[3] He increasingly emphasises how the Afro-Caribbean matrifocal family is best understood within of a class-race hierarchy where marriage is connected to perceived status and prestige.
"[5] In general, according to Laura Hobson Herlihy citing P. Mohammed, women have "high status" if they are "the main wage earners", they "control ... the household economy", and males tend to be absent.
[13] Herlihy found matrifocality among the Miskitu people, in the village of Kuri, on the Caribbean coast of northeastern Honduras in the late 1990s.
[16] Herlihy found that the "women knew more than most men about village histories, genealogies, and local folklore"[15] and that "men typically did not know local kinship relations, the proper terms of reference, or reciprocity obligations in their wife's family"[15] and concluded that Miskitu women "increasingly assume responsibility for the social reproduction of identities and ultimately for preserving worldwide cultural and linguistic diversity".
In the 14th century, in Jiangnan, South China, under Mongol rule by the Yuan dynasty, Kong Qi kept a diary of his view of some families as practicing gynarchy, not defined as it is in major dictionaries[18][19][20][21] but defined by Paul J. Smith as "the creation of short-term family structures dominated by women"[22] and not as matrilineal or matriarchal.
[10] Women in slave families "often" sought impregnation by White masters so the children would have lighter skin color and be more successful in life,[10] lessening the role of Black husbands.
"[10] In some factions of feminist belief, more common in the 1970s than in the 1990s–2000s, and criticized within feminism and within archaeology, anthropology and theology as lacking a scholarly basis, there was a "matrifocal, if not matriarchal, Golden Age" before patriarchy.
[25] In 2025, scientists reported discovering that DNA from the remains of individuals in the Iron Age in Britain showed evidence that men had moved to join their wive's families.
[26] Among the remains of a Celtic group that occupied the central southern coastal region of England, between 100BC to AD100, most genetic material showed that they were descendants of the same woman.