In the book, Gould Davis aimed to show that early human society consisted of matriarchal "queendoms" based around worship of the "Great Goddess", and characterised by pacifism and democracy.
Gould Davis argued that the early matriarchal societies attained a high level of civilization, which was largely wiped out as a result of the "patriarchal revolution".
These views of Gould Davis on a Great Goddess predominating in Neolithic Europe and the Near East are similar to those made by a number of writers in the early and mid 20th-century, including Eric Neumann,[1] Thorstein Veblen, Merlin Stone, Robert Graves, Marija Gimbutas, J. J. Bachofen, Walter Burket, James Mellart, Robert Briffault.
[2] Although many of her views are considered unsupported by most anthropologists and archaeologists today, a number of writers have continued to develop the themes that Gould Davis originated.
In this section of the book, Gould Davis examined how mythology and society changed as a result of a suggested violent conversion from matriarchy to patriarchy.
Her theory proposed that patriarchal revolution resulted from the violent invasion of nomadic tribes who were warlike and destructive, overrunning the peaceful, egalitarian matriarchies.
Gould Davis discussed female circumcision as a means to protect the virginity of women and assure clear lines of paternity.
The book saw the Cretan and Mycenaean civilizations as remnants of the ancient pre-Christian Celtic culture, which Gould Davis also believed to have granted women a great deal of power.
In the following chapter, "The Celts", she argued that similar rights prevailed until the collapse of the Roman Empire, for a matrilineal system of monarchical descent, and for Celtic women being the major preservers of learning during the early Middle Ages.
Quoting Jules Michelet, Gould Davis argued that women by the fifteenth century were treated so badly by men of all social classes that they were seen as "worse than beasts".
[4] In Gould Davis's view, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the first time Western women accepted their own inferiority, and before Mary Wollstonecraft nobody spoke up for them.
Gould Davis called for "the matriarchal counterrevolution that is the only hope for the survival of the human race"[5] and opined that "spiritual force",[6] "[m]ental and spiritual gifts",[6] and "[e]xtrasensory perception"[6] will be more important than "physical force",[6] "gifts of a physical nature",[6] and "sensory perception",[6] respectively, so that "woman will again predominate"[6] and that "the next civilization will ... revolve ["about"] ["divine woman"]",[6] as it had in the past that she asserted.
[6] According to critic Ginette Castro, Gould Davis proposed a discourse "rooted in the purest female chauvinism"[7] and seemed to support "a feminist counterattack stigmatizing the patriarchal present",[8] "giv[ing] ... in to a revenge-seeking form of feminism",[8] "build[ing] ... her case on the humiliation of men",[8] and "asserti[ng] ... a specifically feminine nature ... [as] morally superior.
"Elizabeth Gould Davis's historical reconstruction depends a great deal on drawing morals from the tale, and is filled with numerous, glaring extrapolations.
"[10] In a similar vein, Amy Hackett and Sarah Pomeroy, in Feminist Studies, wrote, "Unfortunately, The First Sex is a bad book, as we shall demonstrate.