"Forstater, Mathew" wrote:
>
> Patriarchy is not characteristic of all noncapitalist communities and capitalist
> patriarchy is arguably much worse than many noncapitalist forms. Serfdom is
> hardly characteristic of all noncapitalist social formations.
Though there are many complexities to this, the development of capitalism created types of male dominance that were fundamentally different from those prevailing in earlier stages of European feudal society. It took until the eleventh or twelfth century for the western European aristocracies to fully adopt male dominance and to mold Christianity into an ideological instrument appropriate to its maintenance. And that was only the small élites. Peasants continued to follow gender relations that were more complementary than anything else. There's a good book by Ivan Illich, GENDER, that shows how this was frequently true until well into the nineteenth century in peasant Europe.
Meanwhile the bourgeoisies evolved an extreme of male dominance, with extreme idealization of femininity in the late bourgeois family. Conventional historical understanding, such as most of us picked up in school, sees this as the prevailing pattern of gender relations in most or all of the past. In fact, pre-modern European societies had much more complex relations between men and women, with, as concomitants, much less intense homophobia, less stringent marriage institutions, much less extensive and effective Christian ideological hegemony.