What is Patriarchy? How have the women’s movements confronted the norms of Patriarchy? (2008)
Patriarchy is not merely male dominance at home; it is a structural arrangement distributing work, property, authority and sexuality by sex. The Indian women’s movement confronted it in three phases, each defined by who holds the microphone, and its record is legal victory alongside structural continuity.
What patriarchy is
- Sylvia Walby, Theorising Patriarchy (1990): interrelated structures through which men dominate and exploit women — household production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality, culture — shifting historically from private to public patriarchy. India carries both.
- Uma Chakravarti’s brahmanical patriarchy (EPW, 1993) gives the Indian specification: caste purity rests on endogamy, endogamy on control of women’s sexuality — so caste and gender are one structure.
Phase one: reform for women (nineteenth century)
Women were the object, men the subject: Raja Ram Mohan Roy against sati (abolished 1829), Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar for widow remarriage (1856), Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule’s schools from 1848. The dissenting women’s voices matter more — Tarabai Shinde’s Stri Purush Tulana (1882) and Pandita Ramabai’s The High Caste Hindu Woman (1887) named men, not custom.
Phase two: organisation and nationalism
The Women’s Indian Association (1917) and the All India Women’s Conference (1927) built a national platform. Mass participation in the salt satyagraha and Quit India gave women political experience but folded the women’s question into the national one. Independence brought franchise and formal equality, then two decades of quiet.
Phase three: autonomous feminism, from the 1970s
- The hinge is Towards Equality (1974), the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (chaired by Phulrenu Guha, Vina Mazumdar member-secretary). It documented a declining sex ratio, falling female work participation and worsening health, destroying the assumption that development was improving women’s position.
- Mobilisation followed: the anti-price-rise agitation in Maharashtra (1973–74), the Shahada struggle, SEWA (1972, Ela Bhatt).
- The campaign-to-law sequence is its clearest win. The Mathura judgment (1979) and the open letter by Upendra Baxi, Lotika Sarkar, Raghunath Kelkar and Vasudha Dhagamwar produced the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1983; the anti-dowry campaign produced Sections 498A and 304B; Roop Kanwar’s death (1987) the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987; Bhanwari Devi’s gang rape produced Vishaka (1997) and the POSH Act, 2013; the Domestic Violence Act, 2005 named the household as a site of violence; the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 made daughters coparceners; the Nirbhaya protests produced the Justice Verma Committee and the 2013 amendment.
- Political and cultural fronts widened it: the 73rd and 74th Amendments reserving a third of panchayat seats, Sabarimala (2018), Pinjra Tod against hostel curfews, MeToo India (2018), and the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023.
The internal critique, and the limits
- Sharmila Rege (Writing Caste, Writing Gender) argues Indian feminism was itself brahmanical, universalising the upper-caste woman’s experience and treating caste as a separate question; her Dalit feminist standpoint answers it.
- The Shah Bano sequence (1985 judgment, 1986 statute reversing it) exposed the standing conflict between gender justice and minority rights.
- Autonomous groups refused party affiliation and foreign funding on principle; later NGO-isation turned campaigns into donor-funded projects, trading radicalism for reach.
Conclusion
The movement has won the law and not the structure. It made marital cruelty and workplace harassment offences and the state answerable. But son preference, dowry, patrilocality and the unpaid care burden remain untouched, and the 2023 reservation awaits a census and delimitation. Law addresses the event; patriarchy is what produces events.