When I was working on my review essay on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (forthcoming in the fall in IJFAB), I was looking around for sources about women’s fate under regimes of extreme inequality—in wealth in particular, given Piketty’s motivating moral critique of societies based on inheritance.

The Sunday NY Times last weekend had an article touching on the question by Wednesday Martin, cultural critic at large with a PhD in anthropology, who has a book out that might be called a participant observation study, or an auto-ethnography: Primates of Park Avenue. She comments in passing, “the worldwide ethnographic data is clear: The more stratified and hierarchical the society, and the more sex segregated, the lower the status of women.” She describes a world not just of financial dependence, but of financial dependence that includes the “wife bonus” paid sometimes even based on meeting performance measures. She describes a world in which the social segregation men and women is no less powerful than in other settings where we readily identify women as “oppressed”—but where it doesn’t go with modesty-based restrictions on dress (the veils and hair coverings that often accompany gender segregation promoted by religions).

What I am really curious about is whether the “and” belongs between the first and second, or the second and third items of the list. Is stratification bad for women as such? On the Gender and Everyday Life panel at LSE a couple of weeks ago, the claim was that there’s a suppressed third causal influence in this equation: in a diverse society, with racialized minorities ready “to bear the bad news of capitalism,” women can escape this fate. There seem to be different stories at the bottom, the middle, and the top. To speak in “Piketty-speak” about classes, women in the 50% (the lowest 50% income earners, largely the service industry plus the under or unemployed; the world of Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed) can move more easily into the 40% (those income earners, service industry or clerical or manual, who on average earn just above the societal average; the world of Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch)—and all those move more easily (though perhaps still with great difficulty) into professional and entrepreneurial success (the 9%) in societies where racialized minorities are consigned to the insecure labour conditions that mark the 50%. The extreme inequality in wages led by the tech and financial sectors—the world of the 1% and the .1%—is extremely gendered, and this is the world Martin portrays. Whether she does it with the sharp feminist lens that Ehrenreich brings to her work is an interesting question. She concludes her essay with, “The wives of the masters of the universe, I learned, are a lot like mistresses — dependent and comparatively disempowered. Just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separates her version of power from her man’s, might keep a thinking woman up at night.”

Piketty’s point is that we haven’t seen anything yet—wait until the fortunes that these top wage-earners are currently accumulating play out in inheritance. There’s no reason to believe the gendering of that picture will be simple. Historically, it translated into an intense need to control women’s sexuality to ensure the bloodline. Today, when families are diverse and the British monarchy has made inheritance of the throne gender-neutral, what will be the gender balance of the generation that inherits wealth, compared to the generation that “earned” wealth in the inflated wages of the financial sector? What possible identities for women, and interests in controlling us and our sexualities, are being born?