Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands

Have women always been subordinated? If not, why and how did women's subordination develop? Kinship to Kingship was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society.

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.

This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines necessarily 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.

Author: Christine Ward Gailey
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 12/01/1987
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.77d
ISBN: 9780292724587

About the Author
Christine Ward Gailey is Professor of Women's Studies and Anthropology at the University of California Riverside. Her research centers on gender hierarchies in the context of state dynamics, viewed comparatively and historically.