In the midst of The Enlightenment, when men in the West hailed reason and rationalism, and aspired towards lofty ideals such as liberty, equality and religious tolerance - another darker social phenomenon was taking place. Over a period of more than 200 years, thousands of women (and some men) across Europe were thrown in jail, tortured, hanged and burned - accused and tried for witchcraft. In this episode Elle talks to Marianne Hester, a world-leading researcher in gender-based violence, with ...

In many ways, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in myths, religion, and history - are blueprints for our human lives. But the converse is also true - how we see ourselves, our attitudes, behaviors, and who holds power - in turn shape our stories. In Western culture, there is no story as powerfully influential as that of Greeks. Historical researcher Max Dashu has spent decades looking for the women in our stories, across the timespan of human history. Collecting visual evidence of w...

How did patriarchy first begin? The answers to that question are many and varied, and most often tries to explain it by one single factor - Agriculture! Private property! Men are stronger! But - the history of patriarchal development is a lot more complex and interesting than one single answer - and very few people have decoded what the evidence tells us about how patriarchal patterns arose and evolved in ancient Europe and Asia Minor - as deeply as research scholar Heide Goettner-Abendroth. I...

In trying to explain inequality between the sexes - we often arrive at the idea that women inhabit the emotional realm, and that men inhabit the thinking realm - and in the hierarchy of realms, thinking is considered superior. In this episode, trauma and dissociation specialist Christine Forner crushes the “feelings versus thought hierarchy” and breaks down how absurd - and harmful - this fictional concept is. She also takes Elle on a deep dive into what human emotion, or the affective circuitr...

Since it was published in 1987, Riane Eisler’s groundbreaking international bestseller The Chalice And The Blade has launched a full frontal challenge to the conventional story of our cultural origins - and has given us a brand new way to think about our ancient past, our present and how we shape our future. It upended the major religions we take for granted, the idea of eternal patriarchy and eternal war, and brought into focus the historical events that turned our human cultures from peaceful ...

With a steady stream of new research coming to light, it is becoming clear that the version of Western history we are taught in school - has a thick layer of patriarchal myth-making. Heide Goettner-Abendroth has spent her whole life studying what this patriarchal overlay is hiding, and in her new book Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy in Europe and West Asia, using a new matriarchal paradigm, she reveals evidence of an ancient past that looks very different from the o...

When we talk about rights and freedoms it is often in political, economic, and gender-less human rights terms. The conversation is often dualistic - taking place on the right/left divide or the black/white divide, or the rich/poor divide - and much that is crucial to women, gets missed. Or obscured. New Zealand author Renée Gerlich grapples with all of what is missed when we do not take women, half of humanity, into account, in her new book Out Of The Fog. In this important book she sidesteps t...

Many scholars who study the evolution of humanity - sociologists, anthropologists, biologists - have come to the conclusion that we, all of us, would not have survived, let alone have evolved into the complex, resilient and innovative species that we are - without millennia of stability and peace. This episode’s guest, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, established the formal study of this peaceful past - and present - known as Matriarchal Studies. Through the institute she founded, International Academ...

Every major religion in the world today features a male deity. Or as Miriam Robbins Dexter puts it: “Man was created in God's image and woman wasn't.” How does it affect women of the world - that we have no major religious symbols that reflect the female? That most religions greatly devalue women? That most religions have taboos against the female body and its life cycles? These are questions Miriam has spent her extraordinary career grappling with, and also what drove her to look into prehist...

We are in our 6th millennia of patriarchy, and as this episode’s guest Susan Hawthorne puts it, “the publicity program for patriarchy has been going for some 5,000 years”. As a poet, author and founder of the feminist publishing house Spinifex Press, and as a lesbian radical feminist, Susan decidedly belongs to the publicity program for the other side, the side that has been fighting against ‘the rule of the father’ since the time of Cassandra. Susan, herself a feminist prophetess of our time, ...

Women always face conflicting cultural narratives in which our sex plays a central role, and much of the time the rhetoric in the foreground is there to cover up a very different reality in the background. In this episode Elle jumps into three hotbed areas - prostitution, surrogacy and the transgender movement - with Swedish journalist and author Kajsa Ekis Ekman, who has made a career out of tearing down the stories we're being sold, digging deep into complicated issues, and revealing greater ...

For women and girls, studying history rarely gives us the answers we seek about how we arrived here. Official history is written by men about men, about male projects, enterprise and progress, and women are all but footnotes. Elle speaks with author and artist Renée Gerlich, who has had a driving passion since childhood, to uncover what official history hides and erases. Renée builds on a rich tradition of writers, artists, scientists and revolutionaries to re-draw a world history from a female...

What if misogyny is not the hatred of women - but a phobia? What if patriarchy is not a power structure - but a pathology? And what if we could trace these twin phenomena back to their point of origin like we can trace the eruption and evolution of a virus? Elle has a rapid-fire conversation with trauma specialist and scholar Christine Forner about tracing patriarchy and misogyny back through - not just history, but the evolution of human neurobiology. Between her scholarship in the field of tr...