Riane Eisler

Riane Eisler is best known for her international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row 1987), hailed by Princeton anthropologist Ashley Montagu as "the most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species" and by novelist Isabel Allende as "one of those magnificent key books that can transform us."

This was the first book reporting the results of Eisler's multidisciplinary study of human culture spanning 30,000 years, and has been translated into 20 languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. Dr. Eisler's other books, Sacred Pleasure (Harper Collins 1995) Tomorrow's Children (Westview Press 2000), The Power of Partnership (New World Library 2002), Dissolution (McGraw Hill 1977), and The Equal Rights Handbook (Avon 1978), have also received wide use and critical praise.

Her 1995 Center for Partnership Studies study, Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, documents the strong correlation between the status of women and the general quality of a nation's life based on statistical data from 89 nations. She has published over 100 articles for publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, and The UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, The International Journal of Women's Studies, the Human Rights Quarterly, and the World Encyclopedia of Peace.

Dr. Eisler was born in Vienna, fled from the Nazis with her parents to Cuba, and later emigrated to the United States. She obtained degrees in sociology and law from the University of California, taught pioneering classes on women and the law at UCLA, is a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group (GERG) and the Alliance for a Caring Economy (ACE), a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and World Business Academy, and member of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality, along with the Dalai Lama, Bishop Tutu, and other spiritual leaders.

Based on her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist over the last twenty years, she introduced the partnership model and the domination model as two underlying possibilities for structuring beliefs, institutions, and relations that transcend categories such as religious vs. secular, right vs. left, and technologically developed or undeveloped. Her pioneering work in human rights expanded the focus of international organizations to include the rights of women and children. She co-founded the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV) with Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams, and serves on many boards, commissions, and advisory councils, including the Scientific Advisory Board of Pluriverso, the Editorial Board of World Futures, and the International Editorial Board of The Encyclopedia of Conflict, Violence, and Peace.

Riane Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies, a nonprofit organization founded to apply her findings to all spheres of life through research and education. She is a charismatic speaker who keynotes conferences worldwide, and a consultant to business and government. She was honored as the only woman among twenty great thinkers including Vico, Hegel, Spengler, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee featured in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, in recognition of the lasting importance of her work.

Riane Eisler as a speaker - and what has been said about her books.

She joined TFF as Associate in 2005.

Address	The Center for Partnership Studies P.O. Box 51936 Pacific Grove, CA 93950 USA
Phone	+ 1 831-626-1004
Fax	+ 1 831-626-3734
E-mail Website	eisler@partnershipway.org Center for Partnership Studies

Articles by Riane Eisler

The most recent on top

Riane Eisler - video, February 25, 2010
Resilience and a new caring economics
Partnership instead of dominance. What is real wealth? And how it is already moving.

Riane Eisler, February 11, 2010
Building cultures of peace
If we are to build cultures of peace we have to start talking about something that still makes many people uncomftable: gender

Riane Eisler, February 18, 2010
Measuring real wealth: Beyond the GDP
What GDP does not tell you and why U.S. GDP growth is not that good news

Riane Eisler, Huffington Post, February 10, 2009
Peaceful Revolution: Investing in our human infrastructure
Let's invest in human capacity development.

Riane Eisler, Alternet.com, September 13, 2007
The ignored issue that can get progressives elected
The failure by the current administration and its congressional allies to care for America's children gives progressives the opportunity to reclaim an area they've tragically neglected.

Where democracy, safety and justice begin.
The culture wars are still on -- and heating up on the family front. Yet even now, progressives are more comfortable talking about what's right or wrong in "public" life -- the widening gap between rich and poor, the immorality of an unnecessary war. But family relations directly influence all our relations -- public as well as private. We cannot build a healthy democracy on a foundation of authoritarianism and intolerance. More on partnership education here.

Reclaiming our humanity: partnership education
We tell children to be good and kind, nonviolent and giving. But on all sides they see and hear stories that portray us as bad, cruel, violent, and selfish. In the mass media, the focus of both action entertainment and news is on hurting and killing. And rather than correcting this false image of what it means to be human, some aspects of our education reinforce it.

Revisioning the Economic Rules - Empowering Women and Changing the World
In her powerful speech to the World's Women Forum, Eisler says: "Economic systems are human creations, the move into the postindustrial economy offers a window of opportunity for us to re-examine and re-define what is and what is not productive work. We women must take leadership in this redefinition, not only for ourselves as women, but for the sake of us all - women, men, and children.

Spare the Rod
What is the link between intimate violence and war? Why do societies that treat women with respect fare better? A movement challenges traditions of violence in the family. From the Journal of Positive Futures, Winter 2005