I.

(A) Personal Details

Role Name Affiliation

Principal InvestigatorProf. Sumita Allahabad University,
Parmar Allahabad
Paper Coordinator Prof. Reicha Kurukshetra Univesity,
Tanwar Kurukshetra
Content Writer/Author Prof. Rajesh Gill Panjab University,
(CW) Chandigarh
Content Reviewer Prof. Reicha Kurukshetra University
(CR) Tanwar
Language Editor (LE) Dr. Sonal Consultant Editor
Parmar

(B) Description of Module

Items Description of Module

Subject Name Women’s Studies
Paper Name The Discipline of Women’s Studies
Module Name/ Title Patriarchy
Module ID Paper-1, Unit-1, Module 3
Pre-requisites The Reader is expected to have some
knowledge of Indian social structures
Objectives To make the reader understand the
concept of patriarchy and the process
through which it operates in society,
with special reference to India
Keywords Patriarchy ; Femininity; Masculinity;
Sexual Division of Labour

II.

1.1 Meaning of Patriarchy

In most of the societies in the world, men have dominated as decision
makers within families as well as in various public spaces. The literal meaning
of patriarchy lies in the principle of the domination by senior males over others,
male as well as female, in the family, tribe or nation, along with the running of
descent through the male line. The term acquired this meaning in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Over time, this principle of seniority was
increasingly substituted in the feminist discourse, by an emphasis on ‘control’
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or ‘power’ of men over women in the family and larger society, specified
primarily as control over their productive and reproductive activities.
Patriarchy has been defined in the following ways:
Walby (2010): “Patriarchy is defined as a system of social structures and
practices, in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.”
Hartmann, 1981: “Patriarchy is a set of social relations between men,
which have a material base and which though hierarchies, establish or create
interdependence or solidarity among men that enable them to dominate
women.”
Patriarchy represents a social and cultural system in which all the
material resources e.g. land, property etc., are owned and controlled by the
senior male who is the head of the family; and by virtue of that he enjoys
control over all productive and even reproductive behaviour of women in the
family.
Patriarchy is reflected in societies in multiple ways. It gets nourished through
the stereotyping that takes place during the process of socialization, whereby
right from the birth, a child is trained to acquire a gendered behaviour,
vocabulary and body language, that go with the cultural values and norms in a
particular society. According to Holmes (2009), we live within a patriarchy, a
society largely controlled by men and in which men usually have a greater share
of the rewards both in terms of wealth and status, which are available. Even if
men are uncomfortable with this and would like to change it, they still benefit
from living within a male dominated society. Sociologists have noted that
gender is a major boundary around which resources and prestige and power are
divided, with the majority of women often struggling to keep control over their
lives.
Patriarchy has by and large been treated to have contributed tremendously
towards the subjugation of women in both private as well as in public domains.
Cultural norms in most of the societies of the world are characterized by
patriarchy, i.e. domination of men in decision making positions and
subordination of women. This has often led to defining the work performed by
men as more important, productive and valuable in comparison to the work
done by women. Patriarchy is often cited as the main reason why even
economic independence among women has failed to grant them freedom and
equal status with men. Patriarchy is therefore an ideology which legitimizes the
domination of men over women in all spheres of life, thereby making a larger
share of resources available to men at the cost of women. It begins within the
private domain of family, extending beyond the familial boundaries, to the
public life and workplace. Thus patriarchal structures characterize even the
economic, political and religious organizations, where men are the decision
makers and at the helm of affairs, while women are placed at the bottom of
power hierarchy. In India, for example, all the major political parties are

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patriarchal in the sense that barring a handful of women, they are headed by
men. All religious organizations are headed by men to an extent that at some
places of worship, women are even debarred from entering.

1.2 Rise of Patriarchy

In her book “Theorizing Patriarchy” Walby (1990) presents a theory for
understanding the patriarchal system and its association with capitalism. She
argues that patriarchy is made up of six structures:
· Paid work
· Household production
· Culture
· Sexuality
· Violence
· State
In her later work “Gender Transformation” (1996) Walby further
investigated the changes that had occurred in gender relations in the last half of
the twentieth century. She argued that western societies have moved from a
system of ‘private patriarchy’ to ‘public patriarchy’. By that she implies that till
mid twentieth century women’s lives were mostly controlled and restrained by
men within their immediate family. Women were dependent on fathers before
marriage and on husbands afterwards. After World War II, patriarchal
domination of women changed to the public world of work and politics.
Although more women have become economically independent and do not
require men’s support to survive, yet the crucial decisions regarding their lives
continue to be taken by men around. While private patriarchy kept them under
the subordination of men in domestic lives, public patriarchy keeps women
segregated at workplaces at lower levels of hierarchy, while it is men at the
powerful positions who make policies for them and control them in public
sphere. Walby argues that gradually more women tend to be governed by public
patriarchy since more of them would be getting education and making entry into
the workforce. Interestingly, both kinds of patriarchy affect women differently
depending upon their age, income, religion, position in life course and so on.
Talking about the rise of patriarchy, Holmes (2009) argues that as the
Western society entered the modern era, the increasing complexity of society
saw distinctions made between different parts of people’s everyday lives. A key
distinction was between those areas of life thought private and those thought
public. The political sphere was where the public decision making, central to
maintaining an ordered society took place. Individuals were supposedly left to
control their own private lives within family and other intimate relationships.
Nature rather than reason was thought to govern the bodily and emotional
messiness of relationships. Women were thought to be closer to nature and thus

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suited to tasks within the private. The messiness of women’s bodies was
supposed to make them incapable of the reason needed for proper political
debate and so they were actively excluded from public decision making, e.g.
they did not have the right to vote till the late nineteenth century. It was argued
that their fathers and husbands could better represent their political interests
(Benhabib 1987; Pateman 1988). Women were believed to have a low IQ due to
which they were believed to be most suited to the so called unimportant tasks of
home making and child bearing/rearing.
While tracing the rise of patriarchy with capitalism, Walby (1994) argued
that patriarchy is in connivance with capitalism and the state should be seen as
both patriarchal and capitalist. She builds her argument by saying that the state
acts to support patriarchal relations in a variety of ways which include the
limiting of women’s access to paid work, the criminalization of forms of
fertility control, support for the institution of marriage through the cohabitation
rule etc. one example of the patriarchal actions of the state is that which enabled
male workers in the First World War to ensure their re-entry into the relatively
highly paid and skilled engineering jobs that they ceded to women for the
duration of the hostilities.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century many men began to
insist that their wives should stay at home and not take work outside. Those
who went out to work, particularly younger single women, were subject to close
supervision by fathers and male employers. In India for example, while women
in the lowest income groups have always been earning for their families,
women in higher caste and class categories generally were expected to remain at
home. Womens going out to work was considered to be a blot on the
masculinity of their men. Therefore, as various studies have shown, as soon as a
family experienced upward economic mobility, it would withdraw its women
from work. Further, women had never been participating in decision making
process within as well as outside families. The public spaces, for example the
panchayat, market places, public transport, administration etc., have all been
male spaces, in which women had no place or role to play. Thus patriarchy
continued to rule beyond home even to the workplace.
Patriarchal structures actually grew stronger with the advent of
industrialization and technological revolution. There has been a clear cut
domination of men over technological knowhow and expertise. For centuries,
barring a few women, men have been encouraged to study medicine,
engineering, astronomy, mathematics and politics; thus making the entry of men
into these spheres easier while women’s reproductive capacity was often treated
as their handicap. In text books at school levels, the father has generally been
projected as the bread winner, while mother as a housewife.

1.3 Subversion of Matriarchal Ethos

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 As narrated by Rege (2003) for several decades, the standard
anthropological definitions of patriarchy and matriarchy were derived from an
essay written by Radcliffe Brown in 1924 ‘The Mother’s Brother in South
Africa.’ According to Brown, a society may be called patriarchal when descent
is patrilineal (i.e., the children belong to the group of the father), marriage is
patrilocal (i.e., the wife removes to the local group of the husband), inheritance
of property and success are in the male line, and the family is patripotestal (i.e.,
the authority over the members of the family is in the hands of the father or his
relatives). On the other hand, a society can be called matriarchal when descent,
inheritance and succession are in the female line, marriage is matrilocal (the
husband removing to the home of his wife), and when authority over children is
wielded by the mother’s relatives (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). Rege moves on to
argue that this definition clearly indicates that familial authority in either system
is expected to repose with males, the father in the one, the maternal uncle or
other male relative on mother’s side in the other. According to Radcliffe-
Brown, there are no known empirical societies where women legitimately wield
authority over men in the family and society (Gould and Kolb 1964). In other
words, as the logical inverse of patriarchy, matriarchy is a ‘myth’. On the
contrary, Kolenda (1987) found significant regional variations in measures of
what she calls ‘wifely bargaining power’.
Matrilineal kinship systems were seen to be inherently or structurally
unstable for one reason or another. It was as though they must always be
straining towards the logical consistency, if not the natural necessity and
historical inevitability of patriliny or patriarchy. Actually, conceiving of
‘patriarchal’ families as an ideal type proposition has been responsible for
subverting all other systems with mixed features, including the matriarchal
societies.
According to one source, the term matriarchy was used in the nineteenth
century to designate the hypothetical form of society in which women were the
leaders and rulers. Anthropologists now agree that there is no evidence to
substantiate the claim that any society has ever come under such control (Gould
and Kolb, 1964:416). Hence sexual asymmetry in the exercise of power has
been found to exist in the form of universal or near universal domination of men
over women.

1.4 Femininity and Masculinity

Every society defines social roles on the basis of gender. In fact, since
birth, a child is socialized according to the sex he/she has. For instance, the
colour and type of dress is chosen on the basis of sex of the child; the toys are
also selected on the basis of sex. In India as well as in many Asian countries,

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parents and families differentiate between a male and a female child while
feeding, getting him/her vaccinated, accessing education and health etc. Right
from the beginning, gender consciousness is reinforced in the child through the
process of reward and punishment. Masculine and feminine characteristics are
distinguished in the following manner:
Masculine Feminine
Assertive Modest
Tough Tender
Rational Emotional
Aggressive Docile
Focused on material Concerned with
success quality of life

Girls from the very childhood are encouraged and rewarded for
internalizing the feminine traits, e.g. submissiveness, emotiveness, tenderness,
modesty, patience and the like, whereas boys are encouraged to be assertive,
dominating, aggressive, competitive and ambitious. Hence a boy acquires
masculinity while a girl acquires femininity in the process of socialization.
Ann Oakley (1972) a pioneer in exposing the social construction of
gender in the light of the huge cross cultural variations across the world, argues
that people learn the ‘normal’ ways to act feminine or masculine in their society
through socialization processes. She borrowed the term ‘gender’ from the 1960s
work of Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist. Oakley argues that early socialization of
children within the family is especially important in teaching people to act in
ways thought appropriate for their gender. As soon as a baby is born people
treat it differently and expect it to act differently depending on whether it is a
boy or a girl. Girls tend to be treated as more delicate and dependent, while
boys are treated as more robust and independent.
Another sociologist Jessie Bernard (1981) argues that the everyday life
especially for children under five is divided into a ‘pink world’ for girls and a
‘blue world’ for boys. The pink world encourages girls to be submissive and
emotional while the blue world expects boys to be assertive and independent.
For example the choice of dish cleaners, tea sets and dolls like real babies are
bought for girls reinforcing ideas of femininity as about being a wife and
mother who cares for others. On the other hand, trains, cars, tool sets and heroic
action figures present a masculine life centred around active work and
adventure.
Further the process of reward and punishment tend to reinforce the
notions of masculinity and femininity among the young children. For instance, a
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boy is rewarded for displaying risk taking, adventurous behaviour and
dominance, while a girl is discouraged against such behaviours and vice versa.

1.5 Masculinity and Femininity are Socially Constructed

Are women born with femininity and men with masculinity? One could
find many girls behaving like boys, wearing a hairstyle that is considered
masculine, and dressing up like a boy. Similarly it is not uncommon to see boys
having a very delicate body, modest in their behaviour and with feminine
characteristics. Actually, a boy with feminine traits is vulnerable to ridicule and
sarcasm by his male and even female friends and relatives and the same applies
to a girl with masculine traits. Therefore, society through reward and
punishment forces boys to grow as men and girls to grow as women.
In relation to femininity it is thought that women’s traditional or natural
role is as mothers and that they should devote all or most of their attention to
this and not work. That women’s natural role means not doing paid work can be
challenged by looking at the women at the lowest end of income hierarchy. For
instance, in India, women in poor households have always worked to
supplement family income. Feminine work has primarily been thought to
include home making, child caring; mainly the domestic activities within the
private sphere. Activities in the public sphere have been considered to be
masculine. Further, women’s body has been under the lens at all times, wherein
poise, delicacy and beauty have been considered to be feminine traits while
muscles, toughness and dominance are the masculine attributes. For a long time
masculinity and femininity were treated to be biological and thus naturally
given to men and women. It was only after social anthropologists conducted
extensive empirical studies across countries, that it came to be realized that
there are many societies in which the heavy and most strenuous work is
performed by women and consequently they have muscular and hefty bodies,
which may be considered as masculine in other societies. It is thus the social
and occupational roles which give particular characteristics to the physique of
men and women and these are not natural.
However, it is a fact that despite tremendous changes in the wake of
industrialization and modernization, the notions of masculinity and femininity
have refused to weaken; rather these have been reinforced.
It is so difficult to dilute the notions of masculinity and femininity which
are reflected by the fact that despite the changed gender roles and entry of
women in male dominated professions, women’s femininity has not been
compromised. More women of all age groups are going to beauty parlours today
to maintain their femininity. In some of the South East Asian countries, it has
been reported that young girls working in corporate sector are paid by their

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employers to go overseas in order to procure “appropriate” dresses and apparels
to look attractive at their workplace. Further, young women have been
increasingly going in for surgery in which apart from flesh, the muscles of
thighs are removed to make these women look thin. After such a surgery
however, they are permanently not able to run or walk fast. Being expressive,
emotional, altruistic and patient are all considered as feminine traits which
women are expected to possess irrespective of their profession or educational
qualification. Men on the other hand are encouraged to possess masculine
characteristics such as aggressive body language, ambitious, career orientation,
competitiveness and so on.

1.6 Sexual Division of Labour

Work and gender have always been closely associated in all societies.
There are certain tasks which are known as masculine work and others as
feminine. The sexual division of labour within families and households has a
specific literature and is well recognized. Different types of work are subject to
this division. In the English village studied by Pauline Hunt, for instance, wives
clean the insides of window panes and husbands clean the outsides (Davies
1977). It is usually recognized that the contemporary urban family household is
constituted by a division of labour that defines certain kinds of work as
domestic, unpaid and usually women’s, and other kinds of work as public, paid
and usually as men’s. Child rearing and caring, washing, cooking etc. are
considered primarily as women’s work all over the world, while work outside
home in public spaces is considered to be men’s work. There has been an
enormous change in the division of labour in the recent past so that women have
started taking up the work which earlier was men’s work, e.g. shopping for
groceries, operating bank accounts, paid work, attending parent teacher
meetings and so on. Interestingly, however, while women’s work has thus
increased manifold, it is not very common for men to take up the women’s
work, i.e. domestic work. This kind of division of labour has another dimension
too, in that societies place men’s and women’s work in a hierarchy, so that the
tasks assigned to women are unproductive in that these do not bring any money;
while men’s work is productive because it brings in money to the family.
Feminists have struggled hard to bring loads of invisible work performed by
women round the clock under recognition by societies as productive work.
The sexual division of labour has often been explained in terms of the
‘Nature-Culture’ opposition, whereby it is argued that women are closer to
Nature while men closer to Culture. Pursuing the Biological theory, it is further
argued that biologically women give birth to children, lactate and rear them.
Therefore, they have been naturally designed for the activities of childbirth and

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child care. Since women are confined to the domestic context, their main sphere
of activity becomes intra and inter-familial relations, as opposed to men, who
operate in the political and public domain of social life. Men thus become
identified with society and the public interest, while women remain associated
with family and therefore with domestic concerns only.
A high proportion of married women now go out to work, but it is still
mostly their responsibility to make adequate provision for childcare and they
continue to do most of the housework. Women’s careers are typically
interrupted, as they retreat from the labour force to care for young children, in
the very time frame in which ambitious males are taking the first key steps up a
promotion ladder. A majority of men today are not hostile towards their wives
going out to work, but in most households it is the man’s work that determines
where the couple lives and how, much of their lives are organized. In the
domain of work itself, what Connell calls “gender regimes” or in Bradley’s
phrase “gendered work cultures”, are still firmly in place. Some kinds of tasks
are considered as appropriate for women and women are debarred from various
types of occupations by informal barriers and norms.
The advent of new forms of domestic technology, household appliances
and commercially produced services, such as pre-prepared food, disposable
nappies and so on, has only partially reduced the amount of time women spend
on domestic chores. Scholars agree that women’s concern with childcare and
domestic tasks blocks their opportunities for achieving equality with men in the
workplace. Far more women in paid work are in part time employment than
men. Most part time jobs are poorly paid and have low promotion prospects.
These very factors push women back towards home, sustaining the sexual
division of labour.

References
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Kohlberg-Gilligan controversy and feminist theory, in S.Benhabib, and
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Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
- Bernard Jessie. 1981. The Female World. New York, Free Press.
- Davies M.L.(ed.) 1977. Life as we have known it. London, Virago.
- Gould, Julius and William L. Kolb (eds.) 1964. A Dictionary of the Social
Sciences. London, Tavistock.
- Hartmann, Heidi. 1981. ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and
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- Hofstede, Geert. 1998. Masculinity and Femininity. New Delhi, Sage
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- _____________ 1994. Towards a Theory of Patriarchy, in The Polity
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