Noun

(matriarchies)

A social system in which the mother is head of household, having authority over men and children.

A system of government by females (particularly as a kind of polity).

The dominance of women in social or cultural systems.

Noun

(dated) The state of being feminine.

A social theory or political movement arguing that legal and social restrictions on females must be removed in order to bring about equality of both sexes in all aspects of public and private life.

* {{quote-magazine

, date = 1926-11-27 , title = The Talk of the Town , magazine = The New Yorker , issn = 0028-792X , page = 17 , passage = Women are still forbidden to smoke there... Ardent though we are in feminism , we applaud this stand... }}

* {{quote-book

, year = 1996 , author = Jan Jindy Pettman , title = Worlding Women: A feminist international politics , pages = ix-x , passage = There are by now many feminisms' (Tong, 1989; Humm, 1992). Alongside and often overlapping with older-identified distinctions between liberal, socialist, radical and cultural '''feminisms''', for example (important as they are in their different accounts of sexual difference and gender power), are variously named black, third-world ethnic-minority ' feminisms , themselves far from homogenous. }}