I was just thinking, with regards to my post about paternalistic societies and how some people keep using word that word, and I do not think it means what they think it means. What is probably even better for Empire building is a maternalistic society.

Population growth is, common-sensically, controlled by women. If a woman doesn’t want to have a baby, there is very little that you can do about it. You may try outlawing abortion, you may figuratively or even literally put a gun to her head, but, ultimately, it is up to her whether or not that child is going to be born. All a man does is provide half of the genetic material, really.

My definition of a maternalistic society is one in which women outright control the ability to reproduce. Meaning, women determine marriage situations. To put it more crudly, women control the pussy. While a lot of this seems to be common sense and is in fact what already really happens, paternalism does compete eminently. For example, the attempts at out-lawing abortion, the ability of men to coerce women by using economic means, or even the subtle cultural coercion induced by making being single somehow aberrant. So a pure maternalistic society would not have the paternalistic interference.

The beauty of a maternalistic society when it comes to Empire building is that it naturally selects the males who get to be cannon-fodder. In a maternalistic society, if you are not good husband and father material, you’re not going to get to marry nor procreate (give or take some human error, of course.) And if you are neither married nor have children, you’re prime for going to the front of the enemy lines, brother. Meaning that the genetic lines that are bad fathers and bad husbands literally get eradicated.

Of course, this has its downsides. The bad fathers and bad husbands may also be good warriors and more likely than not to be aggressive, and so you end up whittling down the genetic material that makes your warrior class.

But nonetheless, this actually still is more efficient for growing a military than a paternalistic society is. In a paternalistic society, every man tries to reproduce, and ultimately this either ties down otherwise excellent warriors or perfect cannon-fodder into a family structure, or results in hardship when the family unit becomes incomplete, either through death or abandonment. (Not to say that single mothers aren’t capable parents, but I can only imagine it’s pretty tough to be doing the job of two people.)

When it comes to maternalistic societies, I can only really think of one Empire (which was rather successful in its day) that comes close to this kind of pussy-control: Spain. Since it was a wholly Catholic Empire, it was pretty difficult to procreate without being married and have offspring who retained your social status. Moreover, so-called spinsterhood was actually considered virtuous—there was nothing wrong with joining a convent and never knowing (in the biblical sense) men. And while we often think of machismo and the other trappings of a paternalistic society when we think of Spain, I think any wholly Catholic Empire would operate more along the lines of a maternalistic society than a paternalistic one. I don’t know, maybe I‘ve just romanticized ideas of Queen Isabella (who may have been the more influential part of the monarchy), or think about how the maternalistic lock on reproduction is what drove Henry the VIII to break away from Catholicism. In reality, I don’t think there is a purely matriarchal society (anymore than there can be a purely paternalistic society) but I think it all comes down to who controls reproduction rights.