Fatherdom

Lastly, religion is represented as fostering the cause of women, chiefly through its mysteries assigning a divine character, as it were, to motherdom as compared with fatherdom.

That the Aeschylean Oresteia turns on the conflict between motherdom and fatherdom is notorious.

Bachofen, the protagonist of the "mother-right" theory in the last century, observed that "motherdom is related to the idea of the day-bearing night, as fatherdom is to light sprung from the union of the sun with mother night."