Origins of class and gender hierarchy in Northwest Europe

Conclusion

The instances cited here of Western European states in formation are not exhaustive, but they do demonstrate a fundamental underlying unity in the development of institutions — the patron-client tie — which embodied the changed land/labor relationships and provided the mechanism by which both intra-gender and inter-gender relationships were transformed. Marc Bloch, E.A. Thompson and others have analyzed the breakdown of kin-based society in Western Europe and the rise of hierarchically based societies, organized by the patron-client tie, but their analyses have been gender-free [¹]. This article has purported to demonstrate that such hierarchy always has a gender and that parallel processes have, in fact, produced both class and gender stratification. Such an analysis is of more than academic interest to us in the West. It reveals the very roots of our own oppression in European-based societies today, which are still hierarchically ordered by class and gender. And, I hope, it points a direction towards the way out, by revealing the processes which progressively undermined egalitarian relationships and by providing historical counter-examples of conditions in our own past under which women did enjoy, along with men, personal autonomy, and social and economic security. It must be stated, that under these “aboriginal” conditions, both women and men cooperated in the construction of culture, namely, the integration of work, play, ritual, and art. But that is not the topic of this article.