Riane Eisler
Official website of futurist, social-systems scientist, and cultural historian Riane Eisler
“In this superb piece, Riane Eisler tries to untangle the limitations of both capitalism and socialism. There is no place for a caring economy in these models — no value given to caring for our trees or, as emphasized in this piece, our children. New models are needed, and the author presents the beginning of one. If economics moves in any direction, it should be this one.” – Jeff Madrick, Challenge Editor.
https://rianeeisler.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Economics-as-if-Caring-Matters.pdf
“On behalf of the entire James Madison University community, I want to thank you for sharing so generously of your time and story with us as part of our Madison Vision lecture series. . .You challenged us to think deeply and creatively . . The feedback has been superb, not just on your inspiring address but also with regard to the conversations and interactions you had throughout the Summit with students, faculty , and administrators. You have sparked an important dialogue here that will continue well into the future.”
~Jonathan R. Alger, President, James Madison University
“When you gave that inspirational keynote address to our deans, vice presidents, and senior faculty, your talk sent more reverberations through our community than any speaker we’d ever had. You spoke from the heart, but also with such a depth and breadth of research data and sophisticated analysis at your finger tips, gently prodding us all to do better and better.”
~ Edward M. Hundert, M.D., President, Case Western Reserve University, 2002-2006
“Riane Eisler spoke to the hearts and the heads of the top women at Microsoft. She was compelling not only in her compassion and humanity but even more so with her strong logic and sense of urgency. She is a wonderful, inspiring speaker!”
~ Alex Loeb, Former Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corporation
“Thank you so much for participating in our 2012 Summit of Sages at the University of Minnesota, and providing such an inspiring ending keynote. You really galvanized the room and people are ready to carry the message of partnership forward.”
~ Joanne Disch, PhD, RN, FAAN
Clinical Professor
University of Minnesota School of Nursing
“A year ago, in San Jose, when you keynoted the International Coaching Federation Conference you changed my life. Thank you ever so much, you made a profound change for me. Two things brought this about. Your storyteller technique is warm, personal, poignant and far reaching. I later decided to go into storytelling and I am still working at that, in your style. Your powerful message about the ideas and visions about the future for a partnership modeled world met my own thoughts about our presence in our world today.”
~ Dennis Jorst, President, ICF Nordic
“Wow! What a day! What a conference! And what a speech! Of the many, many people we’ve spoken to, they all consider your words among the most amazing and inspirational. We simply can’t thank you enough. We’re so grateful that you could share your unique knowledge with us.”
~ Bonnie Reiss, Executive Director, Earth Communications Office (ECO)
“I’m writing on behalf of all the participants in our Executives Leading Sustainable Change program to thank you for your inspiring and provocative presentation…Your vast knowledge of the history of humanity coupled with a deep conviction and guidance on what is needed in today’s corporations to bring about real social change left a deep impact on all of us. You provided us with a new context for thinking about how one person can make a difference and together we can change the world.”
~ Rayona Sharpnack, President, Institute for Women’s Leadership
Thank you once again for the wonderful presentation that you made at our Symposium series …You had a very diverse audience and you somehow managed to say something which was meaningful to just about everyone. I especially appreciated your informal but well organized approach to a very difficult and complex topic.”
~ Professor Alexander W. Astin, Director, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles
“I greatly enjoyed your magnificent presentation at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association… The need for mutual understanding among different faith traditions is particularly great in these times when religious intolerance is blossoming.”
~ Reverend Rudi Gelsey
“I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation for your contributions to Stentor’s Discovery Project. Through your work with us we were able to apply a significant number of learnings related to creativity, processes for innovation, new business opportunities, and corporate transformation.Your systems view of the world and Partnership Model were particularly helpful in establishing processes for innovation. Your willingness to take on and help with this challenging project, your determination to succeed, and creative contributions have all been exceptional Thank you again for your outstanding efforts on the Discovery Project.”
~ Wendy Weisner, Manager New Business Opportunities, Stentor Resources Centre Incorporated Ottawa, Ontario
“Thank you so much for the powerful Opening Keynote Address you presented at The International Alliance for Women (TIAW) Global Partnership Forum in the Rotunda room of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC…You captured the audience instantly with your expressive style, sincerity, and warmth. I felt privileged to be in attendance.”
~ Laddie W. Hughes, TIAW Board Member
“Your work is truly inspiring. Our students are still discussing your ideas and applying them to their coursework. You are a truly remarkable person — filled with kindness and compassion. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.”
~ Jenny Pinter, Bainbridge Graduate Institute
“When the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) held their Millennium Economic Conference, Riane Eisler’s keynote was electrifying, informational and sensitive to the needs of women and society. She was given a dynamic standing ovation and continues to be talked about by the women who were present. If you are looking for a keynote speaker who emotionally connects with the audience while delivering thought-provoking futuristic content, Riane Eisler is your person. She is truly a thought leader for the 21st century and her new book entitled, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics lays out the framework for the revolution. I believe Riane is a voice for our time, a voice that needs to be heard, a voice that points the way to a partnership future.”
~ Barbara G. Stanbridge, Past National President, National Association of Women Business Owners
Educator and noted designer Lauralee Alben used Riane Eisler as a case study for her workshop “Designing Lives Worth Living.”
Are you concerned about what’s going on in your life and our world?
Do you worry about what kind of future we face? Are you looking for a way forward?
Be part of the partnership movement.
“The struggle for our future is not between East and West or North and South, but everywhere between those who believe our only alternatives are dominating or being dominated and those working for partnership relations of mutual respect, accountability, and caring.”
-Riane Eisler’s Cultural Transformation Course
• Changing lives
• What partnership means for you
• Personal & cultural transformation
• Our history, our future
• Partnership politics – from intimate to international
• Sex and the politics of the body
• Toward a new economics
• Women, men, and economic development
• From poverty to partnership
• Changing measures of economic health
• Four cornerstones for a world of partnership and peace
• Partnership education
• Center for Partnership Systems
“I want to thank you for being my teacher and mentor. Your exposition of the dominator and partnership organizational models within the deep context of the human experience has had a foundational influence on my own work, particularly in writing The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Thank you also for providing a model for us all at this time when our society needs elders serving in the roles of teacher, mentor, and wisdom keeper as never before.”
David Korten, Co-founder, Positive Futures Network
“From your breakthrough statements in The Chalice and The Blade to your more recent The Power of Partnership and The Real Wealth of Nations, your writings have inspired my thinking and impacted The Hunger Project’s work on gender. You are a clear and compelling voice for the empowerment of women and the wisdom of true partnership in our world.”
Joan Holmes, President, The Hunger Project
“You are an inspiration to women from all racial backgrounds, to poor and wealthy women alike, to life loving men. As a Mexican ARTivist I am very proud to have read and distributed your literature.”
Silvia Parra
Many of us are hungry for transformative change – personal, social, economic. But as Einstein said, we can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them. Let’s start by thinking outside the old boxes of capitalism, socialism, right, left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western because societies in all these categories have been oppressive, violent, and unjust. None of them help us answer the most urgent question for our future: what social conditions support the expression of our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity – or for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness?
The new categories of partnership system and domination system answers this question. They reveal patterns that are invisible through the lenses of older social categories.
Can we build a world where our great potentials for consciousness, caring, and creativity are realized? What would this more equitable, less violent world look like? How can we build it?
These questions animated my research over the past four decades. They arose very early in my life, when my parents and I narrowly escaped from Nazi Europe. Had we not been able to flee my native Vienna and later find refuge in Cuba, we would almost certainly have been killed in the Holocaust, as happened to most of my extended family.
As I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, I didn’t realize that studying social systems would become my life’s work. By the time I did, it was clear that our present course is not sustainable. In our time of nuclear and biological weapons, violence to settle international disputes can be disastrous. So can our “conquest of nature” when advanced technologies are causing environmental damage of unprecedented magnitude.
I saw that a grim future awaits my children – and all of us – unless there is transformative cultural change. But the issue addressed by my multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, historical study of human societies is: transformation from what to what?
Not so long ago, many people thought that shifting from capitalism to communism would bring a more just, less violent society. But the communist revolutions in Russia and China brought further violence and injustice. Today many people believe that capitalism and democratic elections are the solution. But capitalism has not brought peace or equity: Hitler was democratically elected, and elections following the Arab Spring led to repressive Islamist regimes. Others argue that returning to pre-scientific Western times or replacing Western secularism, science, and technology with Eastern religions will cure our world’s ills. They ignore that the religious Middle Ages were brutally violent and repressive, that Eastern religions have helped perpetuate inequality and oppression, and that today’s fundamentalist religious cultures, both Eastern and Western, are behind some of our planet’s most serious problems.
All these approaches are based on old thinking. As long as we look at societies from the perspective of conventional categories such as capitalist vs. socialist, Eastern vs. Western, religious vs. secular, or technologically developed vs. undeveloped, we cannot effect real cultural transformation. Indeed, history amply shows that societies in every one of these categories can be, and have been, repressive, unjust, and violent.
This is why my re-examination of social systems transcends old categories. It uses a new method of analysis (the study of relational dynamics) that draws from a larger data base than conventional studies. It looks at a much larger, holistic picture that includes the whole of humanity, both its female and male halves; the whole of our lives, not only politics and economics but where we all live, in our family and other intimate relations; and the whole of our history, including the thousands of years we call prehistory.
Looking at this more complete picture makes it possible to see interactive relationships or configurations that are not visible otherwise. There were no names for these social configurations, so I called one the domination system and the other the partnership system.
Once we understand these configurations, it becomes clear that the real struggle for our future is not religious vs. secular, East vs. West, South vs. North, right vs. left, etc. If you think about it, societies in all these categories were, and are, repressive, violent, and unjust.
The real struggle is within societies in every one of these categories, between people who want to move to a more caring and equitable world and those you still believe insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness – and all the misery they lead to – are “just human nature” – the inevitable result of original sin or selfish genes.
Before Newton identified gravity, apples fell off trees all the time but people had no name or explanation for what was happening. The partnership and domination systems not only give us names for different ways of relating but also explain what lies behind these differences.
We’re all familiar with relations of domination and submission from our own lives. We know the pain, fear, and tension of relations based on coercion and accommodation, of jockeying for control, of trying to manipulate and cajole when we are unable to express our real feelings and needs, of the tug of war for that illusory moment of power rather than powerlessness, of our unfulfilled yearning for caring and mutuality, of all the misery, suffering, and lost lives and potentials that come from these kinds of relations.
Most of us have also, at least intermittently, experienced another way of being, one where we feel safe and seen for who we truly are, where our essential humanity and that of others shines through, perhaps only for a little while, lifting our hearts and spirits, enfolding us in a sense that the world can after all be right, that we are valued and valuable.
Our human yearning for caring connections, for peace rather than war, for equality rather than inequality, for freedom rather than oppression, can be seen as part of our genetic equipment. The degree to which this yearning can be realized is not a matter of changing our genes, but of building partnership social structures and beliefs.
In the domination system, somebody has to be on top and somebody has to be on the bottom. People learn, starting in early childhood, to obey orders without question. They learn to carry a harsh voice in their heads telling them they’re no good, they don’t deserve love, they need to be punished. Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force. The world is divided into in-groups and out-groups, with those who are different seen as enemies to be conquered or destroyed.
In contrast, the partnership system supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is also no built-in need for abuse and violence. Partnership relations free our innate capacity to feel joy, to play. They enable us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is true for individuals, families, and whole societies. Conflict is an opportunity to learn and to be creative, and power is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower others.
Here’s an example. Do you remember how the father treated his children in the movie The Sound of Music? When Baron von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) blows his whistle and his children line up in front of him, stiff as boards, you see the domination system in action. When the new nanny (Julie Andrews) comes into the picture and the children relax, enjoy themselves, and learn to trust themselves and each other, you see the partnership system in action. When von Trapp becomes much happier and closer to his children, you see what happens as we begin to shift from domination to partnership.
The last three hundred years have seen a strong movement toward partnership. One tradition of domination after another has been challenged – from the rule of despotic kings and male dominance to economic oppression and child abuse.
But this forward movement has been fiercely resisted, and punctuated by periodic regressions. That is the bad news.
The good news is that we do not have to start from square one. Though we still have a long way to go, in bits and pieces the shift from domination to partnership is underway.
There is also strong evidence from archeology and the study of myth that the original direction in the mainstream of our cultural evolution was in a partnership direction. So much that today may seem new and even radical, such as gender equality and a more peaceful way of life, has ancient roots going back thousands of years, before the cultural shift toward domination about 5000 years ago.
During much of recorded history, rankings of domination – man over man, man over woman, race over race, nation over nation, and humans over nature – have been the norm. But in our time of nuclear and biological weapons and high technology in service of the once hallowed “conquest of nature, “high technology guided by an ethos of domination could take us to an evolutionary dead end.
In sum, the struggle for our future is not between East and West, North and South, religion or secularism, capitalism or socialism, but within all these. It is the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world.
Each one of us can contribute to the partnership movement. We can change by example, education, and advocacy. We can shift our relations from domination to partnership – starting with our day-to-day relations all the way to how we relate to our mother earth.
Societies adhering closely to the Domination system have the following core configuration:
Societies adhering closely to the Partnership system have a different core configuration:
The evolution of societies from prehistory to the present reflects the underlying tension between the configurations of the partnership and domination systems as two basic alternatives. These two systems structure our relations with one another and our natural environment and represent opposite ends of a spectrum of cultural possibilities.
We humans have the capacity for both consciousness, caring, and creativity as well as for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness. The question is what social conditions support the expression one or the other set of these human capacities. To answer that question we have to transcend old categories, and look at a less fragmented picture.
This picture is provided by the two contrasting configurations of the partnership system and the domination system, which include the social construction of two key social components ignored, or at best glossed over in conventional discourse:
• The social construction of the relations between the female and male halves of humanity
• The construction of the relations between parents and children
The reason we must look at these relations is something we have long known from psychology and now also know from neuroscience. This is that it is by experiencing and observing these relations that children learn, before their brains are fully formed, what is considered moral or immoral, desirable of undesirable, and even possible or impossible.
The importance of parent-child and gender relations in these two social configurations cannot be overemphasized – especially they are ignored in conventional theories about society.
To give just one example of the interactive dynamics of domination systems, people raised in families with the domination perspective—families where they learn that the adults on whom they depend for their survival may not be contradicted—tend to have a hard time contradicting what their “superiors” tell them, even when they are adults. They therefore tend to:
• Find it difficult to question, much less challenge, powerful economic interests on whom they feel dependent
• Have difficulty looking at the long-range future
• Place emphasis on the short-term bottom line because they’re stuck in a defensive mode of protecting themselves and what they have
• Have trouble dealing with change (Eisler, The Power of Partnership, 2002, p. 161)
It is time for progressives to reframe the political conversation about family values and have an integrated progressive family policy agenda.
Progressives have ceded the meaning of family life to regressives, who recognize the foundational importance of family and other intimate relations in the establishment of social values and political and economic structures. Family relations affect how people think and act. They affect how people vote and govern, and whether the policies they support are just and genuinely democratic, or punitive, violent, and oppressive.
Regressives have successfully pushed our culture back by insisting that a male-dominated, top-down structure of family is the only desirable one. U.S. fundamentalists stress the “headship” of the father in the family, with women and children subordinate. So successful were their efforts to establish this model that in 1992, when Americans were asked if the “father of the family is master of the house,” just 42% said yes. By 2004 the percentage had risen to 52% — compared to only one third of Canadians and 20% of Europeans agreeing with this “traditional value.”
Slogans like “traditional values” have often marketed a family where fathers make the rules and harshly punish disobedience – the kind of family that prepares people to defer to “strong” leaders who brook no dissent and use force to impose their will. This is the fundamentalist theocratic model of society for our future — and we see the horrors it brings by looking at Eastern fundamentalist regimes.
What is urgently needed is an integrated progressive family policy agenda that redefines “family,” “values,” and “morality” in ways based on partnership, mutual respect, and caring rather than domination, top-down control, and coercion.
Progressive candidates can start by changing the terms of the debate:
1. Replace the regressive “family values” agenda with an agenda that “values families.”
2. Introduce the term “real wealth of our nation” – people and nature.
3. Link family-friendly business and government policies with a strong competitive workforce.
4. Link children’s health, education, and welfare and the future of our economy and society.
Excerpts from Sacred Pleasure
Selected excerpts from Riane Eisler’s book Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (1995).
“Could it be that the yearning of so many women and men for sex as something beautiful and magical is our long repressed impulse toward a more spiritual, and at the same time more intensely passionate, way of expressing sex and love?
Candles, music, flowers, and wine – these we all know are the stuff of romance, of sex and of love. But candles, flowers, music, and wine are also the stuff of religious ritual, of our most sacred rites. Why is there this striking, though seldom noted, commonality? Is it just accidental that passion is the word we use for both sexual and mystical experiences? Or is there here some long forgotten but still powerful connection? Could it be that the yearning of so many women and men for sex as something beautiful and magical is our long repressed impulse toward a more spiritual, and at the same time more intensely passionate, way of expressing sex and love?
Because we have been taught to think of sex as sinful, dirty, titillating, or prurient, the possibility that sex could be spiritual, much less sacred, may seem shocking. . .Yet the evidence is compelling that for many thousands of years – much longer than the thirty to fifty centuries we call recorded history – this was the case.
You can obtain Sacred Pleasure online here.
The real wealth of a nation is not financial. This became painfully obvious with the melting into thin air of credit swaps and derivatives during the “Great Recession.” Indeed, you can see the ephemeral nature of financial riches every day, as stock prices, home prices, and other financial valuations seesaw up and down.
A nation’s real wealth consists of the contributions of people and of nature. Therefore, we
need what we have not had—economic measurements, policies, and practices that give visibility and adequate value to the most important human work: the work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and caring for our natural environment.
Without caring and caregiving, none of us would be here. There would be no households, no workforce, no economy, nothing. Especially now, when flexible, creative people who can work in teams and think in long-term ways are essential for economic success, it can be argued that the caring activities still generally categorized as “reproductive work” are actually the most productive activities of all. Similarly, caring for our natural environment is today a prerequisite not only for sustainability, but also for humanity’s future survival.
Yet despite all this, most current economic discussions do not mention caring and caregiving. Nor is the value of the work of caring in households included in current economic measurements.
It does not have to be this way. Indeed, the social and economic dislocations inherent in the current shift from the industrial to the post-industrial era offer us an unprecedented opportunity to reexamine and restructure economic theory and practice.
Availing ourselves of this opportunity is essential if we are to move to a more equitable, sustainable, and caring future. We know today, from both psychology and neuroscience, that whether or not people are cared for directly impacts human development, health, and life quality.
Some people in the U.S. think that the next generation will be the first to NOT surpass the current generation’s wealth–and by that they mean the accumulation of money, possessions, and property. However, we have to ask, were we really wealthy? Financial wealth can disappear, like the credit swaps and derivatives did, in a matter of seconds.
What many are discovering is that the current financial wealth system often comes at the expense of our children, our families, communities, and the planet. They are waking up to a new definition of wealth. We need an economic system that make it possible to have healthy food, good housing, enriching schools, natural and recreational space, and a sense of community.
Study after study shows that what people truly find most valuable are relationships, meaning, service, and a sense of purpose. But the current economic system does not support or give value to caring for people, starting in early childhood, and caring for our Mother Earth. We can, and must, change this! We can have an economic system that meets everyone’s material needs and makes it possible for us to have time and energy for our children, our communities, and ourselves.
Studies demonstrate the connection between the status of women on the one hand and a nation’s quality of life and economic success on the other. A pioneering study was Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life conducted by the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) in 1995. Using data from 89 nations, it compared the status of women with measures of quality of life (such as infant mortality, human rights ratings, and environmental ratings) and showed that in significant respects, the status of women can be a better predictor of quality of life than GDP (Eisler, Loye, & Norgaard, 1995).
Since then, other studies have verified the relationship between the status of women, a society’s values, and its overall quality of life and economic success. Based on data from 65 societies representing 80% of the world’s population, the World Values Survey (Inglehart, Norris, & Welzel, 2002) is the largest international survey of how attitudes correlate with economic development and political structure. When for the first time this survey focused attention on attitudes about gender, it found a strong relationship between the level of support for gender equality and a society’s level of political rights, civil liberties, and
quality of life.
More recently, in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Reports, researchers Hausmann, Tyson, and Zahedi, (2011) showed that the nations with the lowest gender gaps (such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland) are also regularly in the highest ranks of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Reports.
The simple fact that women are half of humanity is a reason for the correlation between the status of women and national economic success and quality of life. But the reasons go much deeper, to the still largely unrecognized interconnected cultural, social, and economic dynamics inherent in domination systems or partnership systems.
In addition to the connection between a higher status of women and values and policies that support caring for people, there are a myriad other factors, including yet another matter ignored in conventional economic analyses: how resources are distributed not only within nations, but within households.
Eisler and other scholars call this intra-household economics (Eisler, 2007; Jain & Banerjee, 1985), and it is once again directly related to the status of women in a society. Empirical evidence across diverse cultures and income groups shows that in cultures where women are rigidly subordinated, the distribution of household resources tends to be skewed in ways that fail to invest in children’s well-being, health, and development. Studies also show that in these domination-oriented cultures, women have a higher propensity than men to spend on goods that benefit children and enhance their capacities. For example, in “Intra-Household Resource Allocation,” Duncan Thomas (1990) found that $1 in the hands of a Brazilian woman had the same effect on child survival as $18 in the hands of a man. Similarly, Bruce and Lloyd (1997) found that in Guatemala an additional $11.40 per month in a mother’s hands would result in the same weight gain in a young child as an additional $166 earned by the father.
Of course, even in rigidly male-dominated cultures there are men who give primary importance to meeting their families’ needs. However, the socialization of men in such cultures teaches them to believe it is their prerogative to use their wages for non-family purposes, including drinking, smoking, and gambling (and that when women complain, they are nagging and controlling).
The negative effects of the subordination of females to males on intrahousehold resources distribution go even further. In some world regions, parents (both mothers and fathers) often deny girls access to education, give them less health care, and even feed girls less than boys. Obviously, these practices have terrible health consequences for girls and women. Indeed, these practices are horrendous human rights violations that not only stunt girls’ development, but all too often cause their death. But giving less food to girls and women also adversely impacts the development of boys, as children of malnourished women are often born with poor health and below-par brain development (Eisler, 1987b). In short, this gender-based nutritional and health care discrimination robs all children, male and female, of their potential for optimal development.
This in turn affects children’s and later adults’ abilities to adapt to new conditions, tolerate frustration, and avoid using violence—all of which impede solutions to chronic hunger, poverty, and armed conflict, as well as the chances for a more humane, prosperous, and peaceful world for all.
There is no realistic way to end poverty without taking into account the fact that women represent a disproportionate percentage of the poor worldwide.
• According to some estimates, 70% of those who live in absolute poverty—starvation or near starvation—are female (UN Women, n.d.).
• Even in the rich United States, woman-headed families are the lowest tier of the economic hierarchy (UN Women, n.d.).
• According to the United States Census Bureau, the poverty rate of women over 65 is double that of men the same age.
This high female poverty rate is not only due to wage discrimination in the market economy; it is largely due to the fact that these women are (or were for much of their lives) either full- or part-time caregivers of children or other family members. Yet because they did this essential work without pay or later Social Security or pensions, they are condemned to an old age living in poverty.
This, however, is not inevitable. It is a matter of social policies.
Demonstrating the importance of changing policies are the low poverty rates of the nations that orient more to the partnership side of the continuum, such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Here women and stereotypically feminine values have higher status. Not only that, Sweden has a high woman-headed household rate, yet these families are not poor. Women, who are 40 percent of the legislatures, tend to support more caring policies as a group. As the status of women rises, men no longer find is such a threat to their status to embrace more stereotypically feminine values and behaviors.
But while the Global Women’s Movement is beginning to gain momentum it is still much too slow and it is still fiercely opposed in some cultures and subcultures – all too often violently. And, as in the push by so-called religious fundamentalists worldwide to return women to their subordinate, “traditional” place in male controlled families, the resistance to raising women’s status is fiercest among those who also want to impose repressive national regimes and gain global control through “holy wars.” In other words, it is key to the domination system they seek to impose.
Current economic measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fail to give economic value to the most essential human work: caring for people and nature.
A 2004 Swiss government report showed that if the unpaid “caring” household work still primarily performed by women were included, it would comprise 40% of the reported Swiss GDP (Schiess and Schön-Bühlmann, 2004). Unfortunately satellite accounts do not get the publicity of economic measures such as GDP. But they are a start in the right direction.
Reports by nongovernmental organizations also show the enormous value of the work of care. A recent example is Counting on Care Work in Australia (Hoenig & Page, 2012), a comprehensive quantification of the Australian care sector, paid and unpaid. The study used both replacement value (which reflects the low pay of care work in the market) and opportunity cost (which yields a higher value on average, measuring opportunity cost for individuals who perform unpaid care instead of entering the paid work force). The study found that the care sector in Australia was worth an estimated $762.5 billion in 2009-10. Of this total, $112.4 billion was for paid care and $650.1 billion was for unpaid care work.
The latter was the equivalent of no less than 50.6% of GDP. Another key finding was that women contributed the majority of this unpaid care, similar to other world regions (Hoenig, & Page, 2012).
The Australian report pointed out that care work is a “public good” and that, given its profound implications for a nation’s overall well being, government intervention in the form of public policy and funding is required to ensure that appropriate levels of care are available (Hoenig and Page, 2012).
While data showing the huge economic value of care work continue to accumulate, they are still given scant attention by academics, media, policy makers, and the public. A major reason for this neglect is that the information does not fit into the old economic paradigms or the old ways of measuring economic health such as GDP. This is why the development of new measures of economic health such as the Social Wealth Economic Indicators being developed by the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) are so important.
We must show our nation’s policymakers the necessity for enacting more caring policies. There is a connection between the status of women and whether caring and caregiving are valued. Therefore, we must also show policymakers the necessity of raising the status of women worldwide.
The unsustainable nature of current ways of economic thinking and planning is further demonstrated by the fact that a growing number of jobs—not only in manufacturing but also in service industries, from receptionists to middle management—are being taken over by automation and robotics (Associated Press, 2013). This irreversible trend, which will further accelerate with the development and use of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, makes it even more urgent that we find alternatives to economic systems primarily driven by consumer spending.
In this article for the Kosmos Journal, Eisler lays out four interventions that provide the foundations for shifting from domination to partnership.
As detailed in Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century, educators need to keep in mind — and teach our students — to broaden our understanding of events by going beyond conventional political debates about right versus left, religious versus secular, Eastern or Western, or conservative versus liberal. Once students understand the dynamics of the tension between the partnership and domination systems as two basic human possibilities, they can go beyond surfaces. They can see the patterns that underlie seemingly unrelated currents and crosscurrents in our world — and be better equipped to live good lives and intervene in shaping their future. Read/ Buy Tomorrow’s Children.
You can form your own study and action group, using the following resources:
To create a caring economics, start a Study and Action Group on The Real Wealth of Nations.
To build partnership human and environmental relations, The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life is a key how-to book.
To ensure long-term environmental sustainability, use the action steps in The Power of Partnership and The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics.
To start a study group on The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future and/or Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body, use The Partnership Way: New Tools for Living and Learning, a workbook for facilitators by Riane Eisler and David Loye
To build partnership education, use Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education for the 21st Century
Partnership Studies Group Learn more about building partnership communities from this successful Partnership Studies Group at the University of Udine, Italy.
ALL-Associazione Laureati in Lingue is an active group of scholars at the University of Udine who are researching and advocating for partnership.
The Center for Partnership Systems is a public service organization dedicated to cultural transformation from domination to partnership systems. Founded in 1987, CPS has worked with thousands of individuals and organizations to change consciousness, promote positive personal action, encourage social advocacy, and influence policy.
CPS uses research, education, and advocacy to reframe thinking and social policy to achieve gender and racial equity, human rights, social justice, and building a successful economy. The Center for Partnership Studies is an internationally-recognized thought leader in strategies to create a “partnership culture” of human rights and equity.
For more details about CPS’s work and latest accomplishments, please visit us online at the Center For Partnership Systems website.
SAIV was co-founded by Dr. Riane Eisler and Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams in 2004, as a project of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.CenterForPartnership.org). The SAIV Global Council provides a moral voice to engage spiritual leaders, policy makers, and activists to advocate for increased resources to end the global pandemic of violence against women and children.
SAIV invites contributions from the public and faith communities for engagement to “break cycles of violence in families – and the families of nations.” Resources at www.saiv.org include the new Domestic Violence and Religion special collection of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, Dr. Eisler’s videos for teaching, discussion about moving from domination to partnership systems, the “Caring and Connected Parenting Guide” by Licia Rando endorsed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Desmond Tutu and Betty Williams, pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, and much more.
Ela Gandhi
Jane Goodall
Molly Melching
Emilia Muchawa
Netsai Mushonga
Millicent Obaso
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Durre Ahmed
A.T. Ariyaratne
Tenzin Choegyal Ngari Rinpoche
Prof. Chung Hyun-kyung
Kalon Rinchen Khando
Satish Kumar
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Betty Williams
Harvey Cox
Richard Deats
Riane Eisler
Joan Holmes
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Jim Kenney
Irfan Ahmad Khan
Frances Kissling
John Robbins
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Bill Schulz
Sunita Viswanath
Dr. Saleha Abedin
Prince El Hassan bin Talal
Her Majesty Queen Noor
Lauren Artress
Liliane Kshensky Baxter
John A. Buehrens
Raffi Cavoukian
Janet Chisholm
Deepak Chopra
Joan Chittister, OSB
“Human Evolution is now at a crossroads. Stripped to its essentials, the central human task is how to organize society to promote the survival of our species and the development of our unique potentials. A partnership society offers us a viable alternative.” — Riane Eisler, The Chalice and The Blade
From The Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer 2014
Can we build a more peaceful world where our great human potentials for consciousness, caring, and creativity are realized? What would this more equitable, less violent world look like? How can we build it?
These questions animated my research over the past four decades. They arose very early in my life, when my parents and I narrowly escaped from Nazi Europe. Had we not been able to flee my native Vienna and later find refuge in Cuba, we would almost certainly have been killed in the Holocaust, as happened to most of my extended family.
As I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, I didn’t realize that studying social systems would become my life’s work. By the time I did, it was clear that our present course is not sustainable. In our time of nuclear and biological weapons, violence to settle international disputes can be disastrous for us all—as can our once hallowed “conquest of nature” when advanced technologies are already causing environmental damage of unprecedented magnitude.
I saw that a grim future awaits my children – and all of us – unless there is transformative cultural change. But the critical issue addressed by my multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, historical study of human societies is: transformation from what to what?
Not so long ago, many people thought that shifting from capitalism to communism would bring a more just, less violent society. But the communist revolutions in Russia and China brought further violence and injustice.
Today many people believe that capitalism and democratic elections are the solution. But capitalism has not brought peace or equity: Hitler was democratically elected, and elections following the Arab Spring led to repressive Islamist regimes.
Others argue that returning to pre-scientific Western times or replacing Western
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*Portions of this article draw from The Chalice and the Blade, Sacred Pleasure, Tomorrow’s Children, The Power of Partnership, The Real Wealth of Nations, and other publications by Riane Eisler
secularism, science, and technology with Eastern religions will cure our world’s ills. They ignore that the religious Middle Ages were brutally violent and
repressive, that Eastern religions have helped perpetuate inequality and
oppression, and that today’s fundamentalist religious cultures, both Eastern and Western, are behind some of our planet’s most serious problems.
All these approaches are based on old thinking – and, as Einstein observed, the same thinking that created our problems cannot solve them. As long as we look at societies from the perspective of conventional categories such as capitalist vs. socialist, Eastern vs. Western, religious vs. secular, or technologically developed vs. undeveloped, we cannot effect real cultural transformation. Indeed, history amply shows that societies in every one of these categories can be, and have been, repressive, unjust, and violent.
This is why my re-examination of social systems transcends old social categories. It uses a new method of analysis (the study of relational dynamics) that draws from a larger data base than conventional studies. It looks at a much larger, holistic picture that includes the whole of humanity, both its female and male halves; the whole of our lives, not only the “public “ sphere of politics and economics but where we all live, in our family and other intimate relations; and the whole of our history, including the thousands of years we call prehistory.
Looking at this more complete picture makes it possible to see interactive relationships or configurations that are not visible through the lenses of old social categories. There were no names for these social configurations, so I called one the domination system and the other the partnership system.
Looking at history from the perspective of the partnership system and the domination system as two underlying social possibilities, we see patterns behind seemingly random events.
We see that much that is today considered new and radical actually has very ancient roots in societies that for most of our prehistory oriented more to the partnership system. As I detail in The Chalice and the Blade, Sacred Pleasure, and other works, there are no signs of warfare in the archeological record until just a few thousand years ago; houses and burials do not reflect large gaps between haves and have-nots; and these earlier societies were neither patriarchies nor matriarchies but cultures where women and men were equally valued.
But archeology and myths also reveal signs of a major cultural shift toward the domination system. That is the bad news. The good news is that over the last centuries there has been strong movement to reverse this shift in cultural direction.
One modern progressive movement after another has challenged traditions of domination – from the “divinely-ordained” right of despotic kings to rule their “subjects,” the “divinely-ordained” right of men to rule the women and children in the “castles” of their homes, and the “divinely-ordained” right of one race or nation to rule over another, all the way to man’s “divinely ordained” right to dominate and conquer nature.
All these movements have been fiercely resisted. And though there has been forward movement, even after gains were made, there have been massive regressions to more rigid domination systems – from the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes of the 20th century to today’s “religious fundamentalists,” who are actually domination fundamentalists seeking to push us back to a time when most men and all women did not question their subordinate place under those in control.
To answer the question of why the movement toward a more equitable and peaceful society keeps faltering, we have to look at the connection between, on the one hand, whether a society is peaceful and equitable or warlike and inequitable, and, on the other hand, how it structures the most fundamental human relations: the relations between the female and male halves of humanity and between them and their daughters and sons.
Because this connection has been ignored, we have lacked the solid foundations for a more peaceful and caring social organization. The main focus of progressive movements has been on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid: political and economic domination. But the base on which the pyramid keeps rebuilding itself – the primary human relations where children first learn what is considered normal or abnormal, possible or impossible, moral or immoral – has remained largely in place.
This explains why those who want to push us back to a more autocratic, violent, and unjust way of living uniformly work to maintain or impose rigid rankings of domination in gender and parent-child relations. For the Nazis, a top priority was getting women back into their “traditional” place in a “traditional” family – code words for a top-down, male-dominated, authoritarian family. This was also a priority for Stalin in the former Soviet Union and Khomeini in Iran. It still is for so-called religious fundamentalists today – both Eastern and Western – who, not coincidentally, also back “holy wars” and top-down rule.
Yet, ironically, for many people who consider themselves progressives, women’s rights and children’s rights are still “just” women’s and children’s issues.
To move forward we need new social categories that show the connection between what is considered normal in gender and childhood relations and whether societies are more peaceful and equitable or inequitable and violent.
Cross-culturally and through history, societies adhering closely to the domination system have the following core configuration:
• Authoritarian rule in both the family and state or tribe and hierarchies of domination;
• The ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, and greater valuing of stereotypically “hard” or “masculine” traits and activities like domination and violence;
• A high degree of institutionalized or built-in violence – from wife and child beating to war and terrorism, since fear and force ultimately maintain domination;
• Stories that present hierarchies of domination as divinely or naturally ordained – beginning with the rigid ranking of male over female.
Moving toward the partnership side of the continuum – and it is always a matter of degree – we see a different configuration:
• A more democratic organization in both the family and state or tribe;
• Both halves of humanity are equally valued, and stereotypically feminine values such as caring and nonviolence (which are considered “unmanly” in the domination system) are highly regarded, whether in women or men;
• A less violent way of living, since violence is not needed to maintain rigid rankings of domination, be it in families or the family of nations;
• Beliefs that present relations of mutual respect, accountability, and benefit as natural, and support hierarchies of actualization, where power is used to empower rather than disempower others.
The partnership configuration is a blueprint for a more equitable, caring, and sustainable future. It makes it possible to identify four cornerstones that provide solid foundations for this future.
Neuroscience shows that the neural pathways of our brains are not set at birth: they are largely formed in interaction with a child’s early experiences. This is why, although people can, and do, change throughout life, early experiences and relations are critical. If family relations based on chronic violations of human rights are considered normal and moral, they provide mental and emotional models for condoning such violations in other relations. If these relations are violent, children also learn that violence from those who are more powerful toward those who are less powerful is an acceptable way of dealing with conflicts and/or problems.
Fortunately, some people reject these teachings. But unfortunately many replicate them, not only in their intimate relations but in all relations – including international ones. Coercive, inequitable, and violent childrearing is therefore foundational to the imposition and maintenance of a coercive, inequitable, and chronically violent social organization.
Since it is through childhood experiences and relations that people acquire habits of feeling, thinking, and behavior, we need a global campaign against abuse and violence in childhood relations:
• Education: providing both women and men the knowledge and skills for empathic, sensitive, nonviolent, authoritative rather than authoritarian childrearing. A resource is the “Caring and Connected Parenting Guide” that can be downloaded for free at www.saiv.org.
• Laws: enacting and enforcing laws criminalizing child abuse and legislation funding education for nonviolent, empathic, and fair childrearing. “Protecting the Majority of Humanity” shows hot international law can protect children and women from family violence.
• Media: eliminating the presentation of violence as a means of resolving conflicts and “comedies” where family members abuse and humiliate each other.
• Morality: engaging spiritual and religious leaders to take a strong stand against intimate violence – the violence that every year blights, and often takes, the lives of millions of children and women, and leads to violence in all relations. This is the mission of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV) .
How a society constructs the roles and relations of the two halves of humanity – women and men – is not “just a women’s issue.” It not only affects both women’s and men’s individual life options; it also shapes families, education, religion, politics, and economics.
When people learn to equate difference – beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between male and female – with superiority or inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving, they internalize a template for relations that can automatically be applied to a different race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth.
The social construction of gender roles and relations also shapes a society’s guiding values. Along with the subordination of the female half of humanity we inherited from more rigid domination times, comes the subordination of traits and activities stereotypically associated with femininity, such as caring, caregiving, and non-violence that in domination systems are considered unfit for “real men.”
This gendered system of values adverse affects general quality of life. For example, Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life –a study based on statistics from 89 nations conducted by the Center for Partnership Studies – found that in significant ways the status of women can be a better predictor of general quality of life than Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the conventional measure of a nation’s economic health. Since then other studies, such as the World Economic Forums’ Gender Gap reports, have confirmed this correlation between the status of women and a nation’s economic success and quality of life.
A sign of hope is the blurring of rigid gender stereotypes. Men are nurturing babies and women are entering positions of economic and political leadership. But this movement remains slow and localized, and in some cultures and subcultures is fiercely opposed.
What is needed is a global campaign for equitable and nonviolent gender relations backed by progressive leaders.
As long as women still hold a small minority of political positions, we cannot really talk of representative democracy. As long as boys and men learn to equate “real masculinity” with violence and control—be it through “heroic” epics, war toys, or violent TV, films, and video games—we cannot realistically expect an end to the arms build-ups that are today bankrupting our world and the terrorism and aggressive warfare that in our age of nuclear and chemical warfare threaten our survival. Nor can we realistically expect an end to racism, anti-Semitism, and other ugly isms as long as people learn early on to equate difference—beginning with the fundamental difference between female and male—with superiority or inferiority, with dominating or being dominated.
Current economic systems—whether capitalist, socialist, or communist— endanger our natural life-support. The gap between haves and have-nots has been growing both between and within nations. Poverty seems intractable, speculation is rampant, as are insensitive and ultimately destructive financial practices.
As documented in The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, we need a new economics. The real wealth of our world is not financial; it consists of the contributions of people and of nature. What’s needed are economic measurements, policies, and practices that give visibility and value to the most important human work: the work of caring for people, beginning in childhood, and caring for nature.
This is essential not only for human and environmental reasons, but for purely economic ones. To create the “high quality human capital” economists say is needed for the postindustrial information/knowledge era, we must recognize what both psychology and neuroscience tell us: this capital largely depends on the kind of care and early education children receive.
Strong policy support for the caregiving work performed in both the market and the household economic sectors is essential to produce this “high quality human capital.” This support is also urgently needed to cut through cycles of poverty, since worldwide women still do the bulk of this work for very low wages in the market and for free in homes – largely accounting for the disproportionate poverty of women globally.
Important positive trends are that many West European nations offer monetary assistance and education for parenting, along with paid parental leave, health care, and high quality early childhood education.
Satellite economic indicators are also counting the economic value of the work of caregiving in homes. The Swiss government found that if the unpaid work in households were included, it would constitute 40 percent of the reported Swiss GDP. A recent Australian study found an even higher value of 50 percent!
It makes no sense to talk of hunger and poverty in generalities when the mass of the world’s poor and the poorest of the poor are women and children. Even in the rich United States, women over the age of 65 are, according to U.S. Census statistics, twice as likely to be poor as men over 65. A major reason is that most of these women are, or were, caregivers.
The Center for Partnership Studies’ Caring Economy Campaign (CEC) demonstrates the importance of investing in caring for people, starting in early childhood, through caregiver tax credits, Social Security for caregivers, and subsidies for childcare. CEC offers resources, training, and advocacy opportunities, including an online leadership training program.
The CEC is developing new Social Wealth Economic indicators that show the enormous economic value of the work of care and early education, as well as focusing attention on marginalized populations, such as people of color in the United States.
People need meaningful work. A negative income tax or guaranteed income for doing nothing is no solution to chronic poverty. The most important and meaningful work is that of caring for other humans, particularly our children and our growing elderly population, as well as for our natural environment. Giving value to caring and caregiving imbues work with meaning. It also gives work a spiritual dimension as at the core of all spiritual traditions are compassion and love.
Cultural transformation requires accurate stories about “human nature.”
The message of many stories we inherited from earlier times is that dominating or being dominated are our only alternatives. Religious stories about “original sin” and secular stories about “evolutionary imperatives” claim that humans are innately sinful and violent – and must be rigidly controlled. But findings from neuroscience demonstrate that though we humans have the capacity for cruelty and violence, we are actually “wired” more for empathic and caring relationships. For example, studies show that the pleasure centers in our brains light up more when we give than when we win.
Spreading this knowledge about human nature requires a concerted effort through the arts, music, literature, and science. We also have to spread the new language of the partnership system and domination system. We must show that the struggle for our future is not between religion and secularism, right and left, East and West, or capitalism and socialism, but within all these societies between traditions of domination and a partnership way of life.
These changes in language and stories have enormous implications for all aspects of life, including spirituality and morality. Rather than being used to coerce, dominate, and all too often kill, morality is imbued with caring and love. Spirituality is no longer an escape to otherworldly realms from the suffering inherent in a domination world, but an active engagement in creating a better world right here on Earth – a world where peace is a normal state, rather than merely an interval between wars.
Every one of us can play a role in the cultural transformation from domination to partnership. Working together, we can build the foundations for a more peaceful, equitable, sustainable world where all children can realize their capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity – the capacities that make us fully human.
1. www.saiv.org/parenting-guide
2. www.partnershipway.org/learn-more/articles-by-riane-eisler/peace-human-rights-violence-terrorism/Protecting the Majority of Humanity Dec 2010.pdf/view?
3. www.saiv.org
4. www.partnershipway.org/learn-more/partnership-books/books/women-men-and-the-global-quality-of-life
5. www.partnershipway.org/learn-more/partnership-books/the-real-wealth-of-nations-creating-a-caring-economics
6. www.caringeconomy.org
7. www.caringeconomy.org/CELP
