recommend a book on women's history, patriarchy, gender relations, etc.

I guess it depends on how much weight you give to the qualifier "pretty much" and how you interpret "history".

Matriarchy appears to have been very widespread among early societies - except these weren't really prone to producing documented "history". In societies that had writing, built cities, governed via hierarchies, and sought warlike hegemony over their neighbors, some amount of subjugation of women is very nearly universal prior to 1790.

Then again, the results of this subjugation is mixed. Would a European noble woman who could lord it over the peasants controlled by her household be considered subjugated by men, or were more men subject to her?

http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/books/marriage/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/014303667X/

her "social origins of private life" was also a pretty historically wide-ranging book, but there's lots of sort of overgeneralized weaknesses there that she either grew out of or just didn't bother to use in her more recent book (especially regarding native american societies)

I'd be particularly interested in a book that also looked at the element of class: for instance gender relations among the peasant or serf class as well as among the nobles. I imagine that it's harder to find documented history about the uneducated classes from medieval times, but since that's how the majority of people lived, I'm somewhat more interested in that than in how the relatively tiny elite behaved.

I'd also be interested in books about women who revolted against the subjugation or the prevailing social conditions that favored men, especially in pre-modern times. To what extent did women in those societies view their position as one of subjugation, and to what extent was it just seen as the natural order of things? To what extent were gender relations a contract between men & women, in which each side made certain sacrifices in order to create the necessary economic and physical conditions for family life? Did women have strategies or accepted avenues within society of bringing grievances against their husbands? I guess I'm kind of interested in things like that.

oh i think he may have incurred some feminist criticism for being a little too sassy. so to speak.

i think anthony's mom might have written her dissertation on the flounder?

and for a more helpful recommendation, O NATE, you might try lawrence stone's book on sex, marriage and the family in england, ca 1500-1700. it manages to address a number of the kinds of things you are asking about, though generally for the upper classes (and then extrapolating admittedly shakily to the poor, about whom there is little documentary evidence). it's not quite direct about it since his question is more e.g. 'what was marriage like?' rather than 'how were women oppressed?', but he writes with a critical attitude.

and "A History of Women in The West":

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067440369X/r

(i think the latter set is still only partway complete?)

i own assorted vols. from both.

five microhistories i would recommend to complicate the whole mess:

Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance-- Josiah Blackmore

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy Judtih Brown

Voicing Medieval Women:Wogan-Browne,

Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion.

reading the intro to the myth volumes ought to indicate what he's up to.

http://uk.geocities.com/lucath/myths.html

(beware the annoying MIDI jingle)

It seems that Graves's analysis makes much use of the hypothesis that there was a matriarchal phase of human civilization which pre-dated classical civilization; however, from the little I've read, including in A History of Women, it seems there is precious little evidence for this, and the hypothesis is now derided by at least some historians as wishful thinking.

(supposedly 'the white goddess' is one of the books 'useful' to read as - background? - with 'gravity's rainbow', along with say a book on i.g. farben, e.g., among others. if you're into that - i can't remember whether you're a reader of pynchon.)

i guess yr. trying to argue vs. yr. g/f that there was a time in early human history when women weren't in a particularly worse position than men. the two coontz books are better bets here. also there are lots of arguments in the field of anthro -- don't recall the whole field of controversy but the core one stemmed from levi-strauss and his critics vis a vis his definition of marriage.

I am a reader of Pynchon, and I do think that Graves's analysis is interesting to read at least partly for its literary influence. It's interesting to see the iconic images of women that society has venerated throughout different periods of history - for instance, the Virgin Mary, or the Greek goddesses.

nate what there are is anthropological studies of ppl in the americas, africa, etc. who lived in sometimes nonliterate societies with low levels of technology, etc. we can project from the various sorts of societies that the ppl. that later became the ancient greeks, etc. may at one time have lived in such societies

I could see that kind of extrapolation providing one way of thinking about how prehistoric human societies might have functioned. It would be interesting to dig further into the anthropological literature.