Does women’s education help to eradicate patriarchal discriminations? Reflect with illustrations. (2023)
From Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule’s girls’ school in Pune (1848), education has been treated as the key to women’s emancipation. The Indian evidence shows that education erodes patriarchal discrimination substantially but does not eradicate it. Patriarchy can absorb educated women on its own terms.
How education weakens patriarchy
- Access has expanded: female gross enrolment in higher education (28.5) has exceeded the male figure for five straight years, with 2.07 crore women enrolled (AISHE 2021–22).
- Agency and bargaining power: Naila Kabeer (1999) treats education as a resource that widens women’s choices. NFHS-5 analyses show that spousal violence and child marriage fall steeply as women’s schooling rises.
- Demographic and social gains: Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen linked Kerala’s low fertility and infant mortality to female literacy and agency.
- Consciousness and voice: the Towards Equality report (1974), shaped by Vina Mazumdar, and later autonomous women’s movements came largely from educated women. Mahila Samakhya (1988) used literacy to organise rural women against dowry, violence and wage discrimination.
- Dalit and Adivasi mobility: education has produced women writers, officials and leaders who challenge caste and gender hierarchies together (Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 2006).
Why education alone does not eradicate patriarchy
- Schools reproduce gender: the hidden curriculum, subject streaming and textbook stereotypes train girls for “suitable” roles. Sue Sharpe (Just Like a Girl, 1976) found girls ranking marriage and children above careers.
- Education as marriage capital: degrees raise a bride’s value without changing the terms of marriage. Dowry was paid in 95% of rural marriages between 1960 and 2008 (S. Anukriti and co-authors), and it has risen in highly literate Kerala. In the Vismaya case (Kollam, 2021), an Ayurveda medical student died after dowry harassment. Her husband was sentenced to 10 years in 2022.
- Education without work: women’s labour force participation follows a U-shape by education (PLFS 2023–24 analyses): women with middle and secondary schooling often withdraw after marriage. Overall female participation is 40.0% against 79.1% for men (PLFS 2025).
- Attitudes lag behind schooling: in a Pew Research Center survey (2019–20), 87% of Indians agreed that a wife must always obey her husband. Deniz Kandiyoti’s “patriarchal bargain” (1988) explains why educated women often “adjust” rather than resist.
- Structural barriers remain: property, unpaid care, safety and workplace segregation are what Sylvia Walby calls public patriarchy. India ranks 131st in the Global Gender Gap Index 2026 despite near-parity in enrolment.
What makes education transformative
- Critical pedagogy: Paulo Freire’s “conscientisation” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970) turns literacy into questioning of power, as Mahila Samakhya did.
- Gender-sensitive curricula, and boys’ education: patriarchy is sustained by men’s attitudes too.
- Complementary change: inheritance rights, childcare, safe transport and decent jobs let women use their education.
Conclusion
Education is a necessary condition for dismantling patriarchy, because it builds capability, confidence and voice. It is not sufficient. Unless schooling is critical, reaches boys as well and is backed by property, work and legal change, it risks producing educated women within patriarchal families instead of equal citizens.