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We live within a gendered global order in which the overall subordination of women to men is one of the principal axes of power. Gender relations are a major component of social structure, and gender politics play a central role in determining our collective fate (Connell 1995: 67–86; Folbre 2020).

While patriarchy is facilitative of capitalism (as are other hierarchies, including racism), it did not originate within capitalism. The enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression, while patriarchy as a social system of norms, values, customs and roles preceded capitalism by a few thousand years (Lerner 1986: 213). The historical subordination of women as a social group originated in the shift from a matrilineal/matrilocal (mother-right) social structure to one that was patrilineal/patrilocal (father-right). And while women were again domesticated and subordinated much later in history as a result of agricultural enclosures and the divisions that ensued between unpaid and paid labour under industrialization, their original subordination was not generated in capitalism. For many hundreds of years, women were used as a form of family currency in marriage arrangements; they were frequently proffered as a peace offering, or to create alliances, between warring tribes. While men were often killed after conquests, women were taken as slaves for reproduction and sexual work. Their so-called ‘sexual services’ were part of their labour although their children were the property of their masters (Lerner 1986: 212–29).

The use and abuse of women that operated in prehistoric times, and that found expression during colonization and at times of war, have continued into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, often on a deeply racialized basis. The organized sexual enslavement and rape of between 100,000 and 200,000 Korean teenage girls (so-called comfort women) by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, where they were forced to have sex with several men (raped) each day, exemplifies this (Hicks 1997). More recent studies of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Algeria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, all demonstrate the continued widespread abuse and rape of women at times of military conflict (Ní Aoláin, Cahn, Haynes and Valji 2018).