The Goddess movement and second-wave feminism

Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian-American archaeologist trained at Vytautas Magnus and Tübingen who joined UCLA in 1963. Her work at Neolithic Balkan and Anatolian sites in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s produced three major synthetic works: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991).

Gimbutas argued that a coherent Old European civilisation flourished from roughly 7000 to 3500 BCE across the Balkans, the Aegean, and Anatolia; that this civilisation was matrifocal, peaceful, and organised around a Great Goddess whose iconography she catalogued; and that it was terminated by successive waves of patriarchal Indo-European invasion from the Pontic steppe. The archaeological reception of the Gimbutas thesis was mixed at the time and remains contested. The Kurgan hypothesis for the Indo-European migrations — the least controversial part of her work — is now the mainstream position. The wider matrifocal-Goddess-civilisation claim is treated critically by Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (Beacon Press, 2000).

The reception in the parallel feminist intellectual scene was immediate and enthusiastic. Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman (Dial Press, 1976) took the same thesis into popular treatment for a feminist audience, drawing directly on Gimbutas and on Erich Neumann's The Great Mother. Stone argued that pre-patriarchal religions were female-centred, that the transition to patriarchal monotheism was violent and deliberate, and that recovering the older religious framework was integral to women's liberation.

Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row, 1987) restated the Stone-Gimbutas synthesis in political-theoretical form. Eisler proposed a "dominator" vs "partnership" cultural typology, identified the pre-Kurgan Old European civilisation as the paradigmatic partnership society, and argued that contemporary feminism was the direct historical inheritor of the pre-patriarchal cultural order.

Starhawk's The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (Harper & Row, 1979) took the same thesis into explicit religious form for the feminist neopagan movement. The book is now in its third edition and remains the foundational text of the Reclaiming tradition Starhawk co-founded in San Francisco in 1980. The primary-source-through-popular-treatment-to-religious-practice chain from Gimbutas (1974) through Stone (1976), Eisler (1987), and Starhawk (1979) is the documented intellectual pipeline of the Goddess movement into second-wave feminism.