ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the book's key question about polarization, in the global social change of women and men, and discusses related analytic issues. Judith Bennett's own analysis focuses narrowly on the most macro levels of patriarchal systems, especially as related to gender hierarchies, women's spaces, and the growth of the world-system. Women's space is also a concept used by feminist community-based groups and academics to identify, theorize, and create women-friendly social realities. Scholars such as Sylvia Walby who rely on statistical data from the relatively recent past to point to women's progress in areas such as politics, education, and employment feed the contemporary unilinear-progress myth by not addressing the historic losses in each of these areas within the last millennium. Misogyny and women's exclusion were encouraged by church and state. Gary Macy provides solid data and analysis of how a change in the definition of ordination during the eleventh and twelfth centuries excluded women from the ministry.
