Riane Eisler

Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, and attorney whose research, writing, and speaking has transformed the lives of people worldwide. Her newest work, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry and coming out with Oxford University Press in July 2019, shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination.

Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), dedicated to research and education, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, an online peer-reviewed journal at the University of Minnesota that was inspired by her work, keynotes conferences nationally and internationally, has addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State, and Congressional briefings, and has spoken at corporations and universities worldwide on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work.

She is internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 27 foreign editions and 57 U.S. printings. Her book on economics, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, was hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking” and by Jane Goodall as “a call to action.” Her Transforming Interprofessional Partnerships, co-authored with Teddie Potter, won national and international awards, and her Equal Rights Handbook was the only mass paperback on the Equal Rights Amendment.Other books drawing from Eisler’s research include her award-winning Tomorrow’s Children, Sacred Pleasure, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, statistically documenting the key role of women’s status in a nation’s quality of life. Through the Center for Partnership Studies’ Caring Economy Campaign she developed new metrics demonstrating the economic value of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and of caring for nature.

She has written over 500 articles in publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, The Christian Science Monitor, Challenge, and UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Women’s Studies, and World Encyclopedia of Peace, as well as chapters for books published by trade and university presses (e.g., Cambridge, Stanford, and Oxford University).

Dr. Eisler pioneered the expansion of human rights theory and action to include the majority of humanity: women and children. Her research provides a new perspective on our past, present, and possibilities for the future, including a new social and political agenda for building a more humane and environmentally sustainable world.

She is the only woman among 20 major thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary PhDs, the Nuclear Age Peace Leadership Award, the Feminist Pioneer award, and inclusion in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of twenty leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.