The aim of this article is to extend the feminist understanding of Lorca’s theater by offering a reading of Yerma (1934) against the backdrop of contemporary European ideas on ancient matrilineality that appeared in feminist texts in Europe around 1900 in reference to Johann Jakob Bachofen’s anthropological study Das Mutterrecht (1861), where he described the evolution of human kind as a gendered struggle between mother and father law. This struggle is portrayed in Yerma, where it also alludes to the classical conflict between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and it ends as a traditional tragedy with death and devastation. The article combines an aesthetic take on Yerma with a contextualized feminist interpretation by highlighting how contemporary feminist motifs and ideas are represented in the work through the aesthetics of symbolism and classical tragedy, for representing key features of a patriarchal order: its code of honor, its male accumulation of wealth, and its restrictions on women’s sexual liberty.