Is it Feudalism or is it Patriarchy?
Feudalism is so hot right now
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Is it Feudalism or is it Patriarchy?
The early solar system.
Our shining star burns brightly in the center of a massive molecular cloud; A cyclone bound to the giant ball of energy at its core not so gently tugging the light-years long accumulation of matter. Gas and dust hurtling around the expanse of space at unfathomable speeds, violently coalescing into bigger and bigger bodies of matter. Ever swirling, ever changing.
Hurtling masses endlessly bombard this evolutionary tempest, ancient items from the early universe providing life-giving elements and chaos alike crashing into these terrestrial and gaseous bodies so far from their origins. Bodies so dense that over time they create their own gravitational bonds; A smaller body or bodies clinging to their influential orbit. A smaller, less dominating body seeking safety in the shadow of an imposing mass while providing some form of labor as repayment. Moon scars and tides attest to both the violence and fief our lunar companion endures for gravitational protection.1
Brutal on a galactic scale, this process of accretion which occurred early on in our solar system’s life cycle is what allows us to be here today.2 We are born of fusion, of merging, of growth and acceleration. We are born of a galaxy where smaller bodies seek safety in the shadows of bigger, tougher ones to protect against the violent void of the observable universe.
In the instance of our own planetary body, we experience the glory that is Mother Earth because of our sun’s ultraviolet rays; warming and photosynthesizing, ever imposing its domination. Life-sustaining allowances are given in the form of gravitational pulls and magnetic fields amidst the threat of radiation—a constant reminder of the fragility of life itself.
As the cosmos send violent bursts of dust-bullets and DNA altering rays our way, what isn’t deflected by our sun’s magnetic field has to fight against the community efforts of our solar system: Asteroid belts, dominating gravitational pulls from the gas giants, dense expansive atmospheres, and the shields of smaller lunar bodies. Our own moon bearing the heraldic arms of the red, white, and blue colonizer state.
Our authoritative sun acts as a feudal Lord. Dominating our solar system with its imposing stature and wealth of resources. Our sun-lord provides some sanctuary to those living within its proverbial walls while stripping foes of their riches if they dare tread too close. The planets act as our vassals in this analogy; gaining protection from proximity to the sun’s power, but always at a cost and always at their peril. Holding their own power—minuscule in comparison to our solar king—over their dependent, less resource-rich moons. Our lunar companions are the serfs of the solar system; taking a galactic beating but happy to not be afloat alone in the dark crevices of space altogether denied access to the resources of community.
And look, I know it is a stretch to compare European feudalism/feudal society/feudal states of the middle ages with our solar system, however feudalism is but a patriarchal abstraction anachronistically placed upon the middle ages to provide an easily digestible illustration for an elementary education of a particularly brutal patriarchal historical moment.3 It is a construct born “to make the body of evidence on medieval institutions coherent”, not an actual system of polity.4
4.5 billion years into existence Mother Earth is teeming with life.
During this time if you were to zoom into what is now France, Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Northern Italy, you’d find yourself in the dastardly territory of Gaul of the sixth and seventh centuries. As the man who wrote the book on feudalism noted, “under the Merovingians, Gaul was rarely united or at peace, and it frequently lapsed into a state of almost complete anarchy.”5
Once bolstering a shared inheritance practice where all sons were equal beneficiaries of a king’s assets, Clovis’ offspring—and the offspring of that offspring, and their offspring and so forth—descended into chaos via modes of domination as these assets became further divided, diminishing the power base of any one individual. This “repeated partition had given birth to the kingdoms of Austrasia, Neustria and Burgundy” where bitter quarrels arose between extended family in a newly developed hierarchical reality based on mutual investiture through various forms of labor and acquisition of dependents. As land became further privatized through heritable legal rights developed to reaffirm these privileged individual’s ownership over what was once publicly accessible and usable acreage, Christianity and the introduction of the nuclear family tailed closely behind altering the societal landscape indefinitely with the installation of primogeniture patrilineage, the requirement of fiefs, and compulsory monogamy.6
Now, lets pan north a few hundred kilometers turning the clock forward a few hundred years to ninth century England—though it isn’t an England familiar to the modern reader. This little island is split up into multiple kingdoms ruled by multiple kings. It is constantly bombarded with attacks from Vikings who claimed dominion through brutal land grabs, often overwintering in place for an extended period of time. A constant community shifting, an accretion of cultural practices.
Alfred, king of the West Saxons from 871-886, was a busy guy and spent much of his time defending his kingdom from invasions, redrawing the borders of his realm through constant battle. In 886 Alfred fancied himself king of the Anglo-Saxons after repelling Viking forces from modern day London, ruling as such until his death in 899.7 But sometime after 893, comfortable in his reign as lord at the top of the proverbial societal pyramid, Alfred sat down to pursue and dispense patriarchal knowledge, translating Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae into Old English. In it, Alfred added a small biographical note which is thought to be a reflection of his own successful lordship:
he sceal habban gebedmen and fyrdmen and weorcmen
These eight words, nor the passage they accompany, were “present in the original Latin of Boethius”—they were Alfred’s own. And they have handcuffed us to feudalism in a way unlike any other single source.8
Alfred’s “prayer-men, war-men, and work-men” are the backbone of the manifestations of the ‘Three Orders’ of society.9 These Three Orders have been hailed as the hierarchical ordering of society under feudalism by scholars since the early/mid-nineteenth century. Continually reinforced by literary and legal evidence retroactively deemed empirical which was then quickly disseminated as authoritative. If you’ve spent any time studying medieval England, you’ve likely heard the instructive quip: “men who pray, men who fight, and men who work” as a mnemonic for memorizing societal structures of the middle ages. As noted above, the construct—the very idea of feudalism—was developed “to make the body of evidence on medieval institutions coherent.”10 The cyclical nature of this should be starting to reveal itself.
This flattening of medieval European society has persisted modern day, even as we are bombarded with new research clearly implying heretofore unfathomable dimension. Yet, this doesn’t just flatten the experience of medieval peoples, it also universalizes the experience contrary to contemporary documentation that explicitly identifies endless cultural differences between not only the classes of this prescriptive hierarchical society, but across the large regions of land boasting unique ancestral practices and gendered expectations of their own.
Georges Duby infamously categorized the middle ages as “resolutely male”, but so too are the modern teachings of the medieval, as the persistence of feudalism in the collective consciousness makes evident.11 But a society broken down into three classes of ‘free’ men in positions of dependency doesn’t leave much room for women, and if the folks with those allusive cervixes weren’t present, how did all of these people get here?12
So, where were all the women?
As scholars infused the concept of feudalism into their observations of the middle ages, they likewise—unironically—cautioned against such over-simplifications for the handcuffing it encouraged:
“In some contexts the practice of giving general names to whole epochs can even be dangerous, [luring] its practitioners into the worst pitfalls of the nominalist fallacy, and [encouraging] them to endow their terms with real existence, to derive features of an epoch from the etymology of the word used to describe it or to construct edifices of historical argument out of mere semantic conceits.”13
If we rewind and pan south once again to the Merovingian kingdom of Gaul in the early middle ages, it is clear they were in a state of transition—as our universe dictates—leaning more patriarchal by the day—not dictated by the universe.
This patriarchal progression was aided and abetted by constant litigation which ensured societal realization. A realization which required regular despotic reinforcement; “Although a woman was not expected to defend herself, and was in fact discouraged from doing so, she was not valued less than a man. On the contrary, [codes] set her wergeld, the compensation her family would receive if she were killed, at a sum twice that for a man of the same status. Moreover, for any bodily injury inflicted upon her, a woman was entitled to twice the compensation allowed for a man. Indeed should a woman choose to fight like a man, she forfeited this special right. The Burgundian law, which had been codified much earlier, did not yet assume that women were defenseless. On the contrary, it tried to prevent feminine belligerence by denying any compensation to a woman who had gone forth from her courtyard to fight.”14
Those issuing the aforementioned codes did so from a position of male-exclusivity and patriarchal-backed authority as women were not allowed to attend university or practice law within some Salic influenced territories until the twentieth century—more than a thousand years of patriarchal precedence thus being set.15 These law practicing men occupied the space within the proffered societal pyramid which required them to serve their lord king/pope’s will while also requiring their lord king/pope to compensate them in a favorable way as necessitated by a fief. ‘You get what you give’, achieved in endlessly creative and cruel ways as we’ll soon see materialize.
The favoring of women’s position in society implied within the litigation quoted above which offered a higher wergeld for female bodies should not be mistaken as indication of a higher status held, as it was more or less imposed benevolent sexism which sought to reinforce recently established Christian gender norms while also immortalizing pronatalist legalese into the historical record. “The emphasis in the codes on women’s reproductive function and defenselessness fostered acceptance of the concept of feminine passivity and dependence, particularly in the upper classes, where women were not expected to perform physical labor.”16
As mentioned, Gaul of this time often collapsed into violent over-arching anarchy. Our feudalism-forefather, F.L Ganshof, went so far as describing the men of this rivaling kingdom akin to “beasts”: patriarchs ripping one another to shreds in hopes of accessing an ever allusive higher rung on the hierarchical societal ladder.17 Because of this ceaseless brutality repopulation on a grand scale was required. Not only had the population dwindled due to constant warring, this new ranking required an evergreen source of physical bodies to protect and preserve it. In essence, women were litigated into passivity to ensure men-at-arms and the women that birthed and cared for them were there to perform their presupposed patriarchal social roles. The universe dictates that power in the form of violent energy requires mass, and a lot of it.
The chroniclers preserving these contemporary events likewise existed within male echo-chambers, as they were usually Classically trained, Latin wielding clergymen serving their lord in that same cyclical nature as the educated law-men. These positions often overlapping due to the intentional gendered exclusivity of education.18 Only until a woman gained access to a somewhat formal education and sustainable resources did the historical annals and societal commentary challenge this undisclosed patriarchal bias.19 And though Christine de Pizan’s words are still read today, and though they tangibly influenced contemporary polity, they unfortunately did little in way of eradicating the long-held misogyny of the learned few which persisted ad naseum in spaces intentionally void of women.
It was those same male-centric spaces that were charged with educating the masses.
The uncategorized and marginalized
But what if Alfred’s words—his assorted Village People of medieval society—were meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive? A reflection on what had worked for him in his position as he pondered philosophically, and nothing more.20 Alfred’s own daughter defied the gendered expectations outlined and observed in the very same feudal society her father is said to have given literary life to. Æthelflæd very publicly circumvented the idea of invisibility and meekness declared inevitable of those actively erased from feudalism’s supposed hierarchy.21
Patriarchal historians only furthered this unidentified bias by finding both evidence and explanation in women’s missing status in Antiquarian histories. Erected alongside the mountain of literary evidence attesting to the monstrous nature of the feminine, these became pillars of confirmation supporting the notion that men’s assumed superiority was only a natural by-product of social development and not a personal moral failing. Assuring aspiring patriarchs of future generations of their own unassailable right of superiority in the social hierarchy.
This invisible patriarchal bias of course impacted both the subjects deemed worthy to document and the tone of the translations such documentation often required. Not because it was in fact natural to ignore half the population but because contemporary chroniclers, century after century, inherited an unconscious misogyny that did not allow them to see women’s contributions as worthy of cataloging for future generations. Imagine the universe we would think ourselves in if astronomers documented only half of that which they observed.
Archaic laws and prescriptive grammatical formulas often served to only reaffirm anti-feminine sentiment and righteousness in a continued minimization as time progressed. As
noted in regards to Empress Matilda’s contemporary record while catalyzing anarchy in hopes of obtaining the English throne in the twelfth century:“Contemporaries, whether friends, enemies, or neutral observers, struggled to decide how to handle or to judge her, how to place her within a political narrative that expected its chief protagonists to be male. As a result, she is an insubstantial, inconsistent presence in the chronicles, rarely seen in more than two dimensions, often disconcertingly portrayed as a marginal figure in her own story.”22
We are not left wanting for Old English masculine heroes and marginalized feminine foes, as one need not look beyond the still accessible celebrated classics to find such archetypes. In 1994, the Dictionary of Old English published by the University of Toronto distributed an update that directly influenced one of the most translated Old English pieces in all of history: Beowulf. The update was simple, aglæc wif, words used to describe Grendel’s Mother—our infamous feminine foe—were modified to reflect a female warrior or fearsome woman as opposed to a hag-like, pejorative characterization.23 A stark difference to the monstrous creature described to us by passionate professors reiterating Seamus Heaney’s popular “monstrous hell bride”, or Richard Trask’s “ugly troll lady.”24
In a flattened feudal society there is simply no space in the equation for sword-wielding, army-commanding women such as Grendel’s mother and Empress Matilda. And instead of expanding our understanding of a world so far away from our own—recognizing that our math must surely be wrong—when presented with these anecdotes which challenged the status quo, patriarchal historians chose to overlook and exclude as opposed to providing women fodder to perceive their oppression was but a man-made construct and not a requirement divinely predetermined. Those very Merovingian laws which sought to directly dictate gender expression of the early middle ages also confirm that women so often defied the insisted expectation that they had to litigate against feminine belligerence in order to eradicate it through means of imposed dependency and violent domination.25
When women gained wider access to education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were confronted with archives teeming with previously undisclosed women’s stories: Mountains of dusty legalese which laid bare an entirely different history than the one we’d been instructed had taken place by the patriarchs with heretofore exclusive entry.26
Historians built feudalism to describe their ideal middle ages, which did not—and could not—include the accounts of Jeanne de Penthièvre seeking legal, peaceful avenues to avoid civil war to protect her community. Legal avenues which had her confidently petitioning directly to a king of France in the fourteenth century with a husband in her corner ensuring said king publicly recognized her as rightful lord.27 A history that couldn’t include Sichelgiata of Salerno shouting at eleventh century men fleeing mid-battle, a ‘resolutely male’ domain: “how far will ye run? Halt! Be men!”28 An untouched history waiting to be rediscovered which overtly identified that noble women such as Domitilla Brito and the working class entrepreneurial silk-women alike could hold immense influential sway over their respective communities through property, finances, patronage, and most importantly of all, by possessing very obvious and very real agency.29
These were the histories that couldn’t be told in a patriarchal reality.
Feudalism is fickle
Outside of the Three Orders, there are a few characteristics which all-too-quickly qualify an epoch as a feudalistic one, but the least overtly identified—and perhaps most important—is the complete collapse of public held power. This exclusivity of rights to resources ensured the majority (peasantry) were relegated to become reliant upon the minority (land-holders), creating an entire class of dependents subject to dictation. And though theoretical physics ensures us the true power lies with the many, what can’t be factored into an unfeeling equation is the frailty of the human condition and the unforgiving, evergreen needs in which they possess—And it was the few, the nobility, which controlled access to the systems that met those needs.
However, Ganshof didn’t necessarily describe it as such, instead he characterized feudalism as:
“a body of institutions creating and regulating the obligations of obedience and service—mainly military service—on the part of a free man (the vassal) towards another free man (the lord), and the obligations of protection and maintenance on the part of the lord with regard to his vassal. The obligation of maintenance had usually as one of its effects the grant by the lord to his vassal of a unit of real property known as a fief.”30
Aside from the gender specific language which outright ignores half the human population a millennium after the fact, a “body of institutions creating and regulating the obligations of obedience and service” reads as a roundabout way to describe a form of dependency not often attributed to masculinity or the conditions of societally established manhood. So how do you create the conditions that result in both Alfred’s ‘resolutely male’ hierarchical reality alongside the firm, unshakable belief of male superiority amidst obvious oppression?
You create a society which continually affirms “that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”31
You create a presupposed cultural acceptance of men’s conditioned utilization of women’s bodies as the battleground which they can prove both their virility and their domination upon.
You create mechanisms of controlling the perception of history and “construct edifices of historical argument out of mere semantic conceits.”32
You create the patriarchal abstraction of feudalism.
Both the resurgence of feudalism within the journalistic lexicon and the confidence in which everyday individuals utilize the term to describe the here-and-now act as yet more evidence of the tight grasp which patriarchal biases have upon our perception of the past. The fight against the usage of feudalism has been waging since the 70s, with practicing medievalists long lecturing against such broad categorizations and the harm such constructs perpetuate—yet, it lives on.
But it wasn’t feudalism that carried Teresa Borrenpohl out of a town hall meeting nor feudalism which stood by and did nothing as a woman was assaulted in a room full of people.
It wasn’t feudalism that left Josseli Barnica to die while doctors stood by in complete dereliction of duty—an act of intentional indecision which killed a young mother.33
Feudalism didn’t translate Beowulf in a way which ignored available evidence of female lordship within the middle ages, nor was it feudalism that established the need for dynastic pronatalism to ensure there were men to pray, fight, and work all those centuries ago.
Techno-feudalism isn’t responsible for Elon Musk fathering multiple children with multiple women while publicly abandoning all but those that can blindly participate because feudalism is not a system of polity or set of beliefs. It can not dictate such outcomes as it is nothing more than a mechanism of perceiving the past.34
And to be clear, my argument isn’t to imply the non-existence of fiefs, an inheritance held by homage, but instead that fiefs as an institutional practice aren’t the responsible party for the continuance of misogyny from the medieval into the modern, nor did they establish themselves into the cultural practice in some sort of legal big-bang.
Until we can overtly identify what it is that drives us to believe such suppression only lives within the mind’s of angry feminists instead of the institutions that have been dominated by men for thousands of years to the harm of all, we will continue to perpetuate the very thing that oppresses us.
It was never feudalism that declared a society without women as “order itself”, it was always patriarchy and the weaponization of [medieval] misogyny.35
Further Reading/Watching:
And at one point, our magnetic field.
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/earth-and-moon-once-shared-a-magnetic-shield-protecting-their-atmospheres/
Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens; translated by Stephen Palmquist in Kant's Critical Religion. Aldershot: Ashgate (2000)
Elizabeth A. R. Brown. “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe.” The American Historical Review 79, no. 4 (1974): 1063–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1869563.
Cheyette, F. L., Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings. Krieger Pub Co (1975)
Ganshof, F. L. (François Louis), 1895-1980, Feudalism (1964)
Another resource into this division (and the mental gymnastics historians employed to utilize feudalism as an intellectual tool) - Bloch, Marc, 1886-1944, Feudal Society (1961). I say ‘the book’ because you’d be hard pressed to see the mention of feudalism in modern historical outputs without the mention of Ganshof or Bloch.
Fonay Wemple, Suzanne, Women in Frankish Society, Marriage and the Cloister: 500 to 900. University of Pennsylvania Press, (1981)
Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd.
I am grossly oversimplifying here to move this forward.
POWELL, TIMOTHY E. “The ‘Three Orders’ of Society in Anglo-Saxon England.” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 23, 1994, pp. 103–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44510238.
Cook, Albert S. “Alfred’s "Prayer-Men, Warmen, and Work-Men.".” Modern Language Notes, vol. 6, no. 6, 1891, pp. 174–75. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2918273.
Cheyette, F. L., Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings. Krieger Pub Co (1975)
Duby, Georges (1997). Women of the Twelfth Century.
In 1953 Georges Duby partially classified feudalism as a “constitution of a coherent network of dependencies embracing all lands and through them their holders.” Thus, dependent. Georges Duby, La societe' aux XI et XlI siecles dans la region maconnaise.
Postan, foreword to Bloch, Feudal Society, xiv. via Elizabeth A. R. Brown. “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe.” The American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 4, 1974, pp. 1063–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1869563.
Fonay Wemple, Suzanne, Women in Frankish Society, Marriage and the Cloister: 500 to 900. University of Pennsylvania Press, (1981)
I’m specifically speaking of France here as I do not possess the knowledge to speak to the other histories
Fonay Wemple, Suzanne, Women in Frankish Society, Marriage and the Cloister: 500 to 900. University of Pennsylvania Press, (1981)
Labor of course being defined by the patriarchy.
Ganshof, F. L. (François Louis), 1895-1980, Feudalism (1964)
As is the case with Jacqueline Felice de Almania and the predetermined patriarchal litigation against her in early 14th century France. As I wrote about here:
McRae, Joan E., Literary Debate in Late Medieval France. University Press of Florida (2024)
Christine de Pizan’s very public participation in la Querelle and her ability and willingness to petition the highest person in feudal society, regent queen Isabeau, highlights women’s ability to flexibly and expertly navigate this prescriptive strata that they were apparently excluded from.
POWELL, TIMOTHY E. “The ‘Three Orders’ of Society in Anglo-Saxon England.” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 23, 1994, pp. 103–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44510238.
Castor, Helen. She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth, HarperCollins Publishing (2011)
Santanu Ganguly, How Many Heroes are there in Beowulf: Rethinking of Grendel’s Mother as ‘aglæcwif’
A familiar reaction of the patriarchy. If a woman gains too much power, she must be villainized.
Fonay Wemple, Suzanne, Women in Frankish Society, Marriage and the Cloister: 500 to 900. University of Pennsylvania Press, (1981)
A great expansion on this is Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400 : MOVING BEYOND the EXCEPTIONALIST DEBATE, Edited by Heather J. Tanner
Jones, Michael, ed., Recueil des actes de Charles de Blois et Jeanne de Penthièvre, duc et duchesse de Bretagne (1341– 1364), suivi des actes de Jeanne de Penthièvre (1364–1384) verified in Froissart’s Chronicles
Respectively:
Livingstone, Amy. Out of Love for my Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000-1200. Cornell University Press. (2010)
A. H. Thomas (vols. 1-4) and P. E. Jones (vols. 5-6), eds., Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London, 1323-1482 (Cambridge, 1926-61)]
Ganshof, F. L. (François Louis), 1895-1980, Feudalism (1964)
hooks, bell. Understanding Patriarchy
Postan, foreword to Bloch, Feudal Society, xiv. via Elizabeth A. R. Brown. “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe.” The American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 4, 1974, pp. 1063–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1869563.
Duby, Georges. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. The University Chicago Press (1980)
I’m forwarding this post to everyone I know. You break down — in the clearest language possible — the term feudal and link it to its nasty origin, patriarchy and it’s medieval sidekick, Christianity.
I get supercharged angry when people toss around the word “feudal" to make themselves feel proud that 2025 is not the year 1000. I call BS on that. I might even ‘get medieval’ on them and toss some evidence IN LATIN that proves your point about what women were doing. But I really save my nastiest ire for those who use a handful of cherry-picked evidence from the past as a way to justify their hatred of women.
Some people who love to say “feudal” are simply ignorant and need to read this to comprehend the nasty origins of the word. Those who are not ignorant need to be sent to live on an ice berg.
Patriarchy thrives in the abstraction of language, and fascism takes root in language that prizes might over right.
Thank you!
Great essay.
Although I also think it's important to look at where the patriarchy ultimately comes from, which is Judaeo-Christianity (or the monotheistic ideology, we could call it), which places a patriarchal tyrant at the top of the hierarchy (demon-pretending-to-be-a-god) - in direct opposition to pre-monotheistic, pagan ways of viewing the world, and indeed the universe. A feminine view of the solar system, for example, would perceive balance and harmony, not a hierarchy. A family, even.
If I were to define 'feudalism' I would go for a broad, loose definition like 'totalitarian control over society by a small minority group' then add 'exclusively for their own benefit'. Thus they control all the resources and the 'supply' side of the supply-demand equation (restricting resources for purposes of social control, including money - 'neoliberalism' is exactly the same system). They also control all the legal and political functions of course, as well as the media (propaganda), 'education' (also propaganda and indoctrination) and, well, you get the picture. In other words, we are still very much living in the same type of society. It never went away, it only 'looks different' solely due to advancing technology.
And of course it can't obviously call itself feudalism, or it would expose itself, and sheer weight of numbers of the masses would revolt and win the day.
The reason why this 'feudalism' or social hierarchy has been historically patriarchal is, I would argue, solely down to the monotheistic ideology. It is evil, suppressive, anti-spiritual, anti-human, anti-nature (nature as a female), and obviously misogynist. One might also perhaps argue that feudalism itself comes from the same ideology. It is its social manifestation, and everyone on this planet, apart from that small minority group itself, of course, not to mention the planet herself, are still suffering as a result.
And we shall continue to suffer until that ideology has been purged from this world.