Jessica Wynn

There are places routinely described that way, like the millions of Menangkapau people in West Sumatra, Indonesia.

They are the largest matrilineal society on earth.

Property passes through the mother, the family name comes from the mother, women control land and inheritance, and when you marry, the husband moves into the wife's family home.

So men hold most of the formal political and religious roles.

So Islamic law operates alongside customary law.

And in both systems, men have significant authority.

Women control the property, but often not the decisions happening on the property.

Yeah.

But by journalists who visit and see property passing through women and make the claims without digging further.

So the people who actually live there are sometimes baffled by the label.

Well, there's the Kasi in northeastern India.

They're also matrilineal.

Name, property, and clan identity all come through the mother.

The youngest daughter typically inherits the family home, and women are central to the household, and they do hold high status.

The men there have religious and political authority, but they don't seem content with this agreement because there's actually a men's rights movement among the Qasi.

So it's a group called the Singkong Rimpe Timi.

They're organized specifically to push back against what they see as men being marginalized by matrilineal inheritance.

I mean, which tells you something about the gap between what it looks like from the outside and what's really happening on the inside.

So a society can look progressive on paper while the day-to-day experience is still pretty constrained or even oppressive.

Oh, I remember it for sure.