This brilliant book by Eisler defines ways to put into practice the ideas introduced in her best-seller The Chalice and the Blade. She traces the powerful effects of our everyday exposure to the dominator versus the partnership model in every area of our lives:
"THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIP DEALS WITH the seven key relationships that make up our lives. First, our relationship with ourselves. Second, our intimate relationships. Third, our workplace and community relations. Fourth, our relationship with our national community. Fifth, international and multicultural relationships. Sixth, our relationship with nature and the living environment. And seventh, our spiritual relations.
In the next seven chapters, you will see that there are two fundamentally different models for all these relationships: the partnership model and the domination model. You will see how these two underlying models mold all our relationships — from relationships between parents and children and between women and men to the relations between governments and citizens and between us and nature. As you learn to recognize these two models, you will see how both individually and collectively we can influence what happens to us and around us. As you learn to move relationships toward the partnership model, you will begin to make positive changes in your day-today life and our world.
While the terms domination model and partnership model may not be familiar to you, you 've probably already noticed the difference between these two ways of relating — but lacked names for your insight. When we lack language for an insight, it 's hard to hold on to it, much less use it. Before Newton identified gravity, apples fell off trees all the time but people had no name or explanation for what was happening. The partnership and domination models not only give us names for different ways of relating but also an explanation for what lies behind these differences.
In the domination model, somebody has to be on top and somebody has to be on the bottom. Those on top control those below them. People learn, starting in early childhood, to obey orders without question. They learn to carry a harsh voice in their heads telling them they're no good, they don 't deserve love, they need to be punished. Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force. The world is divided into in-groups and out-groups, with those who are different seen as enemies to be conquered or destroyed.
In contrast, the partnership model supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is also no built-in need for abuse or violence. Partnership relations free our innate capacity to feel joy, to play. They enable us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is true for individuals, families, and whole societies. Conflict is an opportunity to learn and to be creative, and power is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower others.
Politics through a new lens:
We see this pattern all too clearly in one of the most serious aspects of the dominator regression of our time: the rise of so-called religious fundamentalism. I say so-called because, if we look closely, it 's clear that what many fundamentalist leaders preach — be it in the Middle East or the United States — is not religious fundamentalism but the domination/control model with a religious spin.
If you look closely at the teachings and policies advocated by leaders of the Christian Right in the United States, you will see that they are often the polar opposite of the teachings of Jesus. Whereas Jesus challenged the rigid rule of the religious hierarchies of his time, these men (and occasional women) are bent on controlling all aspects of our lives — from our family relations to our political relations. Whereas Jesus taught caring, compassion, empathy, and nonviolence — in a word, the fundamentals of partnership — the leaders of the Christian Right preach the fundamentals of the domination model. They preach fear, as in "You've got to put the fear of God into people," guilt, as in "You 're a sinner," prejudice, as in the vilifying of people of different races or sexual orientations, and scapegoating, as in "Feminists are out to destroy the family."
If you look at the Gospels, you will find that Jesus did not say anything about strengthening male power over women. On the contrary, when he preached against divorce, it was to protect women from being thrown out on the street by their husbands, as divorce was in his time the right of men only. He said nothing about keeping women out of the priesthood. Indeed, we know from the New Testament that many of the leaders in early Christian communities were women. (31) We know from the Gnostic Gospels that, rather than being a prostitute, Mary Magdalene was a major figure in early Christian leadership. (32) As for violence against women, Jesus prevented the stoning death of a woman accused of sexual independence.
By contrast, the aim of fundamentalist leaders — whether in the U.S., India, Iran, or Pakistan — is to push women back into their controlled place. In some Muslim nations, women are still publicly stoned to death. So-called honor killings by members of their own families of girls and women suspected of any sexual independence are socially condoned. In the United States, the bombing of family planning clinics and the murder of physicians, nurses, and volunteers who help women exercise their constitutional right to reproductive choice is incited by some fundamentalist leaders. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and other fundamentalist leaders command that women who don 't follow their oppressive dictates be killed. Indeed, one of the reasons for their anti-American rage is that they see the higher status of Western women as a threat to their regressive social order.(33)
If you look at the political agenda of fundamentalists — Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Christian — what really interests them is reimposing the system of rigid top-down control basic to the dominator con-figuration. This configuration consists of strong-man rule in both the family and the state, the ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, and fear and institutionalized violence to maintain rankings — be they man over woman, man over man, race over race, or religion over religion. (This configuration is outlined in the "Partnership/Domination Continuum " in the "More Partnership Tools " section at the end of this book.)
A centerpiece of the fundamentalist political agenda is that women must be returned to their "traditional place" in a family where the authority of the father is unquestioned. Of course, women sometimes rule over men, but then they 're seen as usurpers, as in the phrases "hen-pecking wife " and "she's wearing the pants in the family. "
This goal of preventing gender equality is why the rightist-fundamentalist alliance in the United States rallied to defeat the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would simply have declared that federal and state laws may not discriminate on the basis of sex.
It is why fundamentalist leaders in the U.S. are so fiercely opposed to reproductive freedom for women, why they are so virulently hostile to gays (who in their eyes violate the God-given order of a man never taking the subservient role of a woman), and why they have even opposed federal legislation to protect women from violence as well as government funding for shelters for abused women (as in former Senator Laxalt 's so-called Family Protection Act). It is also why organizations such as the Promise Keepers offer men the false choice between neglecting or abandoning their families and "regaining control. "
Another key element of the U.S. fundamentalist agenda is that children must, on pain of the most severe punishment, learn that their parent s ' will is law. This is why fundamentalists support programs such as those that claim to teach parents how to raise their child "God 's way " that we looked at in chapter 2 — programs designed to terrorize babies into absolute obedience. And unfortunately, because this way of structuring relations is familiar and thus comfortable for people who carry the pain, frustration, and anger of dominator childrearing, such programs flourish.
YOU MAY ASK, what does all this mean for me? I don 't have, and don 't want to have, this kind of family. While this dominator agenda may not affect your family directly, it leads to regressive social attitudes, policies, and behaviors that counter the American credo of freedom and equality for all.
These trends in the U.S. and worldwide are dangerous to each and every one of us. They may seem to affect only those directly impacted by them. But they work to undermine the centuries-long movement toward partnership. They are designed to reinstate traditions of domination and submission in the parent-child and gender relations that are the foundations on which the entire dominator pyramid rests."
This is a handbook for how to put these ideas to work, including action steps and a political agenda. Eisler makes a compelling analysis, especially for women, of the current political situation as it is illuminated by the dominator vs the partnership model, and she points out that political party or religious affiliation do not need to be barriers which keep all women from working toward goals which are in the best interest of all.
I would add that even though these attitude may not be consciously in our minds, if we have been brought up with them, they may be functioning unconsciously and influencing the choices we make.
How We Live 
