Of all social institutions, there is probably none whose universality is granted so unanimously by anthropologists as patriarchy. There is not, nor has there ever been, any society that even remotely failed to associate authority and leadership in suprafamilial areas with the male. There are no borderline cases. He says there has never been a matriarchy. If the reader insists on maintaining a belief in a once-existent matriarchal society, all we can do is demand evidence more convincing than his desire that there should have been one.
Misinformation has a long life.
Dr. Goldberg studied 32 introductory sociology textbooks, and discovered that all but two begin their chapters on sex roles with the claim that anthropologist Margaret Mead said the Tchambuli of New Guinea reversed male-female sex roles. Dr. Mead had, in fact, had been denying this claim for fifty years. Some of the authors of current texts have admitted to me in private that they know the Tchambuli are not an exception. Feminists, he says, often assume that women, if not for social conditioning, would be just as capable as men of a career in nuclear physics. He argues that these tendencies are manifestations of neuro-endocrinological differences between men and women, and that male dominance serves obvious survival functions.