In the context of women’s movements and laws do you think that matriarchy is the need of the hour? Discuss in detail. (2026, 10 Marks)
Matriarchy means a system in which authority, property and public decision-making vest systematically in women — the mirror image of patriarchy. In my view it is neither empirically available nor normatively what the Indian women’s movement has ever demanded. The movement’s claim has been equality and entitlement, not the inversion of male rule.
Matriarchy is not matriliny, and not matrifocality
- Matriliny is a rule of descent and inheritance through the mother; matrifocality is a household pattern in which the mother is the effective centre. Neither confers rule.
- Leela Dube, whose fieldwork on the matrilineal Muslims of Lakshadweep and comparative work in Women and Kinship (1997) remains the reference point, showed that even where property and clan identity pass through women, authority typically rests with the mother’s brother.
- Among the Khasi, ancestral property goes to the youngest daughter, the khadduh, while authority lies with the maternal uncle and women are barred from office in the village dorbar shnong. The Garo pattern is similar.
- The Nayar case of Kerala, described by Kathleen Gough, forced anthropology to redefine marriage itself, yet military and political power there stayed with men. No verified matriarchy has been recorded anywhere.
What the movement and the law have actually sought
- Towards Equality (1974) framed the problem as denial of equality, not deficit of female power.
- The statutory record is symmetrical, not inverted: the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005 and Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) make the daughter a coparcener by birth, equal to the son; the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act 2013 follows the Vishaka guidelines (1997); the 106th Amendment (2023) reserves one-third of seats, not a majority.
- Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) locates patriarchy in six interacting structures — household production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and culture. Dismantling these requires structural reform, not a transfer of the same dominance to the other sex.
- Uma Chakravarti‘s “brahmanical patriarchy” (1993) shows caste and gender welded together in India, so female rule by upper-caste women would leave Dalit and Adivasi women exactly where they are — the point of Sharmila Rege‘s Dalit feminist standpoint.
Conclusion
Matriarchy is a poor diagnosis and a worse prescription: it misreads matriliny as female rule and offers domination reversed rather than ended. What is genuinely the need of the hour is enforcement of the equality already written into law — visible in the persisting gaps, with female labour force participation at 40.0% (Periodic Labour Force Survey, January–December 2025) and 74 women, 13.6%, in the 18th Lok Sabha.