What is patriarchy ? How does it affect the child socialization pattern in India ? (2015)
Ann Oakley (Sex, Gender and Society, 1972) established the distinction this question turns on: sex is biological, gender cultural, and nothing follows automatically from one to the other. Patriarchy can then be defined as the system that converts sex into gender and gender into hierarchy — one that must be taught, since nothing biological transmits it. Socialisation is not an effect of patriarchy; it is how patriarchy reproduces itself.
The quarrel over socialisation theory
- Talcott Parsons (with Robert Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 1955) held that the family works because roles are differentiated — male instrumental, female expressive. Feminists rejected this as naturalising a historical arrangement.
- Oakley named four processes installing gender: manipulation of a child’s appearance, canalisation towards gender-typed objects, verbal appellation, and exposure to different activities.
- George Herbert Mead supplies the internal side: through play and the generalised other, the child views herself from society’s standpoint, so subordination is adopted, not just imposed.
- Nancy Chodorow locates reproduction in mothering: because women do the early nurturing, girls form identity through connection and boys through separation.
- Judith Butler questions the model itself: gender is not a role learned once but a performance repeated until it looks like essence.
The family as the first curriculum
Leela Dube’s “On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India” (EPW, 1988) is the definitive Indian study. A girl learns her transience in the natal home through ordinary discipline — what she may eat and when, how far she may go, how she must sit, dress and speak. Nothing is announced; the lesson arrives as routine, which is what makes it stick.
Ritual, food and the calendar of difference
Ritual marks difference before a child can name it. Annaprashan is often observed more elaborately for a son, the upanayana is for boys alone, and ancestral duties fall to sons — the theological form of his economic value. At the hearth, serving order teaches priority: the woman who eats last has taught her daughter the rule without stating it.
Toys, tasks and the classroom
- Children’s Time Use Survey data show 32.9 per cent of girls participating in unpaid domestic services against 9.1 per cent of boys; among 6-14 year-olds, participating girls spend 104 minutes a day against 70 for boys. Sibling care is an unpaid apprenticeship.
- Toys canalise exactly as Oakley described — kitchen sets against construction sets — and textbooks long carried the same coding, which is why curriculum revision keeps targeting stereotyping.
- It surfaces as subject choice: girls now enrol at or above boys’ rates at every school stage, yet cluster away from engineering and applied streams.
Screens and the new gatekeeping
Socialisation has a digital frontier. ASER 2024 found 36.2 per cent of boys aged 14-16 owning a smartphone against 26.9 per cent of girls. The device is policed for girls in the idiom once used for mobility — protection — an old rule in a new medium, even as women’s internet use rose from a third in NFHS-5 to roughly two-thirds in NFHS-6.
Where the pattern loosens
Maternal schooling and employment are the strongest correctives: educated, earning mothers delay daughters’ marriage and invest more in their schooling. Matrilineal Khasi and Garo households show the pattern is not natural, though authority there rests with brothers — so Deniz Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain explains persistence better than descent.
Conclusion
Patriarchy in India survives less through law or force than through childhood, which is why it outlives the statutes against it. The socialisation literature explains the mechanism; Butler explains the fragility — what must be performed daily can be performed differently. Indian evidence marks where that has begun — the classroom — and where it has not: the kitchen, the phone and the ritual calendar.