www.montereycountynow.com MAY 14-20, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist and, at 94, one of the most consequential thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 2017, she was named in the book Great Peacemakers: True Stories from Around the World as one of 20 international leaders—alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa—who have made major contributions to world peace. Eisler has made these contributions from Carmel, which never stops surprising us with who turns out to be quietly living in the woods. Eisler has lived in Carmel since 1979, when she and her late partner, the psychologist and evolutionary systems scientist David Loye, sold a Spanish-style home near UC Los Angeles and moved to the Central Coast drawn by its beauty. Loye died of Covid in 2022, after 45 years together. “I miss him every day,” Eisler says. “But I don’t cry anymore when I talk about him.” Luckily for Monterey County residents, she would like, in what she calls her last years, to be more connected with the local community. To meet Eisler is to meet someone whose ideas have, again and again, arrived ahead of the conversation. The Chalice and the Blade, her 1987 breakthrough, took 10 years to write and proposed something that sounded almost heretical—that human history is not the inevitable march of male domination, that for millennia our ancestors organized themselves around partnership rather than ranking, and that a more peaceful alternative isn’t utopian, but it’s our recoverable past and likely future. (Read a brief sample from the book on p. 22.) Many books followed The Chalice. In Sacred Pleasure in 1995, Eisler traced the evolution of sexual relations; in Tomorrow’s Children (2000) she offered a practical guide to new arrangements in education; with The Power of Partnership in 2002 she translated her academic research into an approachable self-help book. The Real Wealth of Nations—a true economic manifesto, published in 2007—made the case for an economy that rewards caregiving. Nurturing Our Humanity, co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry in 2019, drew on neuroscience and the archaeology of hunting-gathering societies to bolster the same argument. She has been read and praised by a diverse crowd, from feminists such as Gloria Steinem to politicians such as Mikhail Gorbachev, with international scholars (Marija Gimbutas), global activists (Jane Goodall) and Nobel prize winners (Desmond Tutu) in between. That she speaks to these diverse interests is no wonder; a conversation with her inspires and gives hope. In 2026, she was inducted, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, into the California Hall of Fame, honoring achievements that have made history. Eisler’s biography is a story of a rapid cultural transformation, and her life is cast on the background of some of the most turbulent events of the 20th century. Though Austria remained independent from neighboring and darkening Germany during Eisler’s early childhood, the political climate was increasingly threatening to Jewish people. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family of cutlery merchants, she watched the Gestapo come up the stairs to drag her father away on Kristallnacht, a pogrom and mass arrest in which over 90 Jewish people were killed in Vienna alone; her mother bought his freedom back. Among the men who showed up in her apartment that night in November 1938 was an old family acquaintance, someone whom her father had previously helped. Eisler’s mother confronted this presumed friend. She had to pay, but Eisler’s father was released. The family fled Europe when Eisler was 7, ending up in the slums of Havana, Cuba. The destination was one of the very few places that would take them. Ships were being sent back, and Eisler still thinks about the passengers on the MS St. Louis, which was rejected by Cuba, the U.S and Canada, forcing passengers back to Europe, where over 250 died. The country they arrived in was poor and brutal in its own way. Eisler’s family was stateless there, but it was also there, at a Methodist school, that a teacher introduced her to the concept of prehistory and sparked an interest that ultimately catapulted Eisler’s life and career years later. Eisler eventually made it to California, as many Jewish families that ended up in Cuba did, where she mastered a new language and went on to study law. She eventually married, putting her studies on hold, had two daughters and experienced all the limitations young mothers experienced in her time (and still do), divorced, came back to UCLA law school in her 30s, and then woke up to the feminist movement. “Being born a woman completely affected my life options,” she says. “I was supposed to be the lovely little woman behind the great man.” The framework of thought she introduced to the world is the partnership-domination scale: not feminine versus masculine but two ways of organizing power. The blade is the power to take life. The chalice is the power to nurture it. Domination cultures organize themselves around four cornerstones: childhood and family, gender, economics and language—and so, Eisler says, must any movement that hopes to replace them. Eisler is a distinguished professor at Meridian University, president of the Center for Partnership Systems (which advances the field of partnerism studies), and editor-in-chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently worried about AI in the hands of criminal regimes, but ultimately remains hopeful about the future of humanity. “The regression,” she says, “is really a reaction.” That is a reaction to three centuries of movements, from the rights of man through abolition of slavery through feminism through civil rights, all challenging the same thing: the divinely ordained right of someone to rule over someone else. These days, Eisler’s typical day involves working, exercise and a nebulizer for compromised lungs. She is finishing two new editions of Tomorrow’s Children and plotting another Center for Partnership Systems summit on caring economics. She spoke to the Weekly about how her thinking and career evolved, and where it’s heading. Weekly: Could we start with memories from Vienna and Cuba? Eisler: I cannot forget the velvet blue curtains in our home; I loved to “The conventional categories—right/left, religious/secular, Eastern/Western, capitalist/socialist—are not helpful.”
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