Partnership Studies, Feminism, Domination Systems, and Cultural Transformation

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honor for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Centers for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and has been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems, and Editor in Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade—now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviewed Riane Eisler, founder of partnership studies, on the evolution from domination-based social systems toward partnership-oriented cultures grounded in equity, caregiving, and systemic thinking. Eisler reflected on feminism, trauma, education, gender hierarchies, divorce, and cultural reconstruction after the 1960s. She connected personal experiences with broader societal analysis, emphasizing relational dynamics, nonviolence, and whole-systems approaches to human flourishing while critiquing siloed education, normalized violence, and authoritarian social structures.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are once again with the distinguished humanist and founder of partnership studies, Riane Eisler. We are going to be talking about partnership. I do not know how long this series will last. We will let the content itself determine that. However, we will be having a weekly series for these. The general structure, for those who are going to be introduced to this, seeing it immediately or later, will be theoretical, theory as a foundational conversation, followed by anecdote.

Riane has a lot of life experience to dig into. Ideally, some of the conversations that we have can mine some of that ore or take a few buckets of water out of that reservoir of experience for us to make a little more something you can touch, taste, feel, and see. Riane, how are you distinguishing partnership studies, or partnership as a concept in partnership studies, not only from its counterpart or opposite in domination, but also from what you were noting in your work even before the term became mainstream. in feminism? How is it different, and how is it a more nuanced evolution, for instance?

Riane Eisler: Well, dramatically. It is very different, because semantically partnership is an inclusive term, whereas unfortunately, feminism is not. However, this said, many feminists are partnerists, but they do not know it, because what they want is equity, equality with men, rather than the structure which we have now, which we call patriarchy, which I have broadened to call domination. Domination is a larger structure in which men, as well as women, are part of the top-down hierarchy.

So partnership or partnerism is similar to feminism, but it is very different in that, as partner indicates, it explicitly and semantically includes both forms of humanity, female and male. Moreover, I should add, because domination systems have very rigid gender and ranked gender stereotypes, partnership as a category also includes those who are in between, gay people, transgender people, who have always existed but are not recognized as fully human, or even possible, in domination ideology.

Jacobsen: What about a message to those who go through a phase, ideally a phase, where they want to be the fire-and-brimstone, molten iron activist for their cause, but without much of a longer-term horizon or vision of how things can be structured and integrated for all relevant human and ecosystem parties in consideration? So, in a more holistic sense, in the sense of a whole system, a way of looking at human-to-human relations in all the different colours and flavours we have of ourselves, but then also with the environment. What is your message to those who are stuck, and I see it now, that it is stuck in just one mode of operation, which is a sort of righteous zealotry, for good and for bad?

Eisler: Well, people who are stuck and unable to see the entire system, our education does not facilitate that. It pigeonholes you; it is siloed.

Even higher education is totally siloed. So, all of us are educated, indoctrinated, if you will, to think in siloed ways. This has to change. My book Tomorrow’s Children, which is about partnership education, is much more systemic and relies on seeing the whole picture of how interconnected we all are.

So I do not fault people in the sense of finger-pointing and saying, “Well, there is something wrong with you.” It took me a long time to really see, and it took feminism to include the female half of humanity. Because, in the 1940s and 1950s, when I grew up, it was taken for granted that women were subordinate and were stuck, if you will, in certain roles, and men were men, and there was this hierarchy, and there was something superior about being male. I’m not sure that answers your question.

Jacobsen: It does. And it leans very naturally into the anecdotal part that we are talking to here as well, or the experiential commentary, if you want to phrase it in a different way that has better connotations. When you were growing up in that period, literally before the word feminism was even a term of mainstream academic and popular discourse, what was the sensibility around distinguishing the concerns of women as a category, and then different categories of women from that, and making sure that there was appropriate consideration and a place at the table in as equitable terms as possible?

Because right now, we are living in a situation of regression. Established frameworks, institutions, policies, laws, and the like are under challenge. Okay, reverse the tape. There was a period when the concerns were there. There was no infrastructure, policy, law, et cetera. And the right to vote was, you are saying, in the 1940s. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States were only 20 years apart in the early 1940s.

Eisler: I grew up in a time when women, like children, were considered inferior. And if you were lucky, you got a good superior male in your marriage, which was the destination of women. And if you were not, well, that was too bad. The police walked men around the block for battering, for beating their wives, their girlfriends. That was the milieu in which I grew up.

Talk about violence being taken for granted. It was normalized. The norms were different. Then came feminism, and it exploded all those norms.

What comes to mind is an experience. I am an attorney by training. I attended the UCLA School of Law and got a part-time job at an entertainment law firm in Beverly Hills, California. One day, the head honcho called me into his office to compliment me on having handled a case well. And he said, “You do not think like a woman.” He meant it as a compliment. And what is even worse, I took it as a compliment. That was my worldview. And yet I was a professional woman. Right? I had gone to law school. I mean, it was wild. The fifties were, to put it mildly, not ideal, and neither were the sixties until, of course, things exploded in the late sixties.

I quit my marriage, smoking, and my job, all within a period of three months. I had had it. And I had a creative explosion. It was amazing. It was really amazing.

Jacobsen: What were some other paths you noted of peers, individuals, women who were as qualified, roughly of similar prominence professionally, but who took a different path? They buckled under pressure, they quit, they drove really hard into careerism. How did these different paths play out for women moving forward?

Eisler: Well, I can give you an example. My neighbour came running into my house after I announced that I was getting a divorce and said, “You cannot get a divorce.” And I said, “Why?” She really took me by surprise. And she said, “Because you look so good together.”

She had a terribly unhappy marriage, because I could hear them arguing next door. The houses were close by, but there was no other alternative as far as she was concerned. This was in ’67, which is when I got my divorce, it was two years after I went back to law school. At that time divorce was still rare. But by the early ’70s, it became normalized by a lot of women and men. Then came no-fault divorce. My first book, Dissolution, was on no-fault divorce. That was published by McGraw-Hill – then a major publisher, in ’77.

After my divorce in ‘67 I spent 10 years as a single mother. There were no materials on parenting except Spock. And he said, “Let them cry it out.” And I could not. It was a crazy time. We mistook rebellion, I think, for reconstruction.

Jacobsen: Interesting. Okay, that is the phrase: “We mistook rebellion for reconstruction.” And a synonym for the way I am conceptually thinking of reconstruction is reconstitution. How do we reconstitute our thinking, our relations, and society as such for something equitable, naturally, but also potentially whole-systems-wise, meaningful, fulfilling, and healthy in the ultimate sense? Did any women that you knew end their lives or have mental health problems because of those constraints of the time?

Eisler: I think we all had mental problems. I think what passes for normal in a domination-oriented society entails mental problems. It entails a certain denial from us all. And if you are very traumatized, you certainly have lots of denial, as we can see: COVID-19 denial, election result denial, climate change denial. That is trauma speaking. But it starts in domination-oriented families.

The vast majority of us are not trained to connect the dots, which is what whole-systems analysis requires. I had experience with systems analysis in my job when I quit law school: I had one year of law school, and I got married. So after I married, one of my first jobs was with the Systems Development Corporation, an offshoot of the RAND Corporation. That was in the fifties. And I learned about a thing called systems analysis. Of course, they did not do systems analysis. They were interested in military systems, for one thing. And it certainly was not the whole system.

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But that experience, where I learned about systems analysis long before the term entered our vocabulary, stuck. Also, going to law school and later getting the UCLA Law School to re-admit me on my way out of my marriage in 1963 and becoming an attorney in 1965 was important training for me in systems analysis. First of all, in law school, you have to debrief, to look at a case and figure out what the patterns are, what the applicable case law is, or what the applicable legislative law is. And then, when you become an attorney, the client does not come into your office with, “Apply Section 1222 of the Civil Code to my case.” They come with a story, and it is up to the attorney to see patterns.

So I had training, though I did not know it, in systems analysis. In my research, years later, I developed a methodology of social systems analysis, for looking for underlying patterns in societies. That takes us forward many years, because by ’77 (when my book Dissolution was published, and when I met David Loye, who became my partner and later husband, and supported me in my research), I was already about two or three years into trying to answer the questions of my childhood, which is another story.

Anyway, through systems analysis, through an inclusive methodology, which I call the study of relational dynamics, looking at what kinds of relations (with ourselves, others, and nature) that a particular social system supports or inhibits, is number one. And number two is: what is the relationship between the key parts of a social system? And yes, I included in my data base those parts that are excluded in conventional analysis, or marginalized at best: family, childhood, and gender.

That really is a very distinctive way of studying society. And, of course, economics is part of what reflects the values of a social system—and story and language, my God, huge, huge, huge. I called the patterns I saw, because there were no names for them, the domination system and the partnership system.

These are social constructs that are not visible through the conventional categories of right, left, religious, secular, east, west, north, south – because these old categories we inherited from more authoritarian and violent domination times all fragment our consciousness.

Domination systems are held together through fear, fear of pain. Whereas partnership systems are held together by something else, by our human striving for pleasure, not fun, not escape, but for real pleasure, including caring connection. Of course all systems have some pain, there are earthquakes, we all die, get sick, etc. But we are talking of how domination systems are trauma factories, and of course it is always a matter of degree; there is a partnership-domination social scale.

The patterns of domination-oriented and partnership-oriented societies transcend our conventional social categories. For example, domination-oriented societies include rightist and leftist societies like Stalin’s secular Soviet Union and rightist secular ones like Hitler’s Germany, as well as Eastern religious societies like the Taliban, that also emphasize, and we know how much they emphasize, the status of women, of gender, and how important childhood control of children is by the male head of household, et cetera, et cetera.

Jacobsen: Who would you consider your most complete intellectual predecessors?

Eisler: I have set out on what is a whole-social-systems course. But certainly feminist, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When I discovered feminism, I learned about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She did the feminist manifesto in the same year as Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, 1848. Well, you know, only the Marxist Manifesto, which focused on male worker, is part of history. She also wrote The Woman’s Bible. She was amazing.

Jacobsen: You might find this funny. Maybe eight years ago, seven years ago, in an interview with the Freedom From Religion Foundation co-president, Annie Laurie Gaylor, she mentioned it. I think that was my first time hearing about Stanton. Who else?

Eisler: She was certainly somebody very important in my development, and she had courage. She had what I call spiritual courage, even to challenge the Bible, the passages in the Bible that assume that women are inferior, which were added in the course of domination history. As I have emphasized, at the core of biblical teachings are, if you will, “feminine” teachings of caring, caregiving, nonviolence, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And then there is this overlay of domination that was added in the course of domination social history.

One of the projects I think is very important is for scholars from various religions to get together and sort the grain, the gold, from the chaff, the domination overlay. Scholars are not doing that, but they do not have a frame of reference. They do not realize that passages that were added later really reflect domination indoctrination. And these passages are now used to justify regression to domination.

Jacobsen: Madam President, thank you very much.

Eisler: Thank you.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,900 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.