Patriarchy - V. Geetha

1
Patriarchy: A History of the Term
THE CONCEPT OF PATRIARCHY

Patriarchy is a well-worn term. It possesses an everyday
resonance. When used in casual conversation or in a de-
scriptive sense, whether in English or in any of the several
languages spoken in the Indian sub-continent, the term im-
plies 'male domination', 'male prejudice (against women)'
or simply 'male power'.
When a man raises his voice in the course of an argu-
ment and insists on his point of view, without letting oth-
ers who are party to that conversation, especially women,
get a word in, his actions are likely to be described as 'ag-
gressively patriarchal'. If a woman alleges sexual harass-
ment at her work-place and all the men in her office deny
that this could ever happen, chances are that she might
describe their reasoning as being 'typically patriarchal'. In
political speeches that declaim the universal subordination
of women, the word 'patriarchy' is likely to figure fre-
quently-as a catch-all word to describe the diverse ills that
women suffer from.
But what is patriarchy? Where does the word come from?
At its simplest, the term means 'the absolute rule of the
father or the eldest male member over his family'. This
meaning of the term has been extended to describe the na-
ture of this rule. Patriarchy is thus the rule of the father not
only over all women in the family, but also over younger and
socially or economically subordinate males.
Anglo-European anthropologists, writing in the nine-
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Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
teenth century, used the term widely. In their writings, 'pa-
triarchy' usually referred to a social system where men were -...·
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family heads, descent was reckoned through the father, men n
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alone were priests, and all laws and norms were dictated by '<
..
what male elders in that community held to be just and
right. When used in this sense the term was contrasted with
'matriarchy', which referred to social systems in which
women ostensibly exercised political authority over men, or
possessed decisive power and exerted a measure of control
over social relationships and everyday life. Matriarchy, in
this scheme of things, was usually considered an earlier and,
therefore, more 'primitive' stage of society, and patriarchy, a
more advanced stage of existence.
However, today, the term 'patriarchy' is used somewhat
differently. It is not only a descriptive term that explains how
specific societies construct male authority and power, but
also an analytical category. The transformation of patriarchy
from a descriptive to an analytical category happened in a
specific global historical context-the 1970s that gave birth
to a rousing feminist political and intellectual culture in di-
verse global contexts. In the course of time, this led to the
constitution of Women's Studies as an intellectual discipline
and it is in this double location, in the field, where women
agitated for their rights and the university, where women
demanded that their experiences and points of view be taken
seriously that patriarchy emerged as a way of both describ-
ing and comprehending the world. .
Since that time 'patriarchy' has been critically deployed,
chiefly to unpack the key constituents of authority and power
in any social system, which automatically privileges men over
women and in which women can lay claims to material, sexual
and intellectual resources, only through fighting for them.
That is, in a patriarchal society women have to struggle to be
educated, to have property made over to them and to choose
their partners in marriage. For men, these choices appear
more given, less fraught and even flexible.
The descriptions and critiques of patriarchy that have
emerged over the last few decades point to not merely its
negative aspects but its productive prowess as well. Thus, it
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has been argued that a patriarchal system provides comfort-
ing self-definitions and 11orms, which, ho"rever restrictive
and limited, also amply reward those who learn to accept
their defined roles as mothers and wives. Wifehood and
motherhood are glorified and granted not only social sanc-
tion, but also eulogized in literature, art and religion so that
women do actively want to essay their social roles.
The productive and punitive aspects of patriarchy are of
course interlinked. Thus, women who are not fertile or who
cannot legitimately be wives or mothers (such as upper caste
widows in India) are derided and their civic status is mostly
non-existent. Likewise, women who wish to remain single
and refuse marriage, women who love other women, and
women who would rather be men, are not allowed social vis-
ibility; or, if they are to be visible, relegated and confined to
defined spaces. These could include an ashram, a commu-
nity whose dealings with the larger world are restricted or a
marginal group that exists through accepting its low social
status. More often, though, women who do not wish to rest
their civic ide11tity on th~ir fertility and domestic status are
igi1ored, humiliated and punished for b~ing obdurate and
'unnatural'.
Patriarchy has also been viewed as more than the subordi-
nation of women. It has been pointed out that not all men are
powerful in a patriarchal system: younger me11, who necessar-
ily have to defer to older men, till their tum to exercise power
comes; poor, underprivileged and, in the Indian context, dalit
and 'lower caste' men, men who are oppressed and exploited
by the powerful of their sex and denied access to resources as
well as their own masculine identity; men who appear 'effete'
or are seen as insufficiently 'virile'; men who willingly desire
and covet femininity, such as hijras; men who love other men,
rather than women, are, in different ways, and for different
··-
:c periods of time, discriminated against, excluded and denied
-=:( tl1eir h,1manity in the patriarchal scheme of things. In spite of
this that certain classes and sorts of men are as much the
targets of patriarcl1al authority as women-the fact remains
·-....... that, in a social and economic sense, all men can and do lay
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c.. claims to resources and power far more easily than the women
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in their families or communities. For example, in a working
class or lower caste family, male children get to eat better food .......-·
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and are more likely to be sent to school than female children. n
Likewise, men who do not conform to masculine norms do ~
..
not therefore automatically lose their civic and legal status.
Thus, gay men, especially if they are not poor or working
class, do not always lose out on civic respect. As long as they
....-0 ·
VI
do not defiantly flaunt their sexual choices, and are not dra- '<
matically 'effeminate' they continue to enjoy access to decid-
a
....
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edly masculine--and public-spheres of influence and power, ~
such as the media, for example, or politics. (The one excep- ...3~
tion appears to be hijras: because they actively renounce and
refuse masculinity, they are often the objects of soc_ial hurt
and derision. Besides, many of them are also from working
castes and classes.)
With women matters are distinctively different. Until re-
cently, in most countries, women who did not marry, or were
not fertile, who became widows at a young age or were 'de-
feminized' in other ways because they did not conform to
conventional reproductive norms were viewed with horror
and suspicion. Witch-hunting, for instance, is an expression
of such horror: women who appeared a threat to the larger so-
cial group because they did not conform to the norms that
governed feminine behaviour were, and are, accused of prac-
tising magic and sorcery and punished severely and sometimes
killed. In some contexts, as we have noted earlier, non-fertile,
unmarried women also stood to lose legal and civic privileges.
Lesbians find it more difficult--than gay men-to negotiate a
life for themselves. They bear not only the burden of their
sexual orientation, bt1t are also victimized by the demands of
commonplace femininity and as disenfranchised as other
women are when it comes to employment, wages and housing.
In spite of much complex and sensitive theorizing on pa-
triarchy, there are some who hold that such theorizing is
perhaps unnecessary and futile, for it could never really ex-
plain the manner in which sexual difference and exploitation
operate in all of the world's cultures. They suggest that it
might be more productive to talk of patriarchy in a limited
historical sense. Some extend this argument to note that the
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•
term has very little explanatory or analytical value: they ar-

gue that there is nothing called patriarchy, but only diverse
social arrangements that privilege some men over all others,
including other men, and enable their automatic access to
intellectual, spiritual and material resources. We shall return
to this criticism later, in the conclusion to this book.
But, before we go any further, we could perhaps retain for
now this provisional definition of patriarchy and refine it, as
we go along:
Patriarchy rests on defined notions of masculine and feminine,

is held in place by sexual and property arrangements that
privilege men's choices, desires and interests over and above
those of the women in their lives and is sustained by social
relationships and cultural practices which celebrate hetero-
sexuality, female fertility and motherhood on the one hand
and valorise female subordination to masculine authority and
virility on the other.
In what follows, we will consider the import, context and

relevance of patriarchy as an idea and a concept by locat-
ing it in both historical and textual contexts. Here, we shall
look at the various meanings of and debates around 'patri-
archy'-as these have emerged in political or social mass
movements, which deploy gender as a critical category and
in theoretical debates amongst feminists and between:;
feminists and others. (We have to bear in mind that there
exist both critical as well as commonsensical interpretations
....E of patriarchy within women's movements and feminism as
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well as in other justice movements. We hope to take into
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account both interpretations.)
.....
0 CONTIXTS AND MEANINGS
Ill
·-
:::r: The term 'patriarchy' came to be widely used in the 1970s,
~ especially in England and the United States of America. But
the sense of what it implied-the power of men over
women and the effects of this power-has never been en-
....
..... tirely absent in our various histories. In several cultural and
"'
c.. social contexts and different historical periods, women ex-
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pressed their anger and indignation over the manner in
which they suffered misery, privation and injustice at the
hands of men-in poetry, song and in stories that were
passed down the generations, from mother to daughter.
Such expressions were direct as well as oblique and may be
found in literatures across the world: in folk songs, poetry, .....
V,
fairy tales, religious poetry. In some historical contexts, 0
women produced critical readings of scripture, argued their '<

points of view in letters and conversations, and even at-
a
.....
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tempted to influence state policy with respect to what they ~
considered women's entitlements. ...3~

However, even this history of protest and argument that
we know today and which we claim as part of our common
human heritage is one that has been gained only in retro-
spect. Our contemporary search for women and movements
that resisted patriarchy in the past, at various points in time
and in different cultural contexts, has helped us identify
what women said and did about oppressive and unjust gen-
der systems and arrangements. This has not been easy, be-
cause the history that we learn and the common memory we
inherit seldom contain information or references to these
women and their ideas. But today, it is clear that at all times
there were protesting women who possessed their own sense
of patriarchy.
While we have not been able to glean everything about the
distant past, our immediate history has yielded us several in-
sights. Thus we know that from the eighteenth century at
least, across the globe, and in diverse contexts, women (and
some men) were engaged in a relentless examination of gen-
der roles, privileges, and gendered social and economic ar-
rangements. This has helped create a unique body of
knowledge that interrogated-and continues to interrogat.e-e-
the certainties of our individual and social relationships and
roles, beliefs and attitudes. The questioning of patriarchy,
thus, helped-and helps to produce knowledge about it.
Spanning several disciplines, including anthropology, so-
ciology, political science, studies of art, literature and cul-
ture, the biological and health sciences, and establishing
unexpected linkages between these different forms of knowl-
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edge, the scholarship and thought on patriarchy today is
complex, rich, argumentative, polemical and appear end-
lessly self-reflexive. That is, this scholarship has shown it-
self capable of critically re-examining its own concepts from
time to time.
Before we go on to consider the various issues at stake in
the theorizing of patriarchy, we need to look at the contexts in
which various theories emerged (and continue to emerge). For
the most part, these issues have been addressed from actual
political locations and refined in the context of practical
struggles.
INDIA: THE CRUCIAL DECADES

In the Indian context, questioning women, especially those
who challenged not merely individual male caprice and au-
thority but also the systems that produced these, have al-
ways existed, as we are beginning to find out. We now have
access to women's writing from across the centuries and this
has proven to be a rich archive that we can proceed to read
in the light of our particular concerns. Further, historians,
sensitive to what women might have thought and said in
the past, are beginning to uncover information about the
latter from inscriptions on temple walls, royal documents
and other such, public records.
Yet, this past would not have been ours to own, if it were
not for the decades of the 1970s, when significant intellec-
tual and political changes took place in independent India's
perceptions of itself. These changes brought with them ar-
....E
~ guments and debates about women's lives and their relation-
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..c. ships to not merely their families and communities, but the
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larger world as well. Discussions of patriarchy in the Indian
context came to be sharply defined during this. period, so it
....,
0 is importar,t we understand the 1970s for what they repre-
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sent (and represented).
-=:i:
>- • The late 1960s and the early 1970s witnessed the
..c.
~ outbreak of communist or Left militancy, or
ra
....
...., Naxalism, as it is referred to today, in parts of ru-
ra
c.. ral Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. (The term
10
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'Naxalism' is derived from the term 'Naxalites', as .....
~
the revolutionaries who participated in an uprising ....

-·
against landlords in Naxalbari in West Bengal came
to be known.) These movements saw women en- • •
gage in armed struggles along with men-for eco- J::i

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nomic and social justice, which included gender -·
~
justice. 0
• The 1970s also saw the emergence of movements, -<

especially in southern India, which were commit-
a
,....
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ted to both interrogating 'planned economic devel- n>
opment' as understood and practised by the Indian ....j;jl

state, and to imaging alternative ways of bringing 3
about social and economic changes (a movement
that would eventually lead to the emergence of
non-governmental development organizationss--
NGOs). These movements comprised a sprinkling
of women.
• During this same period, young people, including
young women, enthused by the idealism of the old
socialist Jaya Prakash Narayan, took to the streets
to fight a corrupt polity and venal politicians.
• In 1974, the government of India produced the
Towards Equality report, over which many women .
had laboured. This report unpacked in a systematic
and fundamental manner the horrifying nature of
the discrimination that women were subject to, and
proposed a series of far-reaching changes that
needed to take place for justice to be done to
women.
• In 1975, the Congress government headed by
Indira Gandhi declared the country to be in a state
of national emergency. Subsequently, it undertook
a series of coercive actions that were catalysts in
bringing into existence a range of resistance move-
ments against a distinctly unpopular and authori-
tarian regime. Many women who came to be
politically and intellectually active in the 1980s
were part of these resistance movements.
• Human rights activism received a fillip during the
11
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late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of police
terror against communist militants. Ultimately,
many of these movements cohered into a unified
struggle against the despotism of Indira Gandhi
and her government. Many women were part of
this activism.
• Women also rallied around everyday issues, and the
decade of the 1970s saw the angry eruption of the
Anti-Price Rise movement, made visible by frus-
trated home makers and their supporters; these
years also witnessed the coming together of poor
and underprivileged women for more viable and
independent economic options (resulting in the
forming of the now famous Self-employed Women's
Association [SEWA]).
• In 1975 the United Nations held the first interna-
tional women's conference in Nairobi, an event at-
tended enthusiastically by a motley crowd of
women from across India. This conference pro-
vided an impetus for loud thinking among politi-
cally active women on the subject of patriarchy.
We thus find that in almost every political instance, women

were visible: in trade unions or human rights groups, fight-
ing the death of democracy in Indira Gandhi's prisons; in
the Left-Naxalite movements and as eager participants in
the debates and practices around 'development alterna-
tives~ and, most of all, baffled and angry at the findings of
the Towards Equality report.
If the mid- and late 1970s galvanized the energies of sec-
tions of women into public projects in a decisive manner, the
early 1980s saw them constitute their own forums for public
action. These were the years that brought into the forefront
·-
:I:
issues of sexual violence. A Supreme Court judgment on
-=x::: custodial rape (the rape of a young adivasi girl, Mathura, by
.. two policemen [ Tukaram v State ofMaharashtra, 1979 sec
~
>-
~ (Cr) 381], which betrayed a frightening insensitivity to gen-
·-...."'.... der justice and a cynical reading of a horrible crime, forced
Q.."' an incipient feminist movement into social visibility. (The
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policemen were acquitted and the girl's 'morality' was called
into question.) Sexual assault, the trauma it induced, the
...
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-.
legal ambiguities which were woven around the crime and
the fact that the crime was barely registered as such by the
)::I
state in its engagements with it, led women who had fol-
I
lowed the case into forming groups for protesting rape and -...
VI ·
assault. This happened in the larger metropolitan cities, 0
chiefly in Bombay, Madras and Delhi, but elsewhere too,

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wherever women were visible in public life, it caused a stir- ...::r
0......
ring amongst them: not only in ·those already committed to ~
public activism, but also amongst those who were yet un- ;;;-I
-.
committed, but who were beset by an uneasy angst and an- 3
ger ( the earliest readers of the feminist journal Manushi
founded in 1980 by Madhu Kishwar in Delhi would fall into
this category).
This stirring of minds and the activism that came with it
provoked women-and some men-to examine the nature of
both social and state attitudes to women and their experi-
ences. In tum, ideas voiced in the course of actual struggles
came to be refined in another context: the context provided by
Women's Studies. The idea for Women's Studies had been
mooted in the wake of the intellectual ferment caused by the
Towards Equality report and it acquired practical expression
and form in the 1980s.
We owe our definitions of patriarchy to this unique mo-
ment in time, the conjuncture of the late 1970s and early
1980s, when the political concerns of the women's move-
ment and the scholarly ideals of Women's Studies fed into
each other, providing a layered and rich framework of analy-
sis and action. However, political and scholarly concerns did
not always share common agendas. Over a period of time,
these developed their own trajectories of growth, which
sometimes intersected, but which often produced their own
distinctive critiques of patriarchy, which we shall consider in
some detail in the pages to come. For now, we shall merely
note the manner in which these feminist concerns advanced
their arguments.
The women's movement of the 1970s and early 1980s
produced original and telling disquisitions on sexual vio-
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lence, and how it was embedded within practices and struc-
tures we took as given and for granted, such as emotional
and sexual intimacy, the family, kinship and community. On
this basis, several activists took to interrogating the premises
of social and political theories with which most of its activ-
ists were familiar and to which they owed allegiance: chief
amongst these were theories of socialism and communism.
Socialism, or at least the variant that was available in the
Indian context, did not appear to hold all the answers to
questions regarding sexual injustice and violence that
women's groups considered urgent and pertinent. But nei-
ther could socialism, therefore, be jettisoned, since issues of
poverty, class and property were central to women's emo-
tional lives and familial and social status. The debates be-
tween an incipient feminism that had discovered sexual
violence and a socialism, identified both with the commu-
nist parties and their practices as well as with the founding
texts of the worldwide communist movement, were elabo-
rated through these years, often with a view to persuade
communist parties to grant gender concerns priority. The
outcome of this debate was uncertain for the most part, but
in themselves the arguments that emerged during this time
led to the emergence of a distinctive political project: theo-
rizing and opposing patriarchy in particular ways. (We
shall return to this in the pages to come.)
As far as Women's Studies was concerned, this fledgling
discipline, appalled at the status of women in India, took to
examining the material coordinates to the poverty and social
....E subordination they endured, and produced impressive writ-
~
~ ings on the links between women's work, strategies for sur-
...,
~
vival and the larger system which determined these•
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(Individual women scholars who had been working on
~
...,
0 women's lives or gender inequality for some time now found
·-V)
an anchor in the formally constituted Women's Studies fo-
rums.) In doing so, Women's Studies dared to detach
'woman' from the family and addressed her as a social entity
in her own right. Women became visible as individuals
·-...,.... whose survival needs were routinely subordi11ated to family
co
Q.. needs; as underpaid workers, whose labour power and skills
14
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had no social or economic significance; as citizens whose "...
,..
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rights were infringed in an everyday sense, in terms of their -·

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access to food, shelter and mobility. Thus, the inexorably ;:;
patriarchal nature of the family and society was rendered vis, ~
..
J::,
ible in fairly stark terms and made the subject of state policy.
:::c
Further, women were also seen as persons whose lives
were shaped by the affective ties of kinship and endogamous
marriage. It was now argued that these were not merely 'as,
pects' of a woman's life, but structures and conditions that
defined and limited their status within the family, their place
of residence and determined their mobility and access to fa,
milial and common resources. Religious faith and cultural
practices, especially those that required women to participate
in them, were also brought within the ambit of scholarly
enquiry. Feminist scholars argued that individual and social
consciousness, especially the assumptions that guide our
lives in matters of male,female roles, identities and relation,
ships, owed a great deal to the interlinked spheres of culture
and religion, for these provided the associative and meta,
phoric content to social pressures and norms. These early
studies served as signposts for further studies of women's
lives, and eventually lead to research that brought to visibil,
ity the distinctive nature of Indian patriarchal arrangements.
Debates within the women's movements and Women's
Studies in India did not merely heed local historical anxi,
eties. In some ways, the terms of argument were given to us
by struggles waged elsewhere, but which appeared to have a
bearing on our own particular realities. Discussions of sexual
violence and sexuality, and of the relevance of socialism, for
instance, did derive a measure of their moral indignation
from concomitant debates in Europe and North America.
Women's Studies in India also looked for precedents and
support from disciplinary initiatives elsewhere: for example,
the rich and fruitful dialogues within Western anthropology,
undertaken largely by feminists in that discipline, helped re,
conceptualize Indian responses. In this sense, the positing of
patriarchy, as an object of political attention and critique in
India, was part of a world historical churning, brought about
by political and theoretical developments across the globe.
15
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The restless Indian decades of the 1970s and early 1980s
therefore need to be to be viewed in the context of a series
of international developments, which we shall consider
briefly now.
DEBATING PATRIARCHY WORLDWIDE:

CONTEXTS AND THEORIES
The late 1960s have since become famous in global history
as the 'street-fighting years'. These were the years of youth-
ful protest against the USA's war in Vietnam, and a time
when the civil rights movement in that country came into
unparalleled public visibility. Racial discrimination and in-
justice done to America's black peoples became matters of
public concern and several concerned citizens, both black
and white, took their arguments to street protests and sit-
ins. In France, Germany and England, young protesters not
only called into question the war-mongering policies of their
governments (in France, there was also a concerted opposi-
tion to its colonial policies in Algeria), but derided the as-
sumptions of an older generation that stood bewildered in
its conservatism, especially with respect to sexuality and
women's rights. It did appear that the world, as it was until
then, stood to be turned on its head, for everything was
called into question and the future seemed one of endless
possibilities.
In all these countries communist parties, which were usu-
ally considered to be in the forefront of any movement for
E social change, appeared unable to respond to the demands
.... of their times. They seemed both apathetic and antiquated.
~
~
..c
Indeed, in countries like France and Germany, they were
..... interrogated for their alleged quietism, for not falling in line
0 with what young people identified as a truly revolutionary
~
.....
0 moment. Also, the young were looking elsewhere for inspi-
V)
I
ration: to Mao Zedong's China and Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam;
i:::( to the national liberation struggles in the African continent,
and communist militancy in parts of Latin America.
In the United States and Britain, indeed in much of the
....
..... English-speaking world, these various protests and influ-
ro
0.. ences constellated into a moment of t')tctl liberation; for not
16
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only black people in the United States and the previously
colonized elsewhere but also for thousands of young women
as well. Inspired by the promise of the new, and scornful of
-.-·n..
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QI
QI
the old, especially with regard to sexual mores and the social ~
• •
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relationships mandated by these, young people everywhere
::c
were ready for a life outside family and conjugality.
Women experienced this need for change in very speci&c
ways, In the United States especially, enthusiastic young
women who began by participating in the civil rights and
anti-war movements, and who were vociferous about sexual
revolution, found themselves sidelined by a largely male
leadership. They were even told by the leadership of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, an organiza-
tion that stood in the vanguard of the anti-Vietnam war pro-
tests that the 'place of women in the movement' was 'on
their backs'. Inspired by the same ideals but stung by these
sexual insults and hypocrisy, and angered by their subordi-
nate position in the movements as well as in society, women
decided to focus their struggle against their own oppression.
This anger led to the birth of several strands of feminism,
chief amongst which-was 'radical feminism' (see below).
This latter would offer to a confused young generation a
disquieting and angry critique of the social order and render
the term 'patriarchy' an aspect of political commonsense.
Here we must remember that women who were part of
this exciting historical moment were not all educated, white
or middle class Americans. Some of the most effective orga-
nizing during these years was done by quiet and determined
groups of black American women, who banded together to
fight not only for their civil rights but against the cruelties
of a racist society in which black men as much as black
women were held subordinate: the former, by poverty and
racial injustice, and the latter, by not only these but also
sexual discrimination. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s,
black intellectuals went on to produce remarkably original
disquisitions on the relationship between racial identities,
gender relationships and economic and social power.
In Britain and Ger111any, where youth protests both ad-
dressed and mocked an older generation of communist lead-
17
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ers and thinkers, a critical and often acrimonious dialogue
emerged between women, 'the feminists', as they were iden-
tified, arguing about sexual oppression, and men and women
from the communist parties who wished to explain this op-
pression using the well-known political categories of Marx-
ism. Communists argued that while it may appear that
patriarchy had to do with questions of sexuality and repro-
duction, it had to be understood in terms of its relationship
to capitalism. Feminists diSng;eed: they observed that capi-
talism itself had to be understood differently, taking into ac-
count women's sexual and social subordination. They noted
communist politics and revolutionary practice had to speak
to issues of culture as much as they did to issues of capital
and class since it was in the domain of culture that oppres-
sive sexual and marital relationships were legitimized and
rendered credible. Such politics also had to heed the fast-
growing feminist demand that women's feelings of alien-
ation, subjection and suffering being political issues ought
not to be brushed away as belonging to the realm of the 'per-
sonal'. The personal, declared feminists, was also political,
What proved inspiring to those feminists who chose to
understand patriarchy in terms of how it fashioned, limited
and ultimately denied the individual female self were the
writings of the German Marxists from the Frankfurt school,
especially the work of Herbert Marcuse, who wrote bril-
liantly on the relationship between psychological and politi-
cal realities. Marcuse's ideas helped women understand how
the inner worlds of consciousness and the mind were shaped
...E by political circumstances and structures•
~
In France, students took to the streets, protesting against
.......
~
..c
not merely the Vietnam War and France's continuing occu-
0
pation of Algeria, but also the French education system.
2:-
0 These years proved to be the ones that schooled one of
tii
·-
::c France's most popular intellectuals, Michel Foucault. He
,::( went on to theorize the realm of sexuality in a manner that
.. challenged the relationship of the sexual to political and so-
>-
..c
l:! cial spheres. His work would prove to be a great source of
·-...
...
l'O
inspiration to feminist historians trying to account for the
l'O
a.. intimate inner lives of men and women in a patriarchal so-
18
Original from
ciety, and to a subsequent generation of homosexual activ-
ists and thinkers who came to view the erotic bond between
......-·
""O
QI
QI
man and woman as socially-and· not naturally--con- n

structed. ~
• •
l:,
These political protests centred on intimate and familial
:I:
relationships were influenced by and influenced discussions
and debates on various other issues, especially those that had
to do with race and colonialism. The struggle of black Ameri-
cans against racism in the United States and of African na-
tions against their colonial rulers made these issues
important. African and black American writings on race and
culture especially the work of men like Amilcar Cabral,
Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin-provided new and radical
perspectives on the links between European imperialism,
masculinity and racism, as well as on how these developments
fashioned both individual and collective consciousness.
Political and intellectual developments often intersected
in the context of the classroom-since the struggles involved
students--and academic research during the 1970s witnessed
some fascinating developments:
• The consolidation of Women's Studies in universi-

ties: the emergence of 'women' as subjects of de-
bate and research. Their 'invisibility' in historical
terms was probed, their forced silence made to
speak, and their writings exhumed and reappraised.
• Criticisms of all those disciplines which had been
interested in studying alien cultures, especially an-
thropology which, it was argued, had been part of
the Western world's colonial enterprise and used to
study and domesticate alien cultures to enable
Western control over them. It was noted that these
cultures had to be understood in their own right,
and their internal social and political arrangements
especially gender roles and functions theorized
from within their own historical experiences.
• The development of new perspectives on econom-
. ics: these were argued from the point of view of
female labour and female access to economic re-
19
Original from
sources. On the one hand, this led to the famous
'domestic labour' debate, on the nature and value
of housework and how this was to be integrated
into an overall economic analysis of production and
profit. On the other hand, this perspective pro-
vided a fresh appraisal of women's work, of the
nature of household labour and the factors that
determine this and led to considerations of
women's work, underpaid and exploited as it was,
as crucial to the purposes of capitalist growth and
•
expansion.
• An interrogation of the key arguments of political
science: notions of the 'social contract' that is the
basis of a democratic polity, of citizenship in the
context of unequal gender relationships and of the
role of the state in ensuring women's equalit.y were
all debated robustly.
The new questioning continued well beyond the street-

fighting years. But after the decade of the 1990s, much of
this interrogation has retreated into universities. Popular
arguments are not as intensely held as they used to be even
two decades ago. There are several reasons for this, which
are not really our concerns in this book. What appears im-
portant, though, is to note the ways in which popular and
academic refiguring of key social and political issues in Eu-
rope and North America influenced Indian debates on pa-
triarchy. Here, we would like to state the following:
...E
~
~
.c Of the various debates that influenced Indian arguments, the
......
contentious arguments between feminists and communists
0
proved to be historically the most important, especially for
~
0 the Indian women's movements of the 1980s and early 1990s.
t;
·-
:::c
As far as Women's Studies is concerned, in addition to the
feminist-communist exchange, developments within anthro-
i:x:
pology and economics and the evolution of new methods for
the study of history and culture proved important.
·-.........
ra
0.. We shall consider these in some details in what follows. Our
20
Original from
""0
interest is of course the Indian experience, but we shall try
and bring in major arguments from elsewhere that help us ........-·
DI
DI
to undentand our situation better. n
::r
'<
• •
):ii
INDIA IN THE WORLD
::c
DEBATING PATRIARCHY WITH THE INDIAN UFT -·
.....
Ill
Global political and intellectual developments fed into In- 0
dian debates in complex ways. For women claiming a politi-

'<
0
cal and civic space of their own in the groups that they .....
::r
n,
formed to protest sexual assault, the debates around commu-
nism appeared both disquieting and inspiring. On the one ;;i
...3
hand, several of these groups did not want to give up on the
communist vision, but neither did they think that commu-
nist descriptions and theories of inequality were adequate.
The sexual authority wielded by men over women in all
classes of society, and which appeared a part of common-
sense, and even found its way into the content of laws and
the policies of government appeared to possess an autono-
mous existence: women's oppression could not merely be
thought of in terms of capitalist exploitation or unequal land
ownership patterns and had to be theorized in novel ways.
Thus through the 1980s, feminists as many women now
fearlessly called themselves entered into lively and some-
times discordant public debates with communist ideologues
of various persuasions, arguing for the 'relative autonomy'
of the gender question; that is, they insisted that the oppres-
sion of women deserved to be theorized in its own right and
could not be considered merely as an aspect of an overall
exploitative social system. ·
This debate was conducted at several levels: in public fo-
rums, through the writing of articles, in the course of joint
campaigns conducted by women's groups that claimed they
were 'independent' or 'autonomous', that is, groups that dis-
claimed affiliation to a larger political grouping, even com-
munist ones, and women's groups which were associated
with communist parties. The tone of the debate and the is-
sues at lltake were determined by local circumstances, by re-
gional political contexts. The debates were geographically
wide-ranging, and conducted in several languages, including
21
Original from
Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Bengali.
What was the nature of the debate? It borrowed its terms
of argument in part from Anglo-American feminisms: not
only feminists but communists too worked with a typology
that had been developed by feminists in the United States and
Britain: liberal, radical and socialist. These categories ap-
peared useful in distinguishing different ways of theorizing
gender disparities and injustice. They were understood thus:
Liberal feminism, defined as such in the context of the
USA and Britian, was the political thought that middle class
white women in these countries subscribed to: they called for
a reform of social attitudes to women, changes in the legal
system to ensure equal rights in the realms of work and fam-
ily for women, and upheld the rights of individual women to
lives of their choice. But this point of view was disputed by
communists, both men and women; they held that however
useful in terms of practical politics in these countries, it did
not really help to evolve an understanding of what kept an
unequal social system in place.
The term Radical feminism was also an Anglo-American
import. Feminists. who considered women's sexual vulner-
ability and men's sexual authority to be central to patriar-
. chal oppression were believed to be radical. Radical feminists
attacked the family, emphasized the pervasiveness of violence
in sexual relations, and sought both to organize on their own
as women and to live independently of men. For them, the
subordination of women preceded and set an example for all
other forms of economic and social inequality, which, they
...E argued, emerged subsequently. ·
~
Socialist feminists comprised women-and some men-
...
~
.c.
..... who were members of communist groups and parties: they
0
argued that women's oppression was part of a larger system
~
....
0
VI
of economic and social inequalities. The ownership of pri-
vate property, the growth of capital and industry and the ex-
ploitation of workers affected women in specific ways. Thus
women who desired to challenge their unequal social and
economic status ought actually to challenge the entire sys-
.......
·- tem and fight for its transformation.
"'
Cl.. This typology, however useful in an explanatory sense,
Original from
~
did not really capture the complex politics of active femi-
nists, either in the USA and the UK or in India. Neverthe- ...,..- ·
DJ
less it remained a staple of communist-feminist debates

during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Communist ideo- ••
logues, both men and women, produced critiques of 'radical

feminism' and argued the importance of socialist feminism.
Feminists, without abandoning their analysis of class, in-
sisted that sexual difference and male sexual authority
needed to be understood as relatively autonomous of class
a
,..
::r
and caste power, and as pertaining to all men. n>
In practice, though, there were all sorts of ideological and ...3

;;i
political crossovers. For example, Indian feminists who cam-
paigned for laws that penalized domestic violence and which
punished rape crimes more effectively were not merely 'lib-
eral' women who looked to the law to produce social change.
Many of them were active in trade unions, communist par-
ties or independent socialist groups. Further, those who
spoke out against and worked on issues to do with sexual
violence took their arguments to communist forums: they
demanded an end to sexual harassment at the workplace;
called for trade unions to be more sensitive to issues con-
cerning women and demanded that women's labour be ac-
counted for in more precise terms than was the case in the
1980s. Women members of communist parties and trade
unions too echoed these demands.
During this period, the famous Shramshakti report on
women workers in the informal sector was commissioned (the
commission that produced the report was headed by Ela Bhatt
of SEWA and set up by the government of India in 1988). The
report, when completed, provided a detailed account of
women's working lives, the economic exploitation and social
and sexual humiliation they faced in the course of their work,
the challenges to "their health and the state of the country's
laws with respect to women workers. The report demon-
strated that the use of cheap and exploited female labour was
central to industrial and economic growth (and to capitalism).
Perhaps nothing captures the rich insights that Indian
feminists possessed in the 1980s than these two articles from
an anthology of essays from M.anushi. They indicate that in
23
Original from
spite of the restrictive limits of the typology used in contem-
porary debates, feminists did articulate a more expansive
theoretical position. The first article is Madhu Kishwar's
introduction to the volume. Beginning with an appraisal of
woman's work in the household, which includes both the
physical labour of making available a subsistence meal, wa-
ter and fuel as well as other less tangible tasks, Kishwar goes
on to analyse the experiences of women in terms of depriva-
tion (lack of access to food, health and rest), landlessness,
and life in a peasant community. She demonstrates how kin-
ship ties, marriage practices and a culture of seclusion of
women (at least in north and northwest India) all work to
restrict women's lives and choices. Kishwar argues that in
spite of the hard labour that is the lot of most women in
India, rarely are they allowed to claim the dignity or eco-
nomic power that is due to them on this account. On the
contrary, women are encouraged to mortify themselves, ef-
face their own selves and deny their own needs and to sub-
ordinate themselves physically, sexually and emotionally to
the men in their lives.
For Kishwar, the crucial elements that go to render
women subordinate include lack of control over resources,
such as land, lack of access to instruments of labour, such as
a plough, which according to custom women are disallowed
to wield, kin networks that dictate how a woman should
marry and where she ought to live, household rules that
privilege the eldest man as the head of the family, lack of
mobility and finally, a culture of self-effacement which
....E women appear to practise willingly. Here we have an analy-
~
~
..c
sis that is broadly socialist in its assumptions, but it .also
..... suggests that culture and custom are as central to women's
0 subordination as economic deprivation.
~
.....VI
0 The second article is on the subject of violence, taken from
a larger section devoted to this theme. This latter is divided
into three parts, caste and class violence, police violence and
domestic violence. It is evident from this orchestration of
voices and experiences that here is a testimony to an oppres-
·-
......... sion that is in fact writ large on a woman's body, both literally
"'
0.. and symbolically. The manner in which this body is made to
24
Original from
bear witness to this oppression may differ from class to class ""0
but the fact is as an early Manushi editorial noted, 'to live as .......-·
Al
a woman is to live in fear--of molestation, rape, of social

stigma, in every one of our actions., The argument here owes
):,
a great deal to radical feminist ideas, but it is responsive to
::I:
specific Indian realities as well. In fact, there is a conflation of ,...-·
II)
two sorts of feminisms here: a concern with the bodily integ- 0
rity of women, which owes much to radical feminism; an un- '<

2.
derstanding of how this integrity is threatened by the low ....
:r
economic and social status that is most womens lot, an analy- n>
sis that is socialist in its assumptions. ~

...
During this period, communist theorizing on the question 3
of womens oppression never really worked through the in-
tricacies of sexual and domestic servitude, though feminist
debates on this theme were wide-ranging and widely avail-
able. On the other hand, feminists pushed arguments on
these themes to newer levels of practice as well as theory.
Thus, for instance, the debates around domestic violence
soon turned into disquisitions on the family, on alternatives
to the family and to conjugal love, and on heterosexuality,
all of which were now seen as important constituents of
patriarchal social arrangements. Along with discussions of
sexual exploitation and sexual love, womens groups spoke
and wrote on the body: on how women owned up to it or
did not, on modes of relating to one,s body, on desire, which
could be both heterosexual and homosexual, on women,s
perceptions of their health and well-being, on the politics of
reproduction, state policies on family planning and their in-
exorably gendered nature.
These discussions helped produce a critique of sexuality
on the one hand, though it was not viewed as such, being
really part of a feminist sub-culture rather than feminist
public action. Gay and lesbian activism in the mid-1990s and
the emergence of a new public context in the late 1990s for
discussions of sexual matters, in the wake of organizing on
issues to do with HN-AIDS, helped bring sexuality discus-
sions into the open and this continues to be a contentious
subject in feminist circles.
These early deb~tes on the body also made for a critique of
25
Original from
public health from a feminist perspective and inspired femi-
nist organizing against state policies and practices with re-
spect to re-production, especially family planning initiatives
that targeted women. This in tum led to a more nuanced un-
derstanding of how women's status and lives were both deter-
mined as well as restricted by motherhood and reproduction.
(Here, the work of the US-based Boston Health Collective
proved an inspiring example. Their famous publication, Our
Bodies, Ourselves, set the direction for feminist conversations
about health, fertility, reproduction and sexuality.)
The late 1980s and the early 1990s saw other develop-
ments: the Mandal-Masjid years forced feminists to interro-
gate caste and religion, especially in terms of how they
structured and informed women's lives. While this did not
happen evenly or was always welcomed, it provided new con-
texts for critical feminist self-reflection, which continues to
this day, and is still nearly not enough, as far as these catego-
ries and their relationship to women's lives are concerned.
BUILDING WOMEN'S STUDIES

All these debates were also present in another register: in
the Women's Studies programmes that emerged across the
country in the early 1980s. Arguments about socialism were
enriched by insights from anthropology and economics on
the one hand, and by studies in politics, history and culture
on the other. Sexuality and sexual violence did not emerge
as a matter of research and study until somewhat later; as
we have noted earlier, it remained a part of an incipient sub-
culture.
Anthropological studies provided two sorts of insights: on
women's reproductive roles and how these are structured in
patriarchal societies; perspectives on kinship and caste. The
first led to a more subtle understanding of how production
:::r: and reproduction are linked. The second set of insights led
i::x: to a study of marriage patterns, kinship groups in different
parts of India and the centrality of kin networks to women's
lives and showed how patriarchal control over women was
...
..... exerted and negotiated through these. The links between
n:I
c..
26
Original from
caste and female status were also examined, and caste en-
dogamy was theorized as an important aspect of patriar-
chal structures in India.
In economics, feminist economists, following their coun-
terparts in Anglo-America, began to question the very defi-
nition of 'economic activity'. They pointed out that such ,....
Ill
activity could not be thought of only in terms of what men 0
did; neither did it make sense to consider only work done in '<
factories, or in the field as economically productive. For, in
a
,....
::r
n,
countries like India the family as a whole, including women
and children, could be engaged in such activities. Thus the ...~3
home was often a site for production and the household, it
was argued, was a crucial site for the transaction of patriar-
chal authority. In a related move, some theorists took to ex-
amining female labour ( we have already referred to the
Shramshalcti report earlier) and noted that women's work
needs to be situated within the larger context of the 'sexual
division (and valuation) of labour'.
Those engaged in research related to economics also pro-
duced critiques of the larger assumptions about economic
development. Taking their cue from Development Studies,
which had emerged as an area of scholarship in parts of the
Western world, feminists challenged existing models of eco-
nomic growth, and noted that this often produced female
poverty and ecological destruction. They also provided, in
this context, a critique of the relationship between the
democratic state and its female citizens.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw women scholars ex-
amine history and society, ·culture and tradition critically.
Caste and religion, customs and practices, literature and the
arts came under the feminist critical lens. Scholars pointed
out that it was in and through cultural practices that patri-
archal structures were made acceptable and rendered desir-
able. On the other hand, culture could also be an arena for
resisting patriarchy.
Feminists were also engaged with the sphere of public ac-
tion and politics. Here, they were t:hiefl.y concerned with
those structures and practices, ideas and opinions that effec-
27
Original from
tively prevented women from participating in public life and
which legitimized their domestic roles. The role of custom
and religion in keeping women confined to domestic matters,
the various informal restrictions on women stepping outside
the confines of the house, the manner in which public insti-
tutions, such as political parties or trade unions effectively
excluded women, and finally the manner in which the state
consistently has failed to endorse the right of women to
equality in public life were all debated. These debates pro-
duced very interesting variations on notions of 'public patri-
archy', on public forms of control of women's lives.
We will consider these various arguments under three
major areas of study: the debates with communism and com-
munists, and the consequent re-figuring of our own under-
standing, based on insights offered by anthropology,
economics and political science; the influence of studies in
history and culture; the arguments produced by a consider-
ation of sexuality and sexual cultures. The conceptual ground
covered by women's groups as well as Women's Studies over
the last decades frame these three areas of enquiry.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The contents of Chapter 1 are based on a range of sources, includ-
ing the author's memories of that time, and her sense of the women's
movement in and after the mid-1980s. For a good introduction to
the contexts that framed feminist activism in India from the late
~-E
QJ
1970s onwards, readers could refer to the following titles:
..s:::. Agnihotri, lndu, and Vina Mazumdai; 2005, Changing Terms of Po-
.....
0 litical Discourse: Women's movement in India, 1970s-1990s, in
2:- Maia Khullar, ed., Writing the Women's Mooement: A Reader,
0
..... New Delhi: Zubaan.
·-VI
:::c Gandhi, Nandita, and Nandita Shah, 1992, The Issues at Stake, New
i::x: Delhi: Kali for Women.
>- Kishwai; Madhu, and Ruth Vanita, eds. 1985, In Search of Answers:
..s:::.
~ Women's Voices from Manushi, London: Zed Books.
"' Kumai; Radha, 1993, A History of Doing: An Illustraud Account for
Women's Rights and Feminism, New Delhi: Kali for Women.
28
Original from
Sen, lllina, ed. 1990, A Space Within the Struggle, New Delhi : Kali
for~men.
For a concise historical account of feminism in the United States of • •

America, the United Kingdom and Europe in the 1970s and aftei; :::x:,
see: ::c
Rowbotham, Sheila,1992, Women in Movement: Femioom and Social

Action, London: Routledge.
For those who wish to go further back into the past and identify
proto-feminists, the following books would be useful:
Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson, 1998, A Shining

Thread of Hot>e: The History of Black Women in America, New
York: Broadway Books. ·
Kerbei. Linda K., 1995, US History as Women's History, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Lemei. Gerda, 1993, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, New
York: Oxford University Press.
Spendei. Dale, 1983, Women of Ideas (and What Men Haue Done to
Them), London: Ark Paperbacks.
Tharu Susie and K. Lalita, eds. 1995, Women Writing in India, vols 1
and 2; Delhi: Oxford University Press.
As accounts of the emergence of Women's Studies in India, the fol-

lowing books are important:
Desai, Neera, and Vibhuti Patel, 1989, Critical Researches in Women's

StMdies, 1975-1988, Bombay: Research Centre for Women's
Studies, SNOT University.
Jain, Devaki, and Pam Rajput, 2003, NtJTTacives from the Women's
Studies Famil,, New Delhi: Sage.
Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, ed. 1986, Women's Studies in India: Some Per-
spectiues, Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
29
Original from
2
Production, Reproduction and

Patriarchy: Global Debates
Thus far we have looked at the larger political and social

contexts that enabled popular and conceptual interrogations
of the power of men, or patriarchy. Such questionings not
only created an active public interest in the subject, at least
amongst politically minded people, but also led to systematic
research and argument. With the emergence of Women's
Studies in the 1980s as an initiative that attracted some of
the best female minds of its time, new areas of enquiry were
opened up. It was an exciting time to conduct research in
such diverse fields as anthropology, economics, sociology,
history and public policy, with a focus on women's lives, and
even more exciting to act11ally link up various descriptions
and analyses into a coherent theory of what ailed women's
lives and why.
Of the many debates that emerged during this period-
the 1980s the most important ones were organized, both
politically and intellectually, around socialism, more specifi-
cally the relationship of women's oppression to other eco-
nomic and social oppressions in any given context. We will
first consider the details of the general debate between so-
cialism and feminism and then go on to show in Chapter 3
how these were complicated in the Indian context.
We start with the history of these debates: a history that
feminist-socialist scholarship has helped unearth. This his-
tory is richly complex, comprising not only what socialist
women and some men said and did, but also what women
Original from
whose lives were changed by capitalism, such as women
workers, said and did. (These latter were sometimes social-
-
C)
0
0-
ists, sometimes not.) -

AI
EARLY SOCIALISTS AND THE CRmQUE OF MALE RIGHT

From around the third decade of the nineteenth century,
working women in France and England-as well as some
middle class women with radical ideas-began to articulate
their rights to being heard and considered seriously in mat-
ters of public importance. By the middle years of the cen-
tury these countries witnessed the emergence of industrial
capitalism; in response to the inequities and misery pro-
duced by capitalist development, several socialist groups had
emerged. These groups combined a keen sympathy and sup-
port of working people exploited by the new economic order,
with a robust vision of the new world they desired to build,
in which workers would not be enslaved or exploited.
One of the most important constituents of this vision of
a new world had to do with women. Clearly women workers
were affected by the difficult conditions imposed on them
and their families by capitalism. But there were other issues
too that needed to be discussed. Arguing that women's lives
were limited and constrained by rules and norms, which con-
signed them to eternal domesticity and child-rearing, social-
ists, especially women, observed that this state of affairs had
to change. Housework had to be lightened with the help of
technology, children reared collectively and women granted
the freedom and time to participate in the affairs of the com-
munity in which they lived and worked.
These socialist visions emerged out of a particular under-
standing of the world and human relationships: early indus-
trialization brought home to many especially in England-
the ills of long hours of factory work in unhealthy condi-
tions. The poverty and misery that attended factory labour
pushed workers to re-consider their fate and to protest it.
The more articulate amongst them, especially tho~ who had
been active in various small trades and manufactures, but
who now had been forced to abandon these for factory work,
posited the need for new economic systems based on coop-
31
Original from
eration instead of competition, mutuality instead of profi-
teering. These principles of mutuality and cooperation
gradually came to be extended to all walks of life and soon
enough women and some men demanded that in human
relationships too, men observe these norms. Living together
in cooperative economic institutions, working for the com-
mon good, and extending respect and equality to women
became important aspects of this new vision of life. Some
among the 'cooperators' argued that freedom from authority
and self-interest also implied that sexual love too need not
be dictated by notions of posseasion and ownership, and that
men and women could, and ought to, love freely: and not
only within the bounds of marriage and not necessarily prac-
tise heterosexual love.
In France, from the early decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury, similar opinions were voiced. Followers of the thinker
and visionary, Saint-Simon, who supported the democratic
aims of the French revolution and was interested in the
progress of free enquiry and the truths offered by science,
inspired several young women and men to ask questions
about the world they lived in. These young people criticised
private owne~hip, that is, property being owned by the few
and used to exploit the many. They also extended the mean-
ing of ownership to include the rights that men gave them-
selves in marriage. Thus they opposed the 'possession' of
women by men and the strict regulations laid upon the
former by the latter, especially with regard to sexual matters.
Though men in the group were reluctant to concede equal
voice and authority to women, the women were insistent and
clear about what they wanted and what held them back from
realizing their claims. & Suzanne Voilquin, a well-known
thinker and writer complained: 'They believe they see a ten-
dency toward usurpation on our part whenever we dare to
express our own will. In general, men, even in the context of
the [Saint-Simonian] family are to women as governments
are to the people; they are afraid of us and do not yet love us.'
-"' The Saint-Simonian women further argued that as heads of
..0 families, men wielded enormous sexual and emotional power
-0
0
over women, and that this state of affairs had to change. In
32
Original from
the new society to come, not only would property be held in -0
C)
common, but also women's work, that is, housework and g-

childrearing would be a shared responsibility. -
English socialist and French radical women were particu- iO"'
larly outspoken and visible in the second half of the nine- ...
QI
n>
Ill
teenth century and after. Emboldened by their public
visibility-being part of socialist forums they embarked on
fierce criticisms of male power in the family and of the logic
of family life. Both, they argued, were chiefly responsible for
women being subjugated. To overcome this subjugation,
women must stake their claims to freedom: of opinion, in-
come, love and demand respect and dignity from men.
French radicals, especially those from the working classes~
argued that in the spheres of love and sexual happiness too,
women ought to assert their rights to happiness and desire:
not subject themselves to monogamy and the limited family
life this enjoined. Further they must insist that mothering be
recognized as a social responsibility and not delegated to
women, just because biologically they appear more suited to
the task. The French newspaper Tribune des Femmes called
out to all women to actively not accept male power-to drop
their surnames, as a token of their rejection of male legal
authority: 'We who bear men must give them our name and
take our name from our mothers and from God .•• If we
continue to take men's names ... we shall [continue to] be
slaves.'
During this time, in the United States of America, some
women took up the argument for 'free love'. By around the
· early nineteenth century, in England and the United States
of America, more women were staying away from home: ei-
ther working in factories, or migrating in search of work.
Educated and learned middle class women, possessed of a
sense of what they deserved and were entitled to, were be-
ginning to argue that marriage as .an institution did not serve
them well and, instead, lowered their civic status and cur-
tailed their personal freedom. By the mid-nineteenth century
birth rates, at least in the USA, had come down. Clearly
women were learning to regulate their sexual lives in a man-
ner that was noticeable. It was in this general context of
33
Original from
change in the 1840s and after--that some women assured
of their independence began to make out a case for free love.
Free love was argued as an option and as a right for a
range of reasons: in terms of what a woman felt she owed
herself; as a protest against marriage; against coercive sexual
relationships which put women at a disadvantage and as a
symbol of what one woman-Victoria Woodhull-referred
to as 'fidelity to oneself' or individual sovereignty. Such an
upholding of an individual's right to have a life of her
choice, irrespective of what social norms demanded .of her,
constituted an incipient critique of patriarchal sexual norms
which denied women sexual rights, and which castigated
desiring women as promiscuous. Significantly, free lovers
insisted that they were not making a case for sexual anar-
chy: only if a woman possessed the freedom to love, they
argued, could she love responsibly.
The English and French debates and the practices that
accompanied them, such as the setting up of model coopera-
tive communities, brought a new and sharp focus to discus-
sions of equality between men and women. We could
summarize the early socialist position thus:
• Socialist women pointed to how production and re-

production were linked. The exploitation of male
workers was based on an ethic of competition and
self-interest. This ethic also shaped family life and
sexual morality and if it were to be challenged, then
equality amongst all and emancipation for all
would have to be achieved.
• Equality did not merely refer to economic equality,
but also equality amongst the sexes, including
sexual equality and freedom for women to love as
they chose, for. inequality derived as much from an
oppressive family life and restrictive sexual choices,
everyday drudgery and compulsory mothering.
• Finally, women had to be accepted as valued mem-
-"' bers of the public world, and here too it was male
.0 prejudice that had ·to be challenged, since it stood
-t.,
0
34
Original from
in the way of women fulfilling their responsibilities -er
C)
0
to the common good.
-
QI
These debates would re-emerge nearly half-a-century later in

another context-in revolutionary Russia when the rule c;f
the tzar was overthrown and a communist party assumed
power in October 1917.
REVOLUTION AND PATRIARCHY

Around the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth century, revolutionary energies held the air not
only in Europe but also in the vast landmass of tzarist Rus-
sia. It was clear to contemporary watchers of public events
that the monarchy in Russia would not be able to sustain its
power and privileges. Socialists in Russia were questioning
both economic power and political authority vested in the
tzar and his bureaUC1'8Cy and were preparing for a struggle
that would result in a fundamental transformation of social
and economic life. This struggle was accompanied by a wide-
spread questioning of privilege of all sorts, and male power
and authority came to be systematically interrogated.
An earlier generation of SO'"ialist women (as we have seen)
bad criticized male privilege in the context of a general denun-
ciation of the power of private property and capital owner-
ship. This later generation of socialist and communist women
too did the same; but they did not merely denounce an ex-
ploitative economic and social system, but also sought to de-
fine its coordinates, especially the manner in which economic,
social and sexual relationships were linked together. In this, •
their task was vastly aided by the publication of Friedrich
Engels' The Origin ofthe Family, Private Property and the
State and several other related texts and, importantly, by their
own experiences of struggle in the factory and at home. It is
these texts that we shall consider briefly here.
TiiE ORIGIN Of THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERlY AND THE SIAIE

Engels' understanding of the origins of patriarchy was per-
haps one of the earliest attempts to situate the subordina-
35
Original from
tion of women within an overall social system. He suggested
that early human societies were egalitarian. There existed a
simple and functional division of labour, 'a pure and simple
outgrowth of nature', between men and women. Men
hunted, fished, provided the raw material for food and made
the tools necessary to carry out these tasks. Women cared for
the house, prepared food, clothing and looked after children.
'Each was master in his or her own field of activity; the men
in the forest, the women in the house • • • The household
was communistic, comprising several and often many fami-
lies. Whatever was produced and used in common was com-
mon property (Engels 1983: 155).'
The woman was the centre of the communistic house-
hold, for often she alone knew who the father or fathers of
her children were. Sexual relationships within the household
were freer than we know them now. Women could choose
their men. They, in fact, controlled the household; the men
were mere visitors who could be asked to leave, when the
women did not want them. Things changed when human
communities settled in one place for a long time. Earlier,
human beings led an essentially nomadic existence, wander-
ing from place to place in search of food and water. Once
they started living in a stable environment, they learnt to
grow crops and began to raise animals. Now, food ceased to
be a day-to-day problem. They could not only meet their
everyday food needs, but could actt,ally store and use sur-
plus food. As human beings produced more food, learnt to
make and use tools, and began to practise animal husbandry,
they had a range of goods at their disposal. Once the pro-
duction of these goods accelerated, the communistic nature
of society changed. Fights between groups became common,
as they fought over resources. Often the victors carried away
the losers to work as slaves for them. This created what
V)
Engels called the 'first great division of society into two
CU
~ classes': masters and slaves, the exploiters and the exploited.
"'
..c
CU Gradually as groups accumulated wealth, the relationship
0
-..c"' between men and women changed: for all the wealth was a
result of production, essentially a male activity. Domestic
-
0
C, work and the household, where women had wielded author-
36
Original from
C)
ity over men and the group in general, lost its significance. -0
'In the old communistic household, which embraced numer- CJ
ous couples and their children, the administration of the -

Al
household entrusted to the women was just as much a pub-

lic, a socially necessary industry, as the providing of food by
the men.' But when production became more valued that the
household, 'the administration of the household lost its pub-
lic character ••. It became a private service: the wife became
the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in
social production' (ibid, p.73). Household labour was deval-
ued and women became domestic slaves.
Thus, the division of labour, once a 'pure and simple
outgrowth of nature' ceased to be in favour of women. The
growing significance of production created a new institution:
private property. For, men who produced more and more of
everything wi.s hed to keep all of it for themselves. Private
property was not only land, animals or slaves, soon it came
to include women as well. Men wanted to own women, so
that they could gain control over the children, something
which they needed to do, if they had to pass on their wealth
to the next generation. With a woman being deemed a single
man's property, her control over her children also loosened.
Earlier, children inherited through their mother, rather than
their father, which is the case now. This was known as
mother-right. But when women lost their exalted status in
the household, mother-right too gradually disappeared. Over
a period of time, children learnt to identify their descent and
inheritance throu_gh the father. By this time, the woman and
her household had ceased to be central to the group's life.
Now, the man and his house and property assumed impor-
tance and men became valued group leaders this is how pa-
triarchy, the rule of the father--came into existence.
Engels characterized the transformation of women into
property and the disappearance of mother-right as the
'world-historical defeat of the female sex'. With women be-
coming the property of men, sexual love ceased to be free
and of advantage to women. A woman was now bound to a
single man and gradually, monogamous marriage became the
norm, which meant that a woman had to be chaste and loyal
37
Original from
to her husband, but he did not have to be likewise. Since he
had economic power and sexual authority, he could choose
to have several mistresses and wives. Engels argued that
along with monogamous marriage emerged the first class
antagonism, between man and woman. The implication ·was
that the relationship between the two could never be equal
under the institutions of private property and monogamy.
Engels also argued that as communistic households slowly
dissolved under pressure from private property, their inter-
nal relationships also deteriorated: spontaneous sex love and
promiscuity gave way to degrading and oppressive relation-
ships, so that when monogamy emerged, women actually felt
it was an advance on whatever they had known earlier.
In Engels' view, the historic defeat of the female sex and
the emergence of patriarchy led to a devaluing of female tasks,
roles and responsibilities, and a consequent valorization of
male roles and functions. This also led to sexual hypocrisy in
marriage and a chauvinist sexual ethic in society: men wanted
wives and families, and at the same rim~ claimed their right to
older sexual freedoms, in the form of extramarital relation-
ships. Women on the other hand were enjoined to remain
chaste and loyal to the ideal of monogamy.
Engels' arguments were not mere descriptions of an an-
·cient situation. They were presented as important aspects of
a larger theory of social and economic inequality and the
theory itself was advanced to incite revolutionary under-
standing and action. Engels, in fact, links his description of
an earlier historical development to his own times the
nineteenth century--and noted that currently, under capit.al-·
ism, women's lives had become even more difficult, since
many of them had to labour outside in difficult conditions,
in factories and mines. But scathingly critical as he was of
capitalism as a system of economic slavery, in which rich
industrialists lived off the labour of workers, Engels under-
..."'
VI
G)
.D
stood the capitalist system to be essentially contradictory•
G) That is, it thrived on exploitation but at the same time cre-
0
-"'
.D
ated the social conditions in which this exploitation could be
challenged. For women, capitalism brought great physical
-l?
0
distress and moral horror: working outside, they were forced
38
Original from
to neglect their homes. Yet work outside the home earned -C"I
0
them an income, made them socially productive. Besides, g-
capitalism had created the means large-scale social produc- -
tion-by which all work, including housework, could be or-
ganized on a public scale. This would, if properly deployed,
benefit women.
Engels thus brought together two struggles the workers'
struggle against capital and women's struggle against being
socially confined to the devalued sphere of reproduction.
Workers were enjoined to take collective possession of large-
scale production in the interests of a common good and to
secure justice for all, while women were asked to join work-
ers in this struggle, so that they could re-organize produc-
tion to accommodate mothering, childcare and nurture.
But those who accepted the importance of Engels' argu-
ments were not quite sure about the nature of male tyranny:
was male tyranny particularly pronounced in capitalist soci-
ety? Was it something that would disappear once capitalism
was overthrown? Could it be understood and countered by
women arguing and struggling to make themselves heard,
and through the passing of laws favourable to women? Or
would it persist until soci~ty itself was stood on its head and
was subject to revolutionary transformation?
COMPLICATING ENGELS: ALEXANDRA Kol.LONTAI

AND OTHER SOCIALISTS
These questions proved germane to at least one socialist
woman think.er: Alexandra Kollontai. She was actively in-
volved in the revolution that overthrew the tzar in Russia
and ushered in the rule of the Communist Party or the Bol-
sheviks. She was part of the new revolutionary government,
and in her capacity as the People's Commissar of Social
Welfare, she drafted several decrees to help women over-
come domestic slavery and expand their horizons. These in-
cluded decrees which nationalized pre-natal care of mothers,
provided for well-appointed communal kitchens and
childcare centres; amended marriage laws, making them
more egalitarian; and which announced that the state would
invest in the (equal) education of women. Even so, she did
39
Original from
not think then nor had she thought earlier, in her youth,
that male tyranny could be challenged through these mea-
sures alone.
In her youth she had followed feminist arguments for
equality and had been a keen participant in socialist debates
about the 'women's question'. Most socialists, following
Engels, held that if more and more women were to become
part of the industrial workforce, their emancipation was inevi-
table. Engels had noted: The emancipation of women and
their equality with men are impossible and must remain so as
long as women are excluded from socially productive work
and restricted to housework which is private. The emancipa-
tion of women becomes possible only when women are en-
abled to take part in production on a large scale, and when
domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree.
Kollontai, however, was not so sure. She refused to be-
lieve, as her male peers did, that the question of women's
subordination would be automatically solved with the com-
ing of communism; neither did she think women ought to
wait that long:
Doesn't this putting off the problem until the future (when
the basic reorganization of the social and economic structure
of society has been tackled) suggest that we still haven't
found that one and only 'magic thread'? Shouldn't we find or
at least locate this 'magic thread' that promises to unravel the
[sexual] tangle? Shouldn't we find it now, at this very
moment? (Kollontai 1998: 24)
Her desire to find the 'magic thread' had to do with her

understanding of other things besides economic dependence
and domestic slavery, which went into keeping·women sub-
ordinate. She observed that women were enslaved also by
love, that is, a culture of love and sexuality which automati-
.....c
Vl
CV
RI
cally denied them respect and dignity in relationships. 'Emo-
CV tional rapture .•• impersonal submissiveness ... [and] the
C
-..c naive effort to internalise and reflect the alien image of the
RI
beloved' emotional practices that women appeared to rel-
-lJ
0
ish conspired to make them slaves of men.
Original from
This is why Kollontai was not entirely optimistic about -r::::r
C')
0
what the revolution could achieve for women. She saw all
too clearly the need to challenge existing sexual ethics, which -
QI
clearly favoured men over women and worked to the ~

r::::r
former's advantage. Kollontai's observations on the emo, ....
QI
n,
Ill
tional and sexual aspects of women's subordination were
echoed by her contemporary, the socialist and anarchist,
Emma Goldmann, who noted:
The most prevalent evil of our mutilated love,life is

jealousy ... Jealousy is obsessed by the sense of possession
and vengeance. It is quite in accord with all other punitive
laws upon the statutes which still adhere to the barbarous
notion that an offence often merely the result of social
wrongs must be adequately punished or revenged. (Goldmann
1983: 215,216)
For these women, patriarchy was as much a part of the inti-

mate worlds of love and sexual desire, as it was of economic
and social relationships that devalued women. Stella
Browne, a supporter of the working classes in Britain, re-
stated this relationship between the intimate and the social
worlds in the 1930s. Noting that the 'the psychic' (or the
psychological) and 'economic' were linked, she went on to
say that to attain her most 'precious personal right' a woman
would have to struggle against the 'whole social order'.
In a more general sense too socialist men and women re-
stated the relationship between the economic, the sexual and
political realms. For socialist-minded men and women, the
years preceding the Russian revolution appeared to augur
fundamental tn[lnsformations in men and women's emotional
and intimate lives. A certain openness to discussing sexual
matters in public, which was evident in the writings of a man
such as Havelock Ellis, catalysed into existence new sexual
mores, of which same-sex love proved to be the most endur-
ing. It was now argued that sexual behaviour and preferences
could be wide-ranging and need not be necessarily viewed as
pathological, though Ellis himself appeared to label them
thus, on occasion. For those who wrote of and practised
41
Original from
same sex love and appeared flexible in their assumption of
gender identities Edith Ellis, Havelock Ellis' wife, for in-
stance, dressed as a man at times this new found freedom
appeared to be of a part with all those other freedoms that
were being sought in the name of social transformation and
revolution.
In Russia itself, inspired by a profound faith in the right
of all human freedoms to exist, homosexuality was de-
crimUlalized after the revolution. There were many amongst
the revolutionaries and their supporters, including Emma
Goldmann, who endorsed same-sex love, though we have
more evidence for male-male love than female-female love.
The advocates of same-sex love were implicitly challenging
what in later years American feminist writer Adrienne Rich
would call 'compulsory heterosexwdity'-for Rich, this was
a central feature of male power and dominance.
THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM

Later in the twentieth century, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, in the United States and Britain, socialist feminists
on the one hand and those who were sympathetic to ~he
socialist vision, but convinced that the oppression and ex-
ploitation of women had to be understood in its own right,
on the other, were both asking searching questions about the
nature of power and authority in the societies that they
lived. They were not entirely comfortable with earlier social-
ist explanations that held women's subordination to have
come about with the emergence of private property, the
monogamous family and what Engels called 'the world-his-
toric defeat of the female sex'. Nor were they altogether con-
vinced that male tyranny and the power that men exerted
over women could be identified entirely with capitalism, as
parts of Engels' argument appeared to imply; or that this
VI
tyranny would end with the transformation of the capitalist
.....
~
ro economy and the social relations particular to it•

.a
~ The core of Engels' argument for the triumph of the
Cl
-.a
ro
male-dominated family was that as human beings came to
produce more than they could consume known as the pro-
-lJ
0
duction of 'surplus'-male control over the productive pro-
42
Original from
cess gave them relatively increased power in society. This -C"
C)
0
was in contrast to the earlier period where 'reproduction' (of
new labourers), associated with women, was more impor- -
Q,I
tant. Production, not reproduction, was ultimately domi- ~

C"
nant; the period of even a notional ascendance of .....
Q,I
n>
11'1
reproductive forces, that is5the idea of an original 'matriar-
chy', faded away as societies progressed-and this provided
the basis of male domination. Patriarchal families resulted
inevitably as the dominant males sought to ensure the heri-
tage of their own male children. .
We saw how an earlier generation of feminists, such as
Kollontai and Goldmann, interrogated Engels' argument
from an appraisal of psychological and social behaviour as-
sociated with capita1ism. Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s
were uncomfortable with Engels' formulation for other rea-
sons. They wished to: (i) query the notion that men were
dominant in production; (ii) reconceptua1ize reproduction;
and (iii) critically examine the argument .that a revolution-
ary transformation of the mode of production would also
bring about the freedom of women. These radical interroga-
tions of Engels' core ideas produced the idea of 'patriarchy'
as a system that could not be understood entirely in terms
of the triumph of production, but which required to be theo-
rized in its own right, keeping in mind the universa1 nature
of women's subordination. We shall consider each of these
• •
questions m tum.
RE-THINKING PRODUCTION
Feminists, especial1y feminist anthropologists, argued that in
the divene societies that they had studied there was .very
little evidence to suggest that men were predominant in pro-
duction; in fact, in most societies, women played central and
enabling roles in producing the necessities of life•. Further,
in several parts of the world the spread of production did not
result in the emergence of private property and the monoga-
mous famil~ which Engels had argued was the basis for male
power. In much of the ancient world, and in several non-
Western contemporary cultures, production depended on
common or communa1 control over resources, or was fuelled
43
Original from
by ownership by rotation or linked to kinship networks
that controlled property. These economies possessed their
own social correlates: polygamy, extended families, com-
plex kin networks. Women's status and social roles had to
therefore be adduced from specific historical situations
and societies and cannot be explained or understood, us-
ing a single argument which was itself based on specific
and, in Engels' case, limited historical evidence.
The implications of these criticisms were significant: pro-
duction and reproduction could only be meaningfully dis-
cussed in terms of specific social and cultural contexts.
Descriptions and interpretations of the evolution of these
spheres of human activity offered by Engels are suggestive,
but they are not universally applicable. That is, they are not
iron laws, and are useful only when contextualized. Two
important re-definitions were advanced by feminists:
(i) The sexual division of labour, which Engels as-

sumes to be natural, must be seen as historical:
due to various and culture-specific reasonss-
biological reproduction became the sole denning
activity of women. However, here too, history
proved decisive, for different cultures valued re-
production differently. In some, it became the ba-
sis for social power, in others, a shared task that
did not necessarily connote restrictive life choices
for women.
(ii) Secondly, the relationship between production
and reproduction needed to be precisely estab-
lished for different historical and social contexts•.
One could not assume, as Engels did, that in all
contexts, the household was subsumed into the
larger and more extended sphere of production. In
Ill
many non-Western contexts, the household ex-
...,
IV
isted-and exists in a dynamic relationship to
"'IV
..0
production, influencing, directing and constitut-
0
-"'
..0
ing the production process in specific ways.
-0
0
Feminist anthropologists also noted that while Engels did see
44
Original from
the production of goods and the reproduction of labour as -
C')
0
interlinked, he did not pursue his argument to the point, C"'
where he would have to effectively link the economy and the -

Al
family. By subsuming the family within the economy, he

failed to demonstrate how the one actually infonns the other.
For example, it is the family, organized around age, kinship
and gender that allocates women and men different tasks
and duties, and mediates their access to resources. The
economy, therefore, cannot be separated from the family and
the important conceptual move then would be to acknowl-
edge that it was not only male domination of production that
granted them power over women, but also the manner in
which this domination was served by and related to the or-
ganization of the family.
How does one then conceptualize the family? Here, an-
thropological studies of households and kinship proved use-
ful: arguing against the notion that a family necessarily meant
a group of people living together in peace and harmony, these
studies showed families to be internally differentiated. Gen-
der and age differences, as well as particular structures of kin-
ship made for unequal relationships within families, which, as
just noted, also became the basis for the family members' dif-
ferential access to social and economic resources. (We will
return to this later, while examining Indian arguments in
some detail.) The family was thus a political unit, and one
that had to be studied as a space where male power was played
out, negotiated, contested, and affirmed.
There were also other studies of the family around this
time, which helped hone feminist anthropological reasoning
and illumined it. Women in the humanities programmes of
universities in the USA and Britain asked if the social and
cultural importance of the family was not a myth, and if the
family did not mask, even as it affirmed, a fundamental in-
equality between men and women. By focusing on the mean-
ings of intimate relationships, and the institutions and
practices which surrounded them, as these were portrayed in
literature and art, feminist literary and culture critics pro-
duced important critiques of sexual and emotional intima-
cies between men and women.
45
Original from
These studies took their inspiration from another source:
activism against and studies of violence against women.
Addressing issues of sexuality, these latter argued that the
sexual oppression of women, expressed most fitfully in rape,
was fundamental to male-female relationships and constitu-
tive of male power over women. Catherine Mackinnon, an
American lawyer, noted: 'In my view, sexuality is to femi-
nism what work is to Marxism •••By saying that ••• I mean
that both sexuality and work focus on that which is most
one's own, tha~ which most makes one the being the theory
addresses' (that is, a worker in the case of Marxism and a
woman in the case of feminism). Mackinnon goes on to say,
'As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the
use of others defines the class, workers, the organized expro-
priation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines
the sex, woman. (Catherine A. Mackinnon 1997: 48)
Not only feminist anthropologists and cultural critics, but
feminist historians too took issue with Engels on the ques-
tion of production and its relationship to reproduction. They
noted that it was clear from their research that women were
predominant in production throughout early human societ-
ies; from hunting-gathering societies to early agriculture
(which they undoubtedly invented); even in plough-based
agriculture it was only the plough itself and its operations
that were clearly controlled by men. It was because women
were gradually alienated from production and relegated to
the household that they became subordinate. Besides, the
household itself served different purposes in different cul-
tures, and reproduction was not everywhere a distinctive fe-
male vocation. Every society organizes the business of
housework, childcar-e and nurture differently, involving dif..
ferent sets of people, both across sex and generations. For
example, in rural societies in Africa and Asia, children are
looked after by neighbours, elderly male relatives, even male
youth. Answers must be sought elsewhere, noted the histo-
rians and (as we shall see later)-feminist historians
-"' looked for answers in structures of kinship, the beginnings
.J:l of warfare and the evolution of law and the state.
-lJ
0
Feminist economists added their own to the debates
46
Original from
around production. They observed that the idea of produc-
tion itself must be re-thought. In Marxist analyses, the term
-
C)
0
0-
'production' was used to denote work done outside the -

Q.l
home, often for a wage, which seldom covered the costs of

living incurred by the worker and his family. This was be-
cause the worker was often underpaid and exploited and it
was this that earned his employers their profit. This analysis
was developed by Marx to evaluate the relationship between
underpaid labour and profit in a capitalist society, Since then
the argument had been extended to understand other forms
of profit-making and exploitation: Marxist economists study-
ing older societies thus pointed out how slave labour, bonded
labour or forced labour (such as was forced on 'untouchable'
communities in India) had secured profit in the past for
those who employed them.
Feminist economists noted that while this analysis was
good as far as it went, it did not go far enough: for it did not
take into account the work put in by women at home, cook-
ing, washing, caring for the sick, and so on, in short, it did
not account for the fact that it was women's domestic labour
that kept the labourer or worker alive and fit to go back to
work the next day. In other words, domestic labour, often
considered 'women's natural vocation', indirectly helped in
creating profit, since if employers had to take care of their
workers, in the manner in which women took care of their
labouring fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, they would
have to invest in this all-important service of assuring the
labourer, his everyday existence. Thus, the argument went,
production ought not to be seen as happening only in places
outside the home; neither could women's work around the
house be considered an extension of their 'reproductive'
tasks. Instead production had to be seen in tandem with
women's domestic labour, which, in tum, indicated how the
family and the economy are ultimately and inextricably
linked. What was needed then was a charting of patriarchal
lines of control that included the family, kinship, community
and the economy.
Taken together, the arguments offered by feminist histo-
rians, anthropologists and economists implied that it was not
47
Original from
merely men's dominant role in production that enabled their
power and authority: the organization of sexual and familial
intimacies, household labour and those structures of kinship
which mandated that women were the 'natural' custodians
of the family were equally important to the constitution of
patriarchal power.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REPRODUCTION

Feminist unease with production led to their re-thinking re-
production as well. For if it was not merely male domination
over production that was the source of male power and au-
thority, and familial and social structures eq11ally determined
and helped define male authority, then could it be argued
that it was male control over reproduction that made them
powerful? And if this was so, did male control over repro-
duction enable them to acquire control in the sphere of pro-
duction as well?
Those who made this conceptual tum understood repro-
duction in distinctive ways. It was pointed out that 'reproduc-
tion' did not merely mean the 'reproduction of life', or the
physical act of giving birth to children. Reproduction was a
dynamic social process through which women gave birth,
raised children, socialized them to take their places in the
world around them. In this sense, reproduction also meant
the reproduction of social life and relationships, of all those
ideas and cultural and social practices which enable us to be-
come part of the societies we live and relate to in distinctive
ways, as not only men and women, but also as men and
women of particular classes, castes and religions. It was clear
to feminists that men had intervened in this reproductive pro-
cess in crucial ways in the past and in a manner that left them
in control of all those institutions. This intervention, they
noted, was particularly visible in the sexual subordination of
women, which, in tum, ensured their social subordination.
Explanations as to how men came to do this differed.
One explanation had it that the subordination of women
may be traced to patterns of 'exchange': that is, women first
came to be controlled by men, through an exchange process
48
Original from
between different communities. They were exchanged as
'gifts', for marriage (in South India, the custom of taking a
-
C')
0
C"'
bride from a family and in return, marrying a daughter into "'-

that family is still extant), and for religious and ritual pur-
poses. This created the basis for social relationships in which
women's interests were always subordinated to those of men,
or the group to which she belonged. The anthropologist
Gayle Rubin argued that the logic of exchange constituted a
'sex-gender system', that is,a system, which, by making
women the objects of exchange, also created a principle of
differentiation between the sexes on this basis. This differ-
entiation based on biological sex then became the context for
defining different social roles for men and women.
Further, it was said that historically the exchange of
women happened at a time when human society was in a
state of transition from an earlier stage centred on the
woman and her household to a later stage when men sought
to gain control over women. During this transitional stage,
the relationship between men and women came to be regu-
lated. Certain taboos were instituted which forbade certain
kinds of sexual relationships, such as, for instance, between
brother and sister. These taboos created set patterns of male-
female relationships, as a result of which women not only
lost free sexual access to men of their choice but also came
to be seen as important objects of exchange. During this
time, men began to forge relationships with each other
through women, demanding women as brides, and offering,
in tum, their labour to the family from which the bride was
to be secured. In some instances, women were 'exchanged'
as hostages during fights between different groups of men.
The process of exchange became the basis for their sub-
ordination: firstly, they. became objects; secondly, they lost
access to their bodies and sexuality; and lastly, they were
reduced to their reproductive worth. Gradually, the exchange
of women became a norm, leading to specific and important
changes in the status of women: marriage entailed that
women move into their husbands' homes. Thus, firstly,
women were displaced from their immediate and familiar
49
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context. Secondly, childbirth proved alienating since the chil-
dren were considered the property of the men and could only
inherit through them.
Who or what caused this exchange of women and the
subsequent regulation of their sexual lives? Some feminist
historians argued that this 'exchange of women' ought to be
viewed as a historical process that involved coercion and vio-
lence. That is, it was the prior enslavement of women
through abduction and sexual violence that rendered them
sexually vulnerable and made possible their 'exchange'. (The
historian Elise Boulding suggested that perhaps initially
women 'on their own' agreed to being exchanged in the
larger interests of the group to which they belonged: for in-
stance, to prevent war or to ensure peace. But later on this
'voluntary' option turned coercive and came to be used to
render women's bodies a function of male transactions.)
Why did men abduct and rape women in the first place?
Fights and skirmishes between early social groups over scarce
resources resulted in deaths, which often lowered the ratio
of men to women in a given group. To compensate for the
loss of male lives, the victors forced women from the other
side to live with them and bear children. Alternately, and for
the same reason, a marauding group abducted women and
forced them into sexual slavery. In this context, rape became
a weapon to force women into child-bearing and to acknowl-
edge and demand male protection. This protection often re-
sulted in a woman being confined to the overlordship of a
single man-and led to the institutions of patriarchy or the
'rule of the man, the father and husband'. ·
The historian Gerda Lerner developed this argument
most fitfully, using examples from the ancient Middle East
to affirm it. Her account of the subordination of women and
the institution of masculine control traced the creation of
patriarchy through the following stages:
(i) Men appropriated women's sexual and reproduc-

-.a"' tive capacity through a complex process of ex-
change, involving abduction and sexual slavery.
-I..J0 (ii) The exchange and abduction of women created
50
Original from
the basis for the control of their offspring as well. -er
C)
0
The power of older men over women and childten
and their desire to safeguard their resources for -
11,1
future generations may have provided an impor-

tant impetus to the coming of private property.
(iii) Later, as grain agriculture spread and kingdoms
came to be established, law and legal strictures
were invented to perpetrate the patriarchal family
system.
(iv) & men learnt to exercise control over women,
they extended their authority over other vulner-
able groups: thus slavery emerged, in tandem with
the growth of private property and the spread of
large-scale grain cultivation.
(v) While men's power wa,s gradually established and
expressed through the control they wielded over
~e mode of production, women could only get
what they desired through the sexual ties they had
with men.
More recently, this theory of origins has been complicated

by historical research that notes that it was not only women
who were rendered sexually vulnerable and subordinate by
abduction and conquest, but also younger men and even
boys. One of the most effective ways to retain military au-
thority-in contexts as divergent as colonial America and
the ancient Middle East-was to make boys of grown men
through male-male rape and the widespread practice of sod..
omy. This was also seen as a way 'of 111aking them [men]
women'. In other words, the logic of violent conquest, which
secured male control over women, could only be kept in
place through the simultaneous subjugation of 'enemy' men,
not merely through transforming them into slave labour, but
rendering them sexually vulnerable as well•
.
LINKING CAPl-mllSM WITH PATRIARCHY
While anthropologists, historians and economists were deter-
mined to re-work Engels' views on production and reproduc-
tion thoroughly, feminist political theorists and those engaged
51
Original from
with Left politics in one manner or another, were engaged in
a further critical project: ~hey wished to retain Engels and
Marx's critique of capitalism since they were convinced that it
was an inherently unequal and unjust system that automati-
cally compromised women's status and rights and led to their
exploitation. On the other hand, they did not wish to surren-
der the all-important feministinsight gained during these cru-
cial decades: that the oppression of women is not only linked
to the economic system and the social relationships that result
from it, but has its own distinctive logic, informed by practices
of sexual and cultural control.
Thus theorists interested in combining these two aspects
had to grapple with the coexistence of two systems that cause
women's oppression: (i) patriarchy, identified with culture,
social structures and with all that conspires to make us men
and women in distinctive ways; and (ii) capitalism, the mode
of production that governs economic and social life in our
times. Known as the 'dual systems' theory, this odd argument
tried to retain the salient features of both systems and to unite
them in a single analytical explanation. Those who desired to
do this were concerned about the growing attraction of argu-
ments--for some feminists at least, during the 1980s which
maintained that sexual violence against women by men was
given, inexorable and the basis of patriarchal social arrange-
ments. British feminists linked to the socialist cause felt the
poverty of this position acutely and attempted to locate sexual
oppression within a broader context, of economic division and
social as well as gender hierarchies.
Juliet Mitchell, for instance, argued that it was not nec-
essary to accept that the mode of production alone was cen-
tral to female subordination. The social and economic
structure that locked production and reproduction together
must be seen as comprising four interlocking levels, each of
which, in distinctive ways, perpetrated male dominance, and
ensured female submission. These four levels were:
-
n,
..0
(i) the sphere of work (here women worked at lesser-
paying jobs and were found in typically 'feminine'
-u
0
spheres of work);
52
Original from
(ii) motherhood, including domestic work, that was -c::r
C)
0
understood to be uniquely their vocation;
(iii) socialization-all those cultural and ideological -
11,1
practices and beliefs that made it seem that men ~

c::r
and women cannot help being what they are, .....
11,1
n,
VI
men, dominant and aggressive, women, subordi-
nate and passive; •
(iv) sexuality, or the organization of our intimate and
erotic lives in ways the privilege male desire and
fulfilment.
What held this 'interlocked' system in place or constituted

its effective link? Mitchell noted that given the nature of the
times, which had witnessed an assertion of female sexual
freedom, sexuality must be assumed to be the weakest link
in this interlocking of spheres. But to those who followed the
debate, this did not appear a convincing enough explanation.
Sexuality, these critics argued, could not be deemed the most
decisive, for, while it helped to explain the system in terms
· of the present historical moment, it did not help us under-
stand how the system logically functioned.
As a way out, Sheila Rowbotham, arguing from the self-
same British socialist context, suggested that neither abstract
nor logical arguments about patriarchy could actually help
produce the logical clarity that was being sought. Instead,
she noted, one ought to produce a description and theoriza-
tion of concrete circumstances, rather than systems:
If we stopped viewing patriarchy and capitalism as two

separate interlocking systems and looked instead at how sex-
gender as well as class and race relations have developed
historically, we could avoid a simple category 'woman' who
must either be a matriarchal stereotype or a hopelessly
downtrodden victim ... We could begin to see women and
men bonding into relationships within families which are not
of their own making. We could see how their ideas of
themselves and other people, their work, habits and sexuality,
their participation in organizations, their responses to
authority, religion and the state and the expression of their
creativity in art and culture, how all these things are affected
53
Original from
by relations in the family as well as by class and race •.•
equally, we inherit the historical actions and experience of
people in the past thought institutions and culture-and the
balance of sex-gender relations is as much a part of this
inheritance as is class. The changes which men and women
make within these prevailing limitations need not be regarded
simply as a response to the reorganisation or production, or
even as a reflection of class struggle. Indeed, we could see
these shifts in sex-gender relationships as contributing
historically towards the creation of suitable conditions for
people to make things differently and perceive the world in
new ways (Rowbotham 1999: 102).
Rowbotham's argument took the wind out of theory-making,

but therefore the problem did not go away. Marxist theorists
were not convinced that feminism--0r feminists possessed
the analytical clarity of Marxists and Marxism. Feminists
were not quite sure if for all their clarity, Marxists were not
being chauvinistic and unwilling to work through the ques-
tions raised by feminists. Clearly, as Heidi Hartmann noted,
here was an unhappy marriage, if ever there was one. It did
not appear to her that Marxism and Feminism could relate
to each other, other than in a fraught manner.
Hartmann's point of view was one that she had developed
in the context of her own work: an examination of the (En-
glish) working class,- which was understood to have the
greatest stake in overthrowing c.apitalism. In this, she took
issue with Engels' prognosis that with women coming into
waged work ( ie, paid labour), performed outside the house,
they would be in a position to claim all rights that were due
to them. For, henceforth, they would be part of the working
class and on that basis could struggle to put an end to their
exploitation. Hartmann examined the conditions under
which women came to waged work and observed that even
as paid workers, they earned less than men, and were found
to be in work that did not demand too much skill. Their
access to better and more equal employment (with men) was
-"'
..0
blocked as much by male-controlled trade unions as it was
by the general economic and social conditions which did not
-u
0
enable women to study or learn a trade or skill.
54
Original from
Hartmann further noted that the manner in which trade
unions functioned, as all-male groups which brought men
-g-
C)
0
together and bonded them into a common class, alienated -

women. Besides, women, bearing the double burden of iC"
housework and childcar.,,, on the one hand and work outsic;le ...
Al
n,
VI
the home; on the other, did not really find the time to en-
gage in political work that would bring them together with
other women to form a common forum. Also, for the male
worker, women continued to remain housewives primarily
and this ·'reinforced housewifery' did not make for a com-
mon workers' culture or cause, where men and women could
struggle together. ·
Others too echoed Hartmann's doubts about what a
woman worker could hope to achieve by way of her libera-
tion, merely by being part of the working class. The German
feminist Maria Mies, for instance, observed that the nuclear
family, a product of capitalism, which featured the husband
as breadwinner, wife as homemaker, 'bonded' women to the
home in a new way, intensifying their role as consumers and
nurturers. So it was not to be expected that women would
enter waged work enthusiastically. & for women who did
join the workforce, argued Mies, they had to confront an em-
ployment structure supported by the state that regulated
their access to work and concentrated them in low-paying
jobs. (She had in mind the 'welfare state' conditions of the
erstwhile federal republic of Germany.) Thus it was not
merely the capitalist who required cheap labour who was to
blame, but also social and cultural attitudes to women's
work, and state policy which did not interrogate sufficiently
the fact of female labour being considered cheap. Any de-
scription of patriarchy, for Mies, had to take into account
this very 'public patriarchy', dependent not only on the
'power of the father', but public state institutions.
Mies also pointed out how patriarchy and capitalism were
linked in other ways as well. She re-visited the question of
production and re-production from the point of women
workers in the so-called third world, especially those that
toiled at agriculture and survival tasks. Terming it as 'subsis~
tence labour' or work done to ensure food supply for their
55
Original from
families, Mies noted that women's labour, expended on tiny
family farms did not seek to exploit nature nor did it want
to create profit. On the other hand, women appeared to have
a more cooperative approach to working at survival IUld even
had a more engaged and harmonious relationship to the
natural environment. This was in contrast to the classic capi-
talist model of growth where nature is ruthlessly exploited,
using technology and for making profit. Mies further noted
that as a result of ca('italism's attitude to nature it did not
really seek to improve on subsistence production-which,
being linked to survival and not profit and clearly the prov-
enance of women, was kept out of the purview of meaning-
ful technological change. This meant that survival tasks were
not valued, and women's labour was barely acknowledged as
such, linked as it was to family and nurture. Yet, this labour,
pointed out Mies, was essential for the continued existence
of capitalism.
Mies' argument was that women reproduce in diverse
ways: in a direct, physical human sense of course, and as
feminists had pointed out, in a social and cultural sense,
through their acts of care and nurture. But through their
role in subsistence production they also contributed to a di-
rect reproduction of the economic and social order in an
everyday, generative and economic sense as well (an argu-
ment that the fmdings of the Shramshakthi report proved
conclusively in the Indian context). This meant that
women's subsistence labour had to be seen as central to the
maintenance of the capitalist system since this is what kept
poor families from going hungry, even as it freed their men
to work in exploitative conditions. Mies also extended her
argument to include a critique of colonialism: she noted that
much like women's productive labour, overlooked and under-
valued, subsidized the profits made by capitalist men, the
resources of European colonies and the colonized themselves
..."'
VI
Q.I
.D
were exploited for the sake of European progress and growth.
Q.I (We will see in chapter 3 how Indian feminists utilized this
0
-"'
.D
argument to produce a critique of state-driven development
that exploited both women and nature.) .
-u
0
The dual systems approach emerged in the United States
56
Original from
under different circumstances and was given another name. -
C)
0
Amongst the earliest of those who took to studying women's C-
lives and the reasons for their subordination were historians. -

D.I
Around the late 1970s, feminist historians began to argue

that to understand women's lives in the past, it was not
enough to merely render women 'visible' or write about
women in public life, but ask if there might not be other
stories to be told, stories that had been withheld from his-
tory so far-stories that unfolded in the domestic sphere and
in the context of women's relationships with each other,
whether at work, or as friends or in public contexts. This
resulted in the formulation of what has since been called the
'separate spheres' argument, wherein women's lives, clearly
different from men's lives, had to be studied and understood
on their own terms-and as recorded by them in their mem-
oirs, letters and as directed by institutions they patronised
and created, such as quilting and church groups, labour as-
sociations for women, reading circles and so on.
Thus, it seemed now that there were two spheres of life,
the public (male) and the domestic (female), and that
.women did discover enabling circumstances in the domestic
sphere. These pushed them to be expressive, creative and
made for a wholly different set of social relationships: called
'homosocial bonding' these had to do with intense and re-
ciprocal friendships between women, which might or migh(
not be erotic. The world of production, it now seemed, need
not seen as dominant and all-encompassing, for women had
indeed produced their own world against this overarching
other world.
The doctrine of two spheres, of course, did not address
the question of the fundamental inequality that lay at the
heart of this division of lives into public and private. For, a
charmed female sphere necessarily existed within a larger
context that favoured men over women. Besides, it did not
address other realities, such as those experienced by black
American women, for whom words and spaces such as the
'public' and the 'domestic' meant very different things. Black
American women laboured hard in the so-called male world
of production, as workers, had experienced domestic and
57
Original from
sexual slavery and their 'inner' or 'private' worlds were ac-
tually community life worlds, sustained by deep and recipro-
cal ties between black people in the face of racism.
To conclude: these debates concerning production and re-
production and the public and domestic spheres were intense
in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, but died out after that
due to the shifting of priorities in Women's Studies in the
USA and UK. The shifting itself was brought about by the
fact that middle class educated women in those countries
had achieved a measure of economic and social indepen-
dence and did not, therefore, bring the same vehemence,
which an earlier generation had brought, to debates about
class and the struggle for equality. Also, the general retreat
of socialist politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union
made discussions of socialism embarrassing.
As we shift to India, we will find that these debates con-
tinue; not always as arguments with Marxism or Marxists,
but as aspects of debates about the status of women in the
Indian context. In India, both empirically and in terms of
arguments, gender practices and institutions that underwrite
gender identities are informed by-and info~istinctive
categories such as caste, religion, geographical location and
sexual cultures. This means that categories developed within
socialist thought need to be re-thought, keeping in mind the
specific and distinctive nature of Indian realities. This also
means creating new concepts and methods, which pertain to
our histories and learning from societies and cultures whose
experiences are common to our own.
VI
.....
~
"'
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0
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..0
-lJ
0
58
Original from
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The following books are essential reading for those interested in fol-
-er
0
lowing feminism's engagement with socialism. For early socialist per• -

QI
spcctivcs on gender equality and classic Marxist debates, sec: ~

er
.....
,,,
QI
Engels, Friedrich, 1983, The Origin of the Famil1, Private Property and VI
the State, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Hall, Leslie, 1997, 'I've Never Met the Normal Woman': Stella
Browne and the Politics of Womanhood, Women's History Re-
view 6, 2.
Kollontai, Alexandra, 1998, Kollontai on Women's Liberation (with an
introduction by Chanie Rosenberg), London: Bookmarks.
Moses, Claire Goldberg, and Leslie Wahl Rabine, 1993, Feminism,
Socialism, and French Romanticimi, Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press.
Rowbotham, Sheila, 1992. Women in Movement: Fenunism and Social
Action, London: Routledge.
- , 1999, Threads Tht-ough Time: Wricings on History and Autobiog-
raphj, London: Penguin.
Shulman, Alix Kates, 1983, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldmann
Reader, New York: Schocken.
Critiques of and dialogue with Engels' work and the larger socialist
position on gender equality may be found in:
Mies, Maria, 1986, Patriarch, and Accumulation on a World Scale,

London: Zed.
Mitchell, Juliet, 1971, Women's Estate, London: Penguin.
Sargent, Lynda, ed. 1981, The Unhapp:y Marriage of Marxism and
.mninism: A Debate on Class and Patriarch,, Oxford: Polity Press.
(This· last includes Heidi Hartmann's famous essay on the
fraught relationship between Marxism and feminism.)
Sayers, Janet, Mary Evans, and Nanneke Redclift, 1987; Engels Revis-
ited: New Feminist Essa,s, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
For a brilliant discussion of the scholarship on production and re-

production sec:
Moore, Henrietta, 1988, Feminism and Anthropoloc, Oxford: Polity

Press.
Walby, Sylvia, 1990, Theorising Patriarch,, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
59
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For anthropological studies and concepts that influenced feminist
critiques of patriarchy, see:
Rosaldo Michelle and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974, Woman, Culture

and Socie.ty, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Reiter, Rayna, ed. 1976, Toward an Anthropoloi, of Women, New
York: Monthly Review Press. (1bis last contains Gayle Rubin's
essay, 'The Traffic in ~men: Notes on the "Political Economy"
of sex'.)
The following books offer insights into American writings on the
relationship between Marxism and Feminism:
Mackinnon, Catherine A., 1997, Feminum Unmodified: Discourses on

Life and Law, Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.
Thurner, Manuela, Subject to Change: Theories and Paradigms of
U.S. Feminist History, Journal of Women's History 9, 2.
For a comprehensive feminist perspective on patriarchy evolved dur-

ing these years, see:
Boulding, Elise, 1992, The Underside of History: A view of Women

Through Tnne, New York: Sage.
Lernet; Gerda (1986) The Creation of Patriarch,, New York: Oxford
University Press.
For books that re-state the relationship between gendet; sexuality

and patriarchy in specific historical contexts, see:
Laqueur, Thomas, 1990, Making Sex: Bod, and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud, Cambridge. Ma: Harvard University Press.
Trexlet; Richard C (1995). Sex and Conquest, NY: Cornell University
Press.
-
n:,
..0
-C,
0
60
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1

Patriarchy: A History of the Term

THE CONCEPT OF PATRIARCHY

term has very little explanatory or analytical value: they ar-

Patriarchy rests on defined notions of masculine and feminine,

In what follows, we will consider the import, context and

fairy tales, religious poetry. In some historical contexts, 0

women produced critical readings of scripture, argued their '<

considered women's entitlements. ...3~

INDIA: THE CRUCIAL DECADES

the revolutionaries who participated in an uprising ....

gage in armed struggles along with men-for eco- J::i

• The 1970s also saw the emergence of movements, -<

opment' as understood and practised by the Indian ....j;jl

We thus find that in almost every political instance, women

chiefly in Bombay, Madras and Delhi, but elsewhere too,

ring amongst them: not only in ·those already committed to ~

rights were infringed in an everyday sense, in terms of their -·

DEBATING PATRIARCHY WORLDWIDE:

man and woman as socially-and· not naturally--con- n

• The consolidation of Women's Studies in universi-

The new questioning continued well beyond the street-

Global political and intellectual developments fed into In- 0

dian debates in complex ways. For women claiming a politi-

less it remained a staple of communist-feminist debates

logues, both men and women, produced critiques of 'radical

In practice, though, there were all sorts of ideological and ...3

a woman is to live in fear--of molestation, rape, of social

two sorts of feminisms here: a concern with the bodily integ- 0

rity of women, which owes much to radical feminism; an un- '<

sis that is socialist in its assumptions. ~

BUILDING WOMEN'S STUDIES

activity could not be thought of only in terms of what men 0

For a concise historical account of feminism in the United States of • •

Rowbotham, Sheila,1992, Women in Movement: Femioom and Social

Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson, 1998, A Shining

As accounts of the emergence of Women's Studies in India, the fol-

Desai, Neera, and Vibhuti Patel, 1989, Critical Researches in Women's

Production, Reproduction and

Thus far we have looked at the larger political and social

ists, sometimes not.) -

EARLY SOCIALISTS AND THE CRmQUE OF MALE RIGHT

common, but also women's work, that is, housework and g-

• Socialist women pointed to how production and re-

These debates would re-emerge nearly half-a-century later in

REVOLUTION AND PATRIARCHY

TiiE ORIGIN Of THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERlY AND THE SIAIE

ous couples and their children, the administration of the -

household entrusted to the women was just as much a pub-

COMPLICATING ENGELS: ALEXANDRA Kol.LONTAI

Her desire to find the 'magic thread' had to do with her

clearly favoured men over women and worked to the ~

The most prevalent evil of our mutilated love,life is

For these women, patriarchy was as much a part of the inti-

THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM

ro economy and the social relations particular to it•

tant. Production, not reproduction, was ultimately domi- ~

(i) The sexual division of labour, which Engels as-

where he would have to effectively link the economy and the -

family. By subsuming the family within the economy, he

'production' was used to denote work done outside the -

home, often for a wage, which seldom covered the costs of

THE IMPORTANCE OF REPRODUCTION

bride from a family and in return, marrying a daughter into "'-