Dr. Riane Tennenhaus Eisler was born in Vienna and fled from the Nazis with her parents to Cuba as a child. She later emigrated to the United States. She has degrees in sociology and law from the University of California. She is an attorney, legal scholar, and author of many popular books and articles, as well as the president of the Center for Partnership Studies. Eisler has been described as a cultural historian, an evolutionary theorist, and a social thinker by her supporters.

She coined the term Dominator culture to describe the conflict between an androcracy (governance of social organization dominated by males) versus what she proposes was a partnership model (as distinct from matriarchy) for the social organization of ancient cultures. To support the idea that neither men nor women dominated one another in the distant past, Eisler cites archaeological evidence from southeast Europe, especially Crete, drawing much from the research of Marija Gimbutas and V. Gordon Childe. Her hypothesis also relies strongly on the Gnostic Gospels and on the history portrayed by the ancient poet Hesiod.

Books

• 1987 - The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York. Harper & Row. ISBN 0062502891
• 1996 - Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San Francisco. Harper. ISBN 0062502832

See also

• Marija Gimbutas