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 ...