Matriarchy in Astreiant

Chenedolle is quite blatantly a matriarchal society. (One of the reasons everyone thinks of their neighbor, Chadron, as a barbarous place is that they are ruled by kings, and their society is patriarchal. They use magic in weird ways, probably also because they’re ruled by men…) This was a deliberate choice: Lisa and I wanted to foreground problems with gender stereotyping, and to do so in a way that made it very hard to miss. At the same time, we didn’t think that merely inverting stereotypes was particularly interesting, so we started with some fundamental principles — assumptions that everyone in Chenedolle accepts without thinking. 

First, you can only be absolutely certain of a child’s maternity. Therefore births are witnessed whenever humanly possible, and inheritance is matrilineal. Second, women are responsible for and in control of “the home,” and “the home” includes the greater polity. Third, women and feminine things in general are fixed and stable, while men and masculine things are mutable, vagrant, and unreliable. For example, merchants resident, the owners of the businesses that dominate Astreiant’s (and Chenedolle’s) economy, are generally women, and the profession is considered feminine, while merchants venturer, whose businesses handle import/export, are more commonly men and the profession is masculine. There is an “out,” because all societies need an escape valve: a person’s stars may be masculine or feminine without necessarily being related to their sex or gender, and this is the usual explanation when you find, for example, a woman soldier or a male merchant resident. (Though the latter is likely also to have inherited his position from his mother, and to have no sisters to take over the business.)

Men join their wives’ families, rather than the other way around. We also decided to borrow some marriage practices from early modern Europe, particularly the idea that legal, contractual marriage is a commercial and/or political connection between two families rather than an arrangement between individuals. Therefore, marriage transfers full legal responsibility for men from their families of origin to their wives’ families. This is why, in Fairs’ Point, it matters so much that Besetje’s father was married to her mother: the Quentiers, and Besetje in particular, are now responsible for taking care of her father, in a way they would not be if this hadn’t been a marriage. In this case, it not only places an untenable financial burden on Besetje, but it threatens to upset the balance of power within the family.

Most ordinary people don’t marry. They either make informal arrangements, and if there are children, the mother acknowledges the man as the child’s father, or create contractual obligations, usually under a formula known as a contract of maintenance, by which the woman acknowledges the services of the man and spells out any obligations she assumes toward him. This also means that illegitimacy is defined differently in Chenedolliste society. First, there’s no stigma attached to a child born “out of wedlock.” Since most people don’t marry, what matters is whether the mother claims and raises the infant. It is possible for a marriage agreement or other contract to specify inheritance arrangements that prioritize children by acknowledged fathers, or a woman may prefer the children of one father over another, but a claimed child always has a legal and societal claim on her mother.

However. A woman may reject the child she bore. In the past, this amounted to infanticide except in rare cases where someone was present and able to step in and raise the child. In the era of the novels, it’s possible and more common for the father or the father’s female relatives to step in, but the child is deemed motherless, and carries that social stigma lifelong. Something, after all, must be wrong with a person if his own mother rejected him. (Motherless children are far more likely to be male than female, as a daughter is much more desirable than a son.) This is what happened to Eslingen: for reasons that he has never known, his mother rejected him, and he was raised by his father and his father’s sister. His father never told anyone who his mother was, and there’s really no way for Eslingen to find out. For contrast, Rathe’s parents never married, nor did they have a maintenance contract, but they lived together and shared a household. Rathe was raised by both of them until he reached apprentice-age and joined the points. Not long after, his parents came to an amicable parting, and Rathe remains in touch with both of them. His mother owns the shop which is also her residence; his father moves from job to job, and sometimes works outside the city, always in someone else’s household.

Women are presumed to be sexual beings with full agency, and are presumed, as the householders, to control the circumstances of any relationship with a man. (The rules and assumptions of lemanry are different, and will get their own post at some point.) Therefore, sex for hire generally involves a woman hiring a man, sometimes with the explicit purpose of getting a child, and sometimes simply for her amusement, sexual and otherwise. The hired man, referred to as a lady’s-friend or less politely as a hobby-horse, is expected to dance to her tune, and to earn his pay by providing the services for which he was hired. There are women who sell their sexual favors, like Rathe’s old friend Annechon, but they are mostly employed by other women (generally of higher rank) or by men (also generally of higher rank, and often relatively young and inexperienced) who are socially deprecated for not being able to achieve a “normal” relationship. One of the reasons I wanted to write Point of Hearts was to be able to work in a couple of subplots about sex, sex work, and marriage in the city.

Sexual violence is not unknown, but it is relatively rare: rape disrupts rather than enforces the social hierarchy, and provides no social gain for the aggressor. It’s considered to be anti-social behavior like any other act of violence, and is dealt with accordingly. This is not to say that there is no sexual coercion in Chenedolle. Rather, it’s usually more subtle, done through lies and bribes and manipulation, and only rarely by direct threat. Any direct threat is more likely to come from a woman of status and be directed at a man, and it’s less likely to be a threat of violence than a threat to the man’s social standing: men, particularly men of status, are vulnerable to public opinion in a way that women are not. Such threats are frowned on, but also often overlooked, particularly when made by powerful women.

We deliberately didn’t set out to write a utopia. The novels are structured as mysteries, and need ongoing sources of conflict. More than that, we thought that simply reversing roles, changing who held power over whom, wouldn’t necessarily resolve social conflicts. We were most interested in the ways that this would change the social conflicts. But we also weren’t interested in writing a dystopia. We wanted to try to create the kind of complicated, messy society that most of us live in already, but by changing the rules and assumptions, remove the apparent inevitability. And maybe, just maybe, offer a new perspective on our own world.