No One Should Be Surprised That Celtic Britain Was Women-Centric

The clues have been there all along

A close-up of ‘Boudicca Haranguing the Britons’ by William Sharp (ca. 1793) via Wikimedia Commons

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Diodorus of Sicily described Celtic women as ‘not only like the men in their great stature but (..) a match for them in courage as well.’

The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus painted an even more vivid picture:

In a fight any one of them [Gauls] can resist several strangers at a time, with no other help than his wife’s, who is even more formidable. You should see these viragos, neck veins swollen with rage, swinging their robust and snow-white arms, using their feet and their fists and landing blows that seem triggered off by a catapult.

Many other ancient Roman writers, including the politician Julius Caesar, were similarly fascinated — or terrified — by the women they encountered among the Celts. They were said to be able to take multiple husbands, divorce, inherit property, hold positions of power and fight in battles. Actually, two of the earliest recorded British rulers were women: Cartimandua and Boudica. Cartimandua was the warrior-queen of the Brigantes, a tribe covering much of northern England, and Boudicca (sometimes written as Boadicea) of the eastern England Iceni tribe. Boudicca also famously led a rebellion against Roman forces around 60–61 CE.

Still, it’s been argued that such accounts were more legend or propaganda than reality — simply a way to portray ancient Celtic women as ‘wild,’ ‘untamed,’ and ‘primitive,’ so unlike the ‘gentle’ Roman women who weren’t even allowed to speak in public. Besides, it’s well-known that invaders don’t always depict the cultures they conquer in a flattering or truthful light.

But recent DNA evidence suggests that Roman depictions of women in Celtic Britain were actually not as exaggerated as once believed.

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One important thing to keep in mind about any past — or present — society where women are treated on an equal footing with men or even take centre stage, is that they’re more complex than simply being the reverse of the patriarchal structures we’re most familiar with.

In fact, communities that are matrilineal — where descent is traced through the female line — matrilocal — where women remain near their families after marriage — or matricentric/matrifocal — with women heading the household — are usually egalitarian, with both women and men playing significant roles. As Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor note in their 1987 cross-disciplinary study, The Great Cosmic Mother, ‘the early matrifocal groups were concentrated on maintaining, rather than exploiting, life.’

According to a study published last week in Nature, this seems to have been true of Britain’s Celtic society as well.

Researchers examined ancient DNA from 57 graves at Late Iron Age (around 2,000 years old) Durotrigian burial sites in southwest England and found that two-thirds of the individuals descended from a single maternal lineage. Meanwhile, most of the individuals who were unrelated to it were male. These findings suggest that it was female, not male, ties that were central to Celtic social networks before the Roman invasion, with women remaining in their familial circles, managing land and property and likely inheriting it, too, and men joining them from elsewhere through marriage.

In other words: the Durotriges were matrilocal and matrilineal. However, burials of male spouses in one of the sites — cemeteries at Winterborne Kingston — indicate that men held some influence in these societies as well.

Expanding their research, the team also investigated human remains from over 150 archaeological sites across prehistoric Britain, spanning 6,000 years, and found several other examples of similar communities. Interestingly, and as previous studies also show, many Celtic burials containing prestigious grave goods — which suggest a high status of the individual — belonged to women. But, of course, such burials were previously dismissed as ‘ritualistic’ or mistakenly attributed to… men.

Well, these latest findings provide strong evidence that matrilocality and matrilineality were indeed widespread in Iron Age Britain and perhaps even in the earlier Bronze Age period as well.

As Lara Cassidy, the study’s lead author and a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, told The New York Times:

If you look at what classical writers were talking about and if you look at the archaeological context, there are a lot of hints that women were able to attain high status in these societies.

Yet Cassidy, like many others, said she was ‘shocked’ by the findings.

Are they really that shocking, though?

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It has long been proposed that life in Celtic-speaking areas of Europe was more fluid and positively less male-dominated than in, say, the Roman Empire. And not just by the ancient Roman writers.

In his 1975 book, Women of the Celts, French historian Jean Markale delved into historical sources, old Welsh and Irish laws, as well mythological traditions to argue that Celtic women — whether Irish, Breton, or British — ‘enjoyed freedom and rights’ and ‘could become head of the family, rule, be a prophetess, enchantress or educator, could marry or remain a virgin (…), and could inherit part of her father’s or mother’s property.’ Still, it was an order in which women and men lived harmoniously. As he notes:

(…) women enjoyed privileges that would have made the Roman women of the same period green with envy. Here was a harmony between the roles of men and women that was not dependent on the superiority of one sex over the other, but on an equality in which each could feel comfortable.

Markale also hypothesised this resulted from worshipping a goddess, or at least ‘a divinity with female characteristics.’

A couple of decades later, in his 1995 book Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature, British historian Peter Berresford Ellis similarly showed that women in Celtic myths, laws, and history were at least equal — if not superior — to men. Both Markale and Ellis also suggested that it was only after the Celts’ encounters with patriarchal cultures — such as the Romans — and the introduction of Western Christianity that women’s rights began to erode.

Modern studies echo these claims, too. Just last year, another ancient DNA research published in Nature revealed that two of Germany’s famous Iron Age Celtic elites’ burials — known as Fürstengräber — belonged to uncle and nephew who were related through the maternal line. This discovery suggests that Celtic clans revolved around matrilineal dynasties, with power passing through mothers rather than fathers.

However, the existence of women-centric or egalitarian communities stretches far beyond Celtic prehistory. And we’ve had records and evidence of that for quite a while as well.

Actually, the earliest research dates back to… the nineteenth century, beginning with Johann Jakob Bachofen’s 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right), which proposed that most early societies were female-dominated, and Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 Ancient Society that recounted the time he spend studying the Iroquois tribe in North America he concluded to be both matrilinear and matrifocal. But, as Robert Briffault’s monumental 1927 work The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions shows, similar evidence can be found across the globe.

Even earlier written accounts acknowledge this, too, even if frequently woven in between myths and other fantastical narratives.

Around 100 BCE, Diodorus of Sicily described how in Egypt, ‘the husband (..) appertains to the wife and it is stipulated between them that the man shall obey the woman in all things.’ Herodotus, the so-called ‘Father of History,’ noted that the Sauromatian women of Eastern Iran had power and influence equal to that of men. Other ancient writers also made similar observations about Germanic tribes, Iberian societies — territories of modern Spain and Portugal — and early Indian cultures.

The customs that prioritised women, or neither gender, undoubtedly seemed strange to those living in patriarchal societies where male superiority was as unquestionable as the rising sun. Still, they were normal features of prehistoric communities throughout the entire world.

As we know from later accounts by European colonisers (as biased as they were) as well as the work of Indigenous scholars, they were also part of many precolonial cultures. From Aztec and Maya societies in the Americas, Southeast Asian societies in modern-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and the Igbo people in West Africa, to name a few, women often enjoyed greater economic and cultural freedom than was typical for their European counterparts at the time. But as colonisers brutally enforced their own patriarchal norms, the nuances of indigenous gender roles and the complexities of their societies were dismantled.

Still, modern research estimates that at least 160 communities worldwide — primarily in Asia, Africa, and the Americas — continue to maintain matrilineal, matrilocal, and/or matrifocal structures, preserving practices that date back centuries.

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None of this is to suggest that modern research, like the booming field of ancient DNA studies, lacks significance just because similar information has existed for a long time. Quite the opposite. The fact that so little of it has sunk in — as evidenced by, well, the state of our world today — makes this research essential.

It’s fantastic to see more and more data and material evidence demonstrating, with such unprecedented accuracy, that male dominance is neither universal, innate, nor inevitable and that egalitarian female-centred social structures have existed across time and cultures. As research into our past continues, I have no doubt we’ll uncover even more evidence to support this (a topic I’ve covered frequently as new studies emerge practically every other week).

Still, I believe it’s important to put all of this new research within a broader historical framework and acknowledge that none of it is — or rather should be — that surprising. So many scholars and researchers and writers have devoted their lives to examining anthropological, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence, pointing to the same conclusions: human societies have been incredibly diverse, and many did not prioritise male dominance as ours have. But unfortunately, such work was often dismissed or confined to the fringes of academia because of the supremacy of androcentric narratives and the devaluation of women’s intellectual labour.

What becomes accepted as historical fact and what gets dismissed as mere speculation or ‘eccentric fantasy’ far too often depended — and still does, to an extent — on whose mouth (or pen) it’s coming from and how well it aligns with the existing stories we tell ourselves about humanity, our past, and relations between genders. And, for a long while, any story that as much as hinted at the existence of egalitarian or women-centric societies was treated like a product of an overactive imagination. Or a bad joke.

Although it was a joke that shattered far too many fantasies some people hold dear to be considered funny.

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The fact that this recent discovery could shock anyone just goes to show how powerful and pervasive androcentric myths remain.

Of course, Celtic societies, like others where women played central roles in social, economic, and religious life, were hardly perfect. But the goal of investigating these past social systems isn’t to romanticise them. No, it’s to learn an important lesson we still seem stubbornly resistant to embrace: human nature is not set in biological stone. And neither is male dominance nor female subservience.

We absolutely can — and should — change social and political systems when they don’t work. In particular, when they only benefit very few people.

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