What are the central propositions of the book? All traditional family systems, Therborn argues, have comprised three regimes: of patriarchy, marriage and fertility (crudely summarized--who calls the shots in the family, how people hitch up, how many kids result). Between Sex and Power sets out to trace the modern history of each. For Therborn patriarchy is male family power, typically invested in fathers and husbands, not the subordination of or discrimination against women in general--gender inequality being a broader phenomenon. At the beginning of his story, around 1900, patriarchy in this classical sense was a universal pattern, albeit with uneven gradations. In Europe, the French Revolution had failed to challenge it, issuing in the ferocious family clauses of the Napoleonic Code, while subsequent industrial capitalism--in North America as in Europe--relied no less on patriarchal norms as a sheet anchor of moral stability. Confucian and Muslim codes were far more draconian, though the "minute regulations" of the former set some limits to the potential for a "blank cheque" for male power. Arrangements were looser in much of sub-Saharan Africa, Creole America and Southeast Asia. Harshest of all was the Hindu system of North India, in a league of its own for repression. As Therborn notes, this is one of the very few parts of the world where men live longer than women, even today.

By 2000, however, patriarchy had become "the big loser of the twentieth century," as Therborn puts it, yielding far more ground than religion or tyranny. "Probably no other social institution has been forced to retreat as much." This roll-back was not just an outcome of gradual processes of modernization, in the bland scheme of structural-functional sociology. It was principally the product of three political hammer blows. The first of these, Therborn shows, came in the throes of the First World War in Sweden, where full legal parity between husband and wife was first enacted, and then, in a more radical series of measures, the October Revolution dismantled the whole juridical apparatus of patriarchy in Russia, with a much more overt emphasis on sexual equality as such. Conduct, of course, was never the same as codification. "The legal family revolution of the Bolsheviks was very much ahead of Russian societal time, and Soviet family practices did not immediately dance to political music, however loud and powerful." But the shock wave in the world generated by the Russian example was, Therborn rightly emphasizes, enormous.

The Second World War delivered the next great blow on the other side of the world, again in contrasted neighboring forms. In occupied Japan, General MacArthur's staff imposed a Constitution proclaiming "the essential equality of the sexes"--a notion, of course, that has still to find a place in the American Constitution--and a civil code based on conjugal symmetry. In liberated China, the victory of Communism "meant a full-scale assault on the most ancient and elaborate patriarchy of the world," obliterating all legal traces of the Confucian order.

Finally, a third wave of emancipation was unleashed by the youth rebellions of the late 1960s, which segued into modern feminism. (When the revolt of May 1968 erupted in France, the country's High Court was still upholding the French husband's right to forbid his wife to move out, even if he was publicly maintaining a mistress.) Here the inauguration by the United Nations of an international Decade for Women in 1975 (also the ultimate outcome of a Communist initiative, on the part of the Finnish daughter of one of Khrushchev's Politburo veterans) is taken by Therborn as the turning point in a global discrediting of patriarchy, whose last legal redoubt in the United States--in Louisiana--was struck down by the Supreme Court as late as 1981.

The rule of the father has not disappeared. In the world at large, West Asia, Africa and South Asia remain the principal holdouts. Islam itself, Therborn suggests, may be less to blame for the resilience of Arab patriarchy than the corruption of the secular forces once opposed to it, abetted by America and Israel. In India, on the other hand, there is no mistaking the degree of misogyny in caste and religion, even if the mediation of patriarchal authority by market mechanisms has its postmodern ambiguities. Surveying the "blatant instrumentalism" of the matrimonial pages of a middle-class Indian press, in which "more than 99 per cent of the ads vaunted socio-economic offers and desires," he wonders: "To what extent are parents the 'agents' of young people, in the same sense as any money-seeking athlete, musician or writer has an agent?" At the opposite extreme is Euro-American postpatriarchy, in which men and women possess equal rights but still far from equal resources--women enjoying on average not much more than half (55-60 percent) the income and wealth of men.

In between these poles come the homelands of the Communist revolutions, which did so much to transform the landscape of patriarchy in the last century. The collapse of the Soviet bloc has not seen any restoration in this respect, whatever other regressions it may involve ("the power of fathers and husbands does not seem to have increased," though "that of pimps certainly has"). Therborn speculates that in both Russia and Eastern Europe, the original revolutionary gains may prove Communism's most lasting legacy. In China, on the other hand, there is much further to go, amid more signs of recidivist urges in civil society. Still, he points out, not only is gender inequality in wages and salaries far lower in the PRC than in Taiwan--by a factor of three--but patriarchy proper, as indicated by conjugal residence and division of labor, continues to be weaker.

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