So while I've done some detailed worldbuilding for Lindsen and its surrounding nations, I haven't even drawn a map for the Orenland yet, and all I know is that it's slightly more advanced and it's supposed to be matriarchal. But how might it have become so even with agriculture being developed?
I contemplated having the entire continent or at least the part where humans originated be rainforest with plentiful fruits to make gathering more viable, while dangerous animals meant men were needed for defense and therefore more expendable. However, this is immensely stupid for obvious reasons. Does anybody have better ideas I can steal?
Just look at the indigenous cultures in what we call the Americas. Many of them were matriarchal, most of them developed agriculture.
The idea that gathering is women's work and hunting is men's work is wrong. That's not how things go.
One idea is to establish that men have a proclivity to ignore externalities in their problem solving and they do so by objectifying the world around them, while women have a proclivity towards relational systems thinking. The matriarchal society that developed agriculture just has the clan mothers assign specific agricultural oversight responsibilities to specific men, but maintain their matriarchal role in large scale ecosystem management.
In this way, agriculture will be polycrop, symbiotic with the land, will not involve clear cutting, will likely involve a lot more forest farming, continue to maintain the rules of the harvest, and not involve private property.
Ancient Minoa was also matriarchal to some extent at least, and there are surely more cases throughout the globe.
For indigenous people their agriculture was usually far lower intensity than western agriculture. It was not as labor intensive and it was more stable. They were simply better at early agriculture than than our ancestors were. Where we saw empires like in mesomamerica with very intense agriculture we all also saw more familiar empire like behavior.
Got it. Although the culture I'm making is basically America on steroids.... nonetheless, I'll make it work somehow.
Well, America didn't develop agriculture within it's culture so you're going to have to make Europe matriarchal or have the American settler state have some sort of matriarchal revolution post colonization or make the colonization process itself matriarchal