that reveals social categories that transcend conventional ones: the Partnership System and the domination system. It looks at modern history through the lens of the Partnership-domination social scale, focusing on the struggle between the movement toward Partnership and regressions to domination.

It compares the integrated regressive worldview and political agenda with the fragmented progressive one. It identifies four cornerstones for Partnership or Domination systems: family/childhood, gender, economics, narratives/language. It then details how to build these cornerstones so they support a more humane, caring, and sustainable future, and provides practical resources for this urgent task.

The Real Wealth of Nations: From Global Warming to Global Partnership

In a speech delivered September 16, 2009 in New York City, at the United Nations’ special meeting on climate change hosted by the Caribbean island-country of Grenada, Riane Eisler proposed a new approach for prevention and mitigation of global warming. She placed our climate change crisis in its social and historical context. She highlighted the connection between high technology and an ethos of domination in bringing on our current crises, and why successfully resolving them requires an understanding of the configurations of the domination system and the Partnership System as two underlying social configurations.

These social configurations transcend conventional categories such as right vs. left, religious vs. secular, or Eastern vs. Western, which fail to take into account the crucial interactions between the cultural construction of our basic childhood and gender relations and politics and economics.

As a result, regressions to the domination side of the Partnership/Domination continuum have punctuated our forward movement, including a disregard for both people and nature. She showed that going back to the old “normal” is not an option, and outlined how, together, we can build a new normal in which caring for people and nature is a top priority.

Nurturing Children’s Humanity: Partnership Education

This article proposes that the unprecedented challenges of our rapidly changing world require more than piecemeal educational reform. It describes partnership education as an integrated template for redesigning the three main components of education: content, process, and structure.

In addition, it provides examples of how various elements of Partnership education can be incorporated into current classrooms, both in schools and universities. It illustrates how partnership education can help young people develop their full potentials, not only preparing them to navigate through our difficult times but providing them the knowledge and skills to help build a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable future.

Articles

Reclaiming Spiritual Wholeness

by Riane Eisler for the Spring 2021 edition of Kosmos Journal for Transformation (2021).

This article begins by taking the reader along Riane’s own spiritual journey and connects the individual level corporeal and spiritual experiences to the larger legacies of spiritual history and religious heritage by referencing a multitude of archaeological and theological sources from around the world. As is the case in much of Riane’s work, the article empowers its reader to transform their spiritual teachings and journey; it contains clear steps that can be taken to “leave behind the domination part of our religious heritage and strengthen the partnership spirituality and morality we so urgently need.”

Want to Make Your Country Happier? Elect Women.

by Riane Eisler and Robyn Baker for Ms.Magazine (2021).

In an article for Ms.Magazine titled “Want to Make Your Country Happier? Elect Women”, Riane Eisler and CPS Team Member, Robyn Baker, explain how there are many obvious benefits to having more women in positions of political and economic power but electing more women to office also correlates to greater overall happiness.

In the article, Eisler and Baker help readers take a step back and think about what national happiness truly is.

Love, Caring, and Empathy are Central to Solving World’s Problems

by Riane Eisler for Thrive Global (2019).

In this article, Riane Eisler takes a hands-on approach to how love can help us address major global issues. “Findings from both social and biological science indicate that love may be the key to helping us solve some of the world’s most pressing problems”.

This human capacity to care–which neuroscience shows is integral to our species – is central to creating the type of social system that will help us find creative solutions to pressing issues such as: How can we preserve our life-supporting natural environment? How can we close the widening gap between haves and have-nots, effectively address poverty, and end destructive financial practices?

The Next Economy: Partnerism Post-Capitalist/ Post-Socialist Economics

by Riane Eisler for the Summer 2018 edition of Tikkun Magazine.

The fight between capitalism and socialism will be won by a totally different “ism”

by Riane Eisler for Quartz

Dr. Riane Eisler affirms the possibility of a healthy post-industrial economy that closes the widening chasm of economic inequality. “We need to address critical matters ignored in old thinking. A starting point is leaving behind the gendered system of values we inherited from earlier times, which devalues anything stereotypically associated with women: educating children, caring for the elderly, and keeping clean and healthy home environments—which includes our planet. In other words, we need to care more about caring”.

The article is adapted from a speech Eisler gave in July, 2019 at Bretton Woods 75, an economic conference in New Hampshire that assesses and re-envisions a contemporary world economic order.

I’m a social scientist and Holocaust refugee. To have true equal pay, we need a mindset shift.

by Riane Eisler for Business Insider

In the Business Insider article Dr. Riane Eisler writes, “To work towards true equity, society needs to have a mindset shift”. Eisler outlines how a gendered system of values in the workplace and in society creates inequalities between men and women and it attaches unequal value to the very concepts and definitions of “masculine” and “feminine”, a dynamic especially prevalent in domination social systems.

In Partnership Systems “productive” work is redefined to include caring for and educating people, and the significant economic value of these activities is acknowledged—ultimately changing how we measure economic health.

Eisler calls for a mindset shift towards Partnership Systems, one that leaves behind old thinking in which anything associated with gender is viewed as “just” women’s issues, and marginalized or ignored. We must recognize that stereotypically “feminine” attributes are inherent in all people—male and female—and that these traits have immense value to society. At the same time, there is also an immense cost for scorning or devaluing these attributes, for men as well as for women.

Breaking Out of the Domination Trance

by Riane Eisler for the Winter 2018 edition of Kosmos Journal for Transformation

In this article Riane Eisler shares the traumatic story of fleeing with her family from the Nazi occupation of Austria as a girl, and growing up as a post-war refugee in Cuba. Asking the question: “Why, when we humans have such an enormous capacity for consciousness, caring, and creativity—has there been so much insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness? Is it inevitable, or are there alternatives?”, she outlines her work researching the roots of domination and Partnership societies, and shows how we can work within the framework of four societal cornerstones.

Towards An Integrated Progressive Agenda

by Riane Eisler for the Next Systems Project (2017)

This comprehensive article discusses the roots of domination and provides an overview of new thinking, categories, and agendas called for to support our orientation towards a Partnership System.

No society is a pure Partnership or Domination System. It is always a matter of degree, of where a society falls on the domination-partnership social scale. But those pushing us back to a more autocratic, violent, and unjust social system uniformly work to maintain or impose rigid rankings of domination in gender and parent-child relations.

So while regressives have had an integrated domination agenda, progressives have not had an integrated partnership agenda. Progressives have focused on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid: political and economic injustice, domination, and violence. They have paid far less attention to injustice, domination, and violence in gender and parent-child relations—the relations from which children first learn what is considered normal or abnormal, possible or impossible, moral or immoral.

Consequently, the base on which the domination pyramid rests has remained in place in many cultures and subcultures. And it is on this base that domination systems have kept rebuilding themselves in different forms—be they religious or secular, Eastern or Western, Northern or Southern.

Feminism, Fear, and the Strongman: Women and the New Progressive Agenda

By Riane Eisler and Valerie Young for The Huffington Post (2017).

This article focuses on understanding how and why the struggle over gender norms is a major factor behind the current US political and cultural regression.

If the momentum unleashed by women taking up the call to action is to have lasting impact, it must drive a progressive agenda that will reverse the current regression toward misogyny, scapegoating, and “strongman” rule in both the family and state. This requires long term, focused work – and an understanding of how and why the struggle over gender norms is a major factor behind the current US political and cultural regression.

Breaking the Devastating Link Between International Terrorism and Intimate Violence

by Riane Eisler for Feminist Collections: a Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources; Madison Vol. 25, Iss. 4 (2004).

Riane Eisler’s article Breaking the Devastating Link Between International Terrorism and Intimate Violence. Dr. Eisler addresses the connection between international terrorism and family violence and what we can do to break cycles of violence in our lives and communities. Her research shows that throughout history, the most violently despotic and warlike societies have been those where violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman.