"Ancient society had gender equality, matrilineality. They were kincentered societies, with family traced through women; no states ( See also _Ancient Society_ by LH Morgan). There isn't really "political" power in ancient society. It's egalitarian. The shift to agriculture is the _origin_ of political power."
Charles,
Depends on what you mean by "ancient society."
"Ancient society" could mean Old Testament times, or "ancient times" could refer to the social arrangements of pre-literate, prehistoric hominids. Those social arrangements then, as now, probably varied by geography. There is no monolithic "ancient society" from which sweeping conclusions can necessarily be drawn -- ESPECIALLY if by "ancient society" one is talking about a massive swath of human history that covers tens of thousands of years (or more!), an *incredibly* enormous amount of time for which we have few total records.
Pre-literate peoples left no written records of how they lived, so we have no direct evidence what social formations they arranged themselves in or what they thought about them. It's tempting to posit a composite, catch-all "ancient society" and project stuff onto that from our own ideological biases, but I suspect that there were in fact various societies, spread across vast geographic distances, in "ancient times" -- and that each had particular social arrangements or modes of governance they preferred. Unfortunately, a lot of this is lost to history. Some isn't. It'd be foolhardy to draw broad conclusions from unwritten records, and only artifcacts, excavated at particular, isolated archaeological spots, and furthermore to say that what was revealed applied to how all people once were. A rough analog are the more than 500 original nations of North America -- not by ANY means "ancient" societies since some still exist -- but some were more democratic (Iroquois) than others, some were fairly matriarchal, some were nomadic warrior clans, some were pastoral farmers, some were resolutely patriarchal (Powhatans), etc.
Positing a global, monolithic matriarchal society for "ancient times" in light of all these various older social forms is a little dodgy to me.
It's even less wise to see hunter-gatherer or non-industrial tribes that exist today, in 2006, as an example of how pre-literate or ancient societies arranged themselves way back when.
In any event, ultimately matriarchy is just as illegitimate a distribution of power as patriarchy. We need across-the-board egalitarianism, obviously, a society where folks aren't penalized for being born into the wrong type of body, something individuals have no choice in.
-B.