Househubbies. Tree huggers. Peacenicks. Death penalty protesters. Working women. Are these deviations of a decadent society? Should we look back to the good old ways, when men were real men, women were real women, justice was as swift as a whack to the side of the head, and the world view as clean as a picked bone?

No way, argues Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade. It is the violent, male-dominated social orders that deviated, and they are neither good nor old. Long ago and far away, in prehistoric Europe and the Middle East, there were peaceful and balanced cultures where women worked together with men, and not just for them. Artifacts from that time--the little "Venus" statuettes--show the worship of a goddess of creation.

At some point in time, nomadic horsemen who venerated the sword, the power to take away life, descended on these peaceful societies like prehistoric Huns, and took them over. The moral justification of the violent, authoritarian patriarchy followed: the goddesses where transformed to mates and servants of gods, women were pronounced vile vessels of inequity, the source of original sin, and things to be had and traded.

Now that violence and exploitation have brought us to the brink of extinction, it is time to pick up the original threads, and try to recreate a partnership society.

This book can change the way you look at things.

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, by Riane Eisler; Harper & Row, 1987.

--Millie Johnson