Every so often, I get a question that makes me blink. The most recent one was something along the lines of “How would a matriarchal society work, especially in terms of politics, child rearing, property, gender roles, religion, etc.?”
I always want to start my answers with a different question, to wit, “You do remember that you are making this stuff up, yes?”
In fiction, the key thing about the worldbuilding is that the writer makes it plausible over the course of the story. Writers can make up all sorts of impossible things, from talking trees and flying horses to amoeba-like aliens who can infect people and take over their brains, and even those readers who know enough physics or biology or chemistry to identify just how impossible those things are will suspend their disbelief for the course of the story…if the writer presents them right.
What this means is that the only reasonable answers to “How would a matriarchal society work?” are “Which one?” and “How does your particular story need it to work?” Because the other thing is that there isn’t a working matriarchal society that is the only plausible portrayal that readers will buy. There have already been dozens, ranging from the legends of the warrior Amazons to more modern stories and novels like Joanna Russ’s “When it Changed,” Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Ruins of Isis, Jane Yolen’s Sister Light, Sister Dark, and the dark elven drow of the D&D “Forgotten Realms” novels, among others.
The matriarchal societies portrayed in fiction are wildly different from each other, because each of them is the kind of place their author wanted to write about, or allowed the author to make the point they wanted to make, or simply let the author tell the story they wanted to tell. How each author came up with their particular version, and how they made it seem plausible, has to do with all those things, as well as with the particular writer’s process.
So how does one go about inventing a society?
Note that I took the “matriarchal” out of that question, because the process of making up a society out of whole cloth doesn’t change depending on who is in charge in that society or what kind of government they have. The process of making those things up depends mainly on the writer and the story the writer wants to tell.
A writer who usually begins with characters or a plot, or some combination, has significant constraints on the sort of society they can invent. They already have characters, who will have to be plausible residents of the society that shaped them; they already have a plot, which has to be believable in the context of the society they are going to invent. A Romance writer whose plot involves the problems faced by a noblewoman in love with a stableboy needs a society that has noblewomen, stableboys, and a serious social taboo against the two becoming romantically involved, else their plot falls apart. A writer who usually starts with world-building doesn’t have those constraints.
There’s also the question of how real and/or how mimetic the writer needs or wants their stories to be. At one extreme are writers whose fiction is set in somewhere that is as close to reality as they can make it – modern-day fiction set in LA or New Delhi or London, historical fiction that’s meticulously researched in every detail, from the style of hat to the newspaper headline on the heroine’s birthday. At the other extreme are writers who simply make it up, Alice-in-Wonderland style.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle, but tending toward one end or the other, and this affects how we go about inventing the societies we’re going to use. Writers who start with characters or a plot usually begin, consciously or unconsciously, by examining the constraints they’re working under. The writer who asked me that original question was one of these. He clearly had a story in mind that required a matriarchal society in it somewhere; equally clearly, he didn’t want the story set in a specific real-life culture. However, that writer also didn’t want to make up a surreal, Alice in Wonderland version of a matriarchal society. He wanted it to be realistic, grounded in facts, which means finding out what the facts are. Which means research.
There are two sorts of research that this writer needed to do: First, looking at the things that all societies have to do if they want to stay stable (things like teaching customs and beliefs to children and immigrants, dealing with other societies, maintaining infrastructure, regulating things that need regulating, trade (both internal and external), protecting its citizens (both from crime and from invasion), and so on. Second, the writer will need to look at what is known about real-life matriarchal and matrilineal societies, and where (and in what ways) they differ from other sorts of societies … and where (and in what ways) they generally don’t differ from other societies.
Once the writer has this information, they can start making the decisions necessary to invent their society. First up is, given what they know from their research, are they going to use a thinly disguised version of a real-life or historical society, or are they going to cobble together bits and pieces of different societies to make something that isn’t instantly recognizable, but that still mimics real life?
Ultimately, however, the really important question is, what can the writer make the readers believe? Some perfectly true things simply will not pass muster with readers because they contradict what “everybody knows.” The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines “pigs” as a slang term for thief-takers, i.e., police, even though everybody knows that’s slang from the 1960s. Some perfectly good writers have trouble making anything seem real unless it conforms to what they “know” is true, even if they have solid historical evidence that in some place/time, it worked a different way. Some writers lack the confidence to make up a society if they can’t point to real-life factual examples of every aspect. Some writers think it’s more fun to write in the cracks of real history, keeping everything as verifiably factual as possible. None of these is a right or wrong approach; they’re just how different writers approach things.
I think that one decision which probably needs to make early is: where do you start?
For example, you may want to tell a story set in a (particular) matriarchal society, so that’s the first thing you know about it, and everything else has to fit in with that. (E.g. the gendering of jobs will imply their status; if you have a female teacher of children in this society you’re implying that it’s regarded as an important position.)
Or you may want a society that’s not like the Good Guys, so it’s defined by doing things differently. Or you may have a flood plain or an ice planet on your map, and want to build a society that might plausibly come out of that. My point is that the first decision very often defines the flavour of what comes later.
This.
I’d go further and say, it’s keeping the flavour consistent that matters most. I can work around inconvenient facts, or jiggle them to make them fit with what’s already established. But if a particular bit of world-building doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t matter how logically consistent it is, it’s going to jar the reader, potentially right out of the story.
My reflexive response to such a question is “What makes you think I would know?”
But the place I usually start is with a Cool Bit or three – “Women come into their magic powers at menopause” or “Space battles rarely produce fatal casualties.” Then I try to figure out how these Cool Bits would fit in a larger setting, with both what other elements would produce them and what other elements they would produce. Another big motivation of mine is “fixing” parts that have annoyed me when other writers did something similar. I have to please myself before I can try to please anyone else.
On the other hand, when “looking at the things that all societies have to do if they want to stay stable” it’s worth taking a moment to consider what other people believe societies have to do to stay stable, even if you don’t agree.
And one more thought: Who are the dissidents in your fictional society, and how much of a point do they have?
“I am going to ask my students to read one book of travel, history, cultural anthropology, or similar account that will… shame them out of concocting another pseudo-medieval non-society peopled by folks like themselves (and a few dragons and vampires, also much like themselves).”
—John Crowley
“It really happens!” is no excuse when the thing that happens does not happen with other things that also happen in your story.
For instance, there really were masquerade balls in history, and there really were societies in which there was little surplus so that even nobleman would work their own land and wear the clothes spun, woven, and sewn in their own household by the noblewomen. The former does not go with the latter because it would be an insane luxury to waste that much cloth. Carnival and other topsy-turvey times would be characterized by borrowing other people’s clothes, ill-suited to you. (And forget the modern day wedding gown. You got a new dress if you could, and then you wore it for festive occasions for the rest of your life, until finally you were (often enough) buried in it.)
Hear hear!
Not every reader thinks about what they’re reading in enough detail to spot and be put off by problems of that sort, but at least in my experience many fantasy and SF readers are quite prone to it. (Of course one can’t really compare with readers who prefer fiction set in the real world, because errors there are more likely to be failures of research rather than inconsistencies.)
One of my favourite “really happened” things that seems implausible: the cylinder in a Colt Single Action Army (“Peacemaker”) swings out to the right. This makes it much easier to reload if you transfer it to the left hand first, and there’s been some speculation that Sam Colt was left-handed; there’s certainly no mechanical benefit to doing it that way. It was such a successful gun that it was copied in detail, including the right-swinging cylinder.
So much depends on the type of book you are writing. However one way to develop the cultural impact of a gee-whiz idea (or social shift) is to examine it through the lens of 5 or 10 social strata*.
As in: how will this affect a local politician, a detective, a homeless woman, a plumber, a rich merchant. You could write a paragraph from each of their viewpoints.
Now, do you want to bore the reader with all that backstory? It depends on the book.
*I believe this advice came from M. Kowal.
Right now I’m slogging through building three imaginary houses, which is smaller in scale but still a lot of detail to deal with. It helps, a little, that they’re three similar-but-not-identical neighboring houses, and that I already know the characters who live in them.
It doesn’t help that I’m the kind of writer who wants/needs to build the entire iceberg, and not just the one-eighth that sticks up into the story. (I run into the same trouble with character descriptions too – it’s not just “how do I describe this character in the story” but also “how do I describe this character in my own notes,” with the notes being much more comprehensive.)
“thief-takers, i.e., police”
There were no police in our sense in England in 1811. Thief takers were private individuals catching criminals in order to receive rewards, public or private.
The most famous one was Jonathan Wild, self titled thief-taker general, who profitably combined the professions of thief-taker, employer of thieves, and recoverer of stolen property for about a decade, but was eventually hanged. He featured in a number of works of fiction, most notably as Mr. Peachum in “The Beggar’s Opera.”
The way I see the issue you are describing is that world building feels more like discovery than invention. Given the part of the world you already have, what does that imply about the parts you have not yet thought through?
I know things about the background to my first novel that I not only did not know when I started writing it, I did not know them when I finished writing it.