Kinship to Kingship

<p>Have women always been subordinated? If not why and how did women's subordination develop? <i>Kinship to Kingship</i> was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society.</p> <p>Using a Marxist-feminist approach Christine Ward Gailey analyzes women's status in one society over three hundred years from a period when kinship relations organized property work distribution consumption and reproduction to a class-based state society. Although this study focuses on one group of islands Tonga in the South Pacific the author discusses processes that can be seen through the neocolonial world.</p> <p>This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines <i>necessarily</i> entails the subordination of women. And the opposite is also held to be true: state and class formation cannot be understood without analyzing gender and the status of women. Of interest to students of anthropology political science sociology and women's studies this work is a major contribution to social history.</p>