in the national legislature of most countries is massively disproportionate to
their share of the population. Feminism has tended to be left-wing in general
orientation, if only because it is attacking what it sees as an established power
relationship. However, there are major theoretical problems because of the way
that sexual political divisions fit very badly with the class divisions around
which the left tends to develop its thought. As a reform movement feminism
has been rather successful in a short period, with equal-rights legislation being
passed in many countries. Feminist positions, amounting sometimes almost to
separate subdisciplines, are now found in many academic subjects. Thus
‘feminist political theory’ is a recognized specialism within political theory,
as is feminist literary criticism, and even feminist legal thought in their
respective faculties. Much of the real strength of these intellectual positions
comes from redressing the way women’s thinking and perspectives have been
ignored in the historical development of these subjects.
Feudalism
Feudalism, which has a precise (though very complicated) meaning when used
by historians to describe the Western system of land ownership and govern-
ment in the medieval period, has come to be attributed to a wide variety of
modern socio-political systems which have almost nothing in common with
genuine feudalism. InMarxism, feudalism was regarded as the precursor of
capitalism. Crudely, feudalism was the basic form of social organization that
had arisen in Europe out of the shattered remnants of the old Roman Empire
by the ninth century, and which reached its peak, in England anyway, after the
Norman invasion of the 11th century. It was founded on the principle that the
king, or some other overlord, had rights over land that he could grant to his
followers in return for services, originally military, on the basis of an oath of
loyalty. At its extreme the king was actually held to own all or most of the land.
The one to whom estates were granted could in turn grant what might be
thought of as a sub-lease to his followers on similar terms. The whole edifice of
feudalism was a complex of two-way obligations, firmly set in an unquestioned
set of statuses, rather than being based on contractual rights or more vague
notions of citizenship or nationality. While there was no pretence of equality of
rights and obligations, and no general sense of what would now be called
‘social mobility’ (one’s position in the social order being more or less fixed at
birth), the justifying ideology was one of reciprocation of loyalty.
Modern examples as varied as Latin AmericanLatifundia(huge estates
privately owned by absentee landlords and worked by ruthlessly exploited
day-labour peasants) and Japanese industrial enterprises have been described as
feudal. With the former the apparent connection is of a backward or ‘med-
ieval’system; in fact the Latin American peasant is far more oppressed than the
Feudalism