Feminist theory of state

Feminism’s relationship with the state is the most ambivalent in political theory. The state is charged with being an instrument of patriarchy, and it is simultaneously the only instrument capable of dismantling patriarchy — and feminists have never fully resolved which of those two facts should govern strategy.

• The critique begins from a claim about the discipline itself: mainstream political theory is androcentric — built on male experience, presented as universal, and therefore normative rather than neutral.
• What follows is not one theory but several rival accounts of what the state is: a capturable arena, an essentially patriarchal structure, a servant of capital, a genuine ally, or a set of contested practices with no single character at all.
• Holding those apart is what makes the topic tractable. Collapsing them into “feminists think the state is patriarchal” loses the argument that matters most, which is internal to feminism.

Why There Is a Problem at All

• Feminist theory approaches the classical tradition with doubt and distrust, because a tradition that theorised citizenship while excluding women from it cannot be assumed to have merely overlooked them.
  • Aristotle’s active citizenship — ruling and being ruled in turn — was explicitly limited to free, native-born men, with women, slaves and resident aliens outside it.
  • The exclusion was structural rather than accidental: the citizen’s freedom for public life depended on someone else sustaining the household.
• Power in the state, on this reading, is hegemonic and gendered, and it subordinates women simultaneously in politics, law, society and culture.
• The crucial claim is that power centres are institutionally gendered — not that they happen to contain more men, but that their procedures, standards and definitions were built around a male subject.
• Kate Millett, in Sexual Politics, made the enabling move by redefining politics itself as “power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.”
  • On this definition the family, the workplace and the bedroom are political sites, and confining politics to government becomes a substantive choice rather than a neutral boundary.
  • Everything else in the topic follows from that redefinition, which is why it belongs at the start rather than among the thinkers.

Where the Separation Came From

• The exclusion has a traceable intellectual lineage, and naming it prevents the critique sounding like a general complaint.
  • Aristotle drew the separation between the personal and the political — between household and polis — and denied women the status of citizen, confining them within the family on the assumption that they had no separate interest requiring representation.
  • The tradition persisted. Hegel treated the family as a sphere of altruism, which by definition cannot contain the exploitation, subordination and violence that women in fact encounter there.
  • Plato and J.S. Mill are the standard exceptions, and they are conspicuous precisely because they are so few.
• Women lacked even the vote in most states until the twentieth century, so the neglect was not an oversight of theory but a description of the arrangements theory was written to justify.
• The consequence compounds. The separation marginalised women in decision-making institutions, which kept the profession of politics as male as its theory, which in turn ensured the state remained patriarchal — and that shows up in the content of the laws the state makes about women.
• Patriarchy — male domination — is the name radical feminists give to the whole arrangement, and they treat it, unlike Marxists, as the basic structure of society rather than a derivative of the economy.
  • Its worst aspect is not the subordinate status of women but violence directed at women because they are women.
  • The forms are specific and identifiable: female foeticide and infanticide, honour killings, genital mutilation, dowry violence, rape. That these harms track sex rather than any other variable is the evidence patriarchy is a structure and not an aggregate of individual acts.

Two Faces of the Feminist Concern

Feminist analysis is concerned with two distinct aspects of the state, and they pull in opposite directions.

• On the regulatory face, oppression and deprivation begin at home and continue upward. If the state refuses to regulate purely personal relations between men and women, it leaves the primary site of subordination untouched while calling that restraint neutrality.
• On the power face, the philosophy of the state is power-centric, and that power is operationalised by men or by structures that represent them.
  • Excluding women from power pushes the state to build its strength on military capacity, which raises tension between nations.
  • Feminists criticise militarisation on the argument that a differently constituted politics would have promoted cooperation instead.
  • This is also the argument most vulnerable to the charge of essentialism, because it can slide from “women have been excluded from war-making” into “women are by nature peaceful.”
• The tension between the two faces is real and unresolved: the same state is asked to enter the bedroom and to disarm itself.

MacKinnon: “Feminism Has No Theory of the State”

Catharine MacKinnon‘s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State is the field’s central text, and its title is a confession as much as a claim.

The Problem She Sets

• Earlier writers — Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir — had produced a rich description of the varieties and locales of sexism, but no general theory of the state grounded in sex-based hierarchy.
• Her own opening formulation is the most quoted line in the topic: feminism has no theory of the state, it has a theory of power — sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualised.
• She takes Marxism as her method, not liberalism, because Marxism confronts organised social dominance and analyses it dynamically rather than treating inequality as a residue to be cleared away.
  • Both theories expose as natural what is in fact socially produced: Marxism exposes value as a social creation; feminism exposes desire as socially relational.
  • She is explicit that proliferating “feminisms” in the name of women’s diversity is liberal pluralism’s way of evading the challenge women’s reality poses to theory.

The State Is Male

“The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender — through its legitimating norms, forms, relations to society, and substantive policies.”

• The structure of her argument parallels classical Marxism exactly, and the parallel is the key to it.
  • Male power is constituted outside the state and channelled through it. The state is not the source of that power but the instrument through which power made elsewhere is enforced — as capitalist power is, on the classical account, made in production and enforced through the state.
• It follows that the state cannot be the neutral umpire of liberal theory. Its actions will serve male dominance whether or not any official intends them to.
• She rules out even relative autonomy: however autonomous of class the liberal state may appear, it is not autonomous of sex. Male power is systemic — coercive, legitimated and epistemic — and is therefore the regime rather than an actor within it.
  • Nowhere in her account does the state have the capacity to choose to benefit women, or interests even marginally independent of male power. That completeness is her theory’s strength and its principal vulnerability.
• Her analysis of rape law shows the mechanism concretely.
  • There is no single interpretation of reality to which a court can appeal in deciding such a case, but the court adopts an objective standard and proceeds as though there were one.
  • The reality that standard tracks is the male point of view — a vantage from which sex inequality is simply not visible.
  • Objectivity is thus not the opposite of male bias but its most effective form, because it makes a particular standpoint unavailable for challenge.
• Her practical charge against the liberal state is that laws on rape, abortion and pornography exist formally but are never fully enforced — the gap between statute and enforcement being itself a policy.

The Public–Private Divide

This is the single most productive idea feminist theory has contributed to state theory, and it survives even where MacKinnon’s stronger claims do not.

The Personal Is Political

• The slogan arose in second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and is associated with Carol Hanisch, whose essay of that title argued that what women were being told were personal problems were in fact shared, structural and political.
• Its target was the framing under which a woman’s unhappiness in the roles of housewife and mother counted as a private difficulty rather than a public question.
• Okin distinguishes several distinct things the slogan asserts, and separating them is what stops it becoming a mere phrase.
  • There is a politics of sex within the family, and the state must intervene on women’s behalf rather than treat the household as a jurisdiction of its own.
  • The claim that state policy does not reach the family is a myth. The state constantly intervenes through marriage, divorce, inheritance, maintenance and custody law — the question is never whether it intervenes but on whose terms, and where women are inadequately represented those terms carry loopholes.
  • The family reproduces political subordination across generations. A child raised watching a mother’s subordination reads it as natural, carries that expectation into society, and the arrangement renews itself without anyone deciding it should.
  • Domestic arrangements determine economic prospects. As Betty Friedan argued, patriarchy is sustained by myths — including that a woman must marry early or lose her value — which truncate education, depress skills, produce lower wages, and thereby supply fresh evidence for the original hierarchy.
• The feminine mystique is Friedan’s name for that machinery of myth. She criticised women’s magazines for circulating it and Freud for dressing it as science, most damagingly in the claim that a woman’s central object should be to appear attractive to men.

Pateman: The Sexual Contract

• Carole Pateman gave patriarchy a history inside social contract theory rather than before or outside it.
• Her claim is that the original contract was two contracts, not one: a social contract establishing political right among men, and a sexual contract establishing men’s access to women’s bodies and labour.
  • Contract theory is conventionally read as the foundation of freedom. Pateman argues that this freedom is predicated on subordination — the brothers’ equality with each other is constituted by their shared standing over women.
• The myth of universal equal citizenship embedded in contract doctrine is precisely what obscured women’s subordination, because it described as already achieved what had in fact been arranged around them.
• Applied to Rawls, the objection is structural: the parties in the original position are sexless, so the sexual contract is never on the table. Only men contract; women are born into the arrangement rather than consenting to it.
• The public sphere of contract and consent was therefore constituted by excluding the domestic sphere — which makes the public–private division not a feature of the liberal state but its founding act.

De Beauvoir: Woman as the Other

• Simone de Beauvoir drew on Sartre‘s existentialism — existence precedes essence — to argue that womanhood is achieved rather than given: one is not born a woman, one becomes one.
• Woman is defined only in relation to man, and therefore only provisionally. If man is the subject, woman is the object; if man is the first sex, woman is the second sex and “the Other”.
• Her inversion of the problem is the sharpest thing in her: being a woman is not a problem; it is men’s problem — just as there is no “Jewish problem”, only a European one.
• She distinguishes immanence — the stagnation women are held in — from transcendence, the capacity to project and change, which is withheld. Women who reject patriarchy are then classified as abnormal, defective or unattractive, which is how the withholding is enforced.
• She insisted that patriarchy harms men too, constraining their freedom through the fear of departing from what masculinity permits.
• The distinction underlying all of this, and the one most often stated backwards, is between sex and gender: sex is biological and given; gender is social, cultural and constructed. The whole feminist case rests on that asymmetry, because only what is constructed can be reconstructed.

Five Feminist Models of the State

The disagreement inside feminism is more instructive than the agreement, and it resolves into five positions.

The spectrum runs from “the state is the greatest pimp” — the English Collective of Prostitutes’ slogan of the 1980s — to the Nordic claim that the welfare state was the chief instrument of women’s advance.

The Neutral State: Liberal Feminism

• Liberal feminism is embedded in the classical liberal theory of the state and takes freedom for individuals as the governing value, looking to the state to secure it.
• It sees the state as a neutral arbiter between interest groups — which means the state is simply a reflection of whichever interests control its institutions.
  • Liberal feminists do recognise that state institutions are male-dominated and that policy reflects masculine interests.
  • Their conclusion is that the state must be re-captured from the interest group of men, not abandoned. More women in the state should yield public policy that empowers women.
• The operative principle is formal equal treatment before the law: differences between women and men should be irrelevant in the public sphere, and both are to be treated as equal citizens.
• Okin pushes the position to its limit by arguing that liberal principles of justice must be extended from the state into the family, and criticising the state’s indirect role in reproducing inequality there.
  • Her prescription stays inside liberalism: the remedy lies in public policy and reform of family law.
  • She extends the argument to multiculturalism, holding that the liberal state should set boundaries to group rights where those rights harm women — the position that opened the feminism-versus-multiculturalism debate.
• The criticisms are substantial and mostly come from other feminists.
  • Its concept of the state is narrow and institutional, so it cannot see the structural relations that shape women’s lives — the family, the sexual division of labour, sex-class oppression — as political at all.
  • By leaving the deep structures of male dominance unchallenged, it may create space for a subtler form of patriarchy that is more stable and more powerful than the one it replaces.
  • Kathy Ferguson makes the sharpest version: liberal feminism has become a voice subservient to dominant patriarchal discourses, because an exclusive focus on integrating women into state institutions perpetuates those institutions’ norms rather than challenging them.

The Patriarchal State: Radical Feminism

• Radical feminists hold that state and society are fundamentally patriarchal, and their central contribution is the concept of patriarchy itself.
  • Patriarchy captures the insight that women’s oppression is not haphazard or piecemeal: the diverse forms of oppression are interconnected and mutually sustaining.
• Their distinguishing claim is one of modality, and it is worth stating precisely: the state is not contingently patriarchal but essentially so. Patriarchy is also global — for Millett, the particular form a state takes hardly matters, since all are patriarchal states.
• Where liberal feminists study political institutions, radical feminists extend the analysis to the wider structures of state and society, and to the informal practices of decision-making as much as the formal ones.
• They bring into state theory subjects previously treated as outside politics altogether — reproduction, sexuality, rape, domestic violence, objectification.
• The strategic conclusion follows from the diagnosis: since state power cannot be separated from male power, women cannot expect the state to liberate them, and civil society is where energy should go.
• Radical feminism seeks a reorganisation of society eliminating male dominance in every social and economic context, pursued by challenging social norms rather than through the political process — contesting traditional gender roles, opposing sexual objectification, and forcing public awareness of violence against women.
• Its weaknesses are the mirror image of its strengths.
  • It tends to essentialise the state as patriarchal, seeking a single cause of women’s oppression in the structure of patriarchy.
  • Power collapses into men’s power over women, when neither the state nor masculinity has a single source or terrain.
  • Treating all states as equivalently patriarchal makes it unable to explain variation — why some states legislate against domestic violence and others do not.

The Capitalist State: Marxist and Socialist Feminism

• For Marxist feminists the state is essentially capitalist, and it is not just an institution but a form of social relations.
• Women’s subordination sustains capitalism through the reproduction of the labour force within the family — unwaged work that produces and maintains workers at no cost to capital.
  • Women are oppressed both in work and in exclusion from it, and familial ideology is what makes both look natural.
  • The welfare state is criticised on exactly this ground: it reproduces and maintains familial ideology through its own policies, encoding the male-breadwinner household into entitlement rules.
• The distinguishing strategic claim, against radical feminism, is that women matter to the struggle against capitalism as workers, not as women.
• Socialist feminism attempts to combine the two, and is the more defensible position.
  • From radical feminism it takes the system of oppression called patriarchy; from Marxist feminism the class oppression defining all workers’ situation.
  • The combination is the dual systems analysis — capitalism and patriarchy as two interlocking structures rather than one derived from the other.
  • Zillah Eisenstein‘s capitalist patriarchy names the mutually reinforcing dialectical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual structuring.
• Socialist feminists part from liberal feminism on scope: they argue it addressed the situation of upper and upper-middle-class women while presenting it as universal. Women are oppressed in all known societies, but the form of that oppression varies with economic conditions.
• They also insist that capitalism is one tangled factor among several — male dominance, racism and imperialism operate alongside it — so ending capitalism would not by itself deliver equality of status. The patriarchal structure has to be dismantled separately.
• The criticisms are pointed.
  • Sophie Watson observes that despite the emphasis on the state as a form of social relations, the state keeps reappearing as an entity that limits and determines our lives, acts for capital, defines who we are and what we need, and obscures class divisions.
  • More generally, Marxist feminism is charged with privileging Marxist categories at the expense of feminist ones — treating gender as a variable within class analysis rather than as an ordering principle of its own.

The Women-Friendly Welfare State

• A distinct tradition — Nordic feminists, Australian femocrats, and gender-and-development scholars — argues that the models above are all too narrow, and that states differ in ways the theory must register.
• On this account a particular form of the state, the welfare state, has a woman-friendly structure through which women’s empowerment was actually delivered: public childcare, parental leave, individual taxation and a large public-sector labour market made paid work compatible with family life.
• State feminism is the term for the arrangement, coined by Helga Hernes with reference to Norway’s tradition of government-supported gender equality policy. It is, in effect, state-supported liberal feminism.
  • The working definition used since is that state feminism occurs when the state adopts policies beneficial to women’s rights and the improvement of women’s lives — which makes it an empirical question about particular states rather than a claim about the state as such.
  • Femocrats — feminists working inside the bureaucracy, with a mandate to push gender policy — are the institutional form the strategy takes.
• Its weakness is the exact inverse of radical feminism’s. Where radical feminists assume all women are oppressed by the state in the same way, Nordic feminists risk assuming all women are liberated through the state in the same way.
  • The phrase itself presumes common and collective interests of women, which makes the category homogeneous and obscures class, migration status and race.

The Differentiated State: Poststructural Feminism

• Poststructural feminists deny that the state has a unified character at all. Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson argue that the state lacks coherence — it is a set of arenas, not an entity.
• The state is therefore a differentiated set of institutions, agencies and discourses, and the emphasis shifts from institutions to state practices and discourses. The state is treated as a discursive process.
• The pivotal claim reframes the whole debate: the state is not inherently patriarchal but historically constructed as patriarchal, through a political process whose outcome is open.
  • The patriarchal state is then not the expression of a patriarchal essence but the centre of a reverberating set of power relations in which patriarchy is both constructed and contested.
  • Because the process is open, the state can be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists.
• The gain is strategic. Feminist theory had reduced the options to a dichotomy of “in” or “out”.
  • Going in means integration into the state at the risk of co-optation; staying out means autonomy at the cost of leverage.
  • Treating the state as differentiated dissolves that dichotomy, since one can contest one arena while working through another.
• The standing objection is overemphasis on discursive processes, which draws attention away from institutions and policies — the places where outcomes are actually determined.

Differentiated Citizenship

The question of what equality should look like divides liberal from radical feminism more cleanly than any other, and Iris Marion Young supplied the concept that resolves it.

• Liberal feminists demanded equality of status through equal civil and political rights, expecting equal treatment to produce equal outcomes.
• Radical feminists reply that in a gendered society equal rights will not produce equal status, because formally identical treatment applied to unequally situated people preserves the inequality.
• Young’s differentiated citizenship is the alternative to universal citizenship: the state should recognise that women’s needs differ from men’s and legislate accordingly.
  • The justification is precise and worth getting right. Special provision is warranted not because women are a weaker sex but because women alone are exposed to particular kinds of harm — so the provision responds to a specific vulnerability, not to a general incapacity.
  • Reserved compartments and coaches for women on public transport are the everyday illustration; reservation in local government is the constitutional one.
• Young’s wider politics of difference generalises the move: a just polity must recognise and accommodate group difference rather than dissolving it into an abstract citizen who turns out, on inspection, to be a particular kind of person.
• This is the theoretical warrant for affirmative action by the state in favour of women, and it is what allows a constitutional order to permit sex-based special provision without contradicting its own equality clause.

The Third Wave and Internal Differentiation

The third wave is best understood not as a further advance on the second but as feminism turning its critique on itself.

• Postmodern feminism.Judith Butler argues that gender is performative — not an inner essence that behaviour expresses, but something constituted by the repeated performance itself, and constructed in and through language.
  • The consequence for the topic is severe: if there is no single way of defining women, there can be no single account of what women need from the state, and identity politics loses its stable subject.
• Black feminism. bell hooks and Angela Davis argue that the situation of Black women differs fundamentally from that of white women, so a movement built on the latter’s experience misdescribes the former’s.
• Post-colonial feminism. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Sarojini Sahoo hold that women in the third world face oppression not only from patriarchy but from racism and neo-colonialism, including exploitation by multinational firms.
• Post-feminism. Susan Faludi‘s Backlash documents the reaction against feminist gains; the post-feminist position holds that women in Western societies are sufficiently liberated for radical feminism to have lost its purpose, and proposes celebrating womanhood instead.
• New feminism, advanced from within the Church, emphasises mutual respect between men and women and affirms distinctively feminine qualities, including motherhood.
• Shulamith Firestone‘s The Dialectic of Sex sits at the radical extreme of the preceding wave and is worth registering as the boundary case: she located women’s oppression in biological reproduction itself, which makes technology rather than politics the route out.

Intersectional and Southern Critiques

The models above were built largely from Western experience, and the most serious challenge to them came from women the category “women” had flattened.

• Black feminism attacked the assumption of a unitary female subject. Crenshaw‘s concept of intersectionality shows that a Black woman’s experience is not the sum of racism and sexism but a distinct position that anti-discrimination law, built around single-axis categories, cannot see.
  • Black women are subject to the burden of racism alongside patriarchy, which makes any account of “women and the state” that abstracts from race a partial account presented as complete.
• Postcolonial feminism presses the same objection across the North–South line. Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that Western feminist scholarship constructs a composite “third world woman” — uniformly poor, tradition-bound and victimised — against which the Western woman appears modern and free.
  • Women in the South face what is often described as a triple burden: patriarchy, racism and neo-imperialism, with Sarojini Sahoo among those developing the argument.
  • The political implication is that who speaks for whom is itself a question about power, not a preliminary to one.
• In the Indian context the critique is sharper still, because caste cuts through the category of woman.
  • Uma Chakravarti‘s brahmanical patriarchy identifies the control of women’s sexuality as the mechanism by which caste purity is reproduced — which makes caste and gender a single system rather than two intersecting ones.
  • Dalit feminism, associated with Sharmila Rege, argues that mainstream Indian feminism spoke from an upper-caste position while claiming to speak for all women, and that the Dalit movement in turn subordinated gender to caste.
  • Nivedita Menon presses the general point that the category “woman” is produced by the very arrangements feminism contests, so it cannot be the stable ground on which claims are made.
• The cumulative effect is decisive for state theory: if there is no single female subject, there can be no single account of what the state does to women — which is one route by which the differentiated-state position won the argument.

Eco-feminism

• Eco-feminism holds that the domination of women and the domination of nature share a logic, and that patriarchal systems produce both.
• The term was coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne, and the position was developed by Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies and Mary Daly among others.
• Its core propositions can be stated compactly.
  • Gender and environment intersect. Environmental problems have a gendered structure, and environmental decision-making that excludes women’s perspectives will misdescribe the problem.
  • Care ethics replaces the ethic of exploitation, valuing interconnectedness, empathy and responsibility toward nature and other living beings.
  • Capitalism is the shared cause. Its emphasis on profit and growth produces environmental degradation and social inequality together, so alternatives must prioritise sustainability and justice jointly.
  • Women are environmental stewards. Indigenous and local women hold substantial knowledge of sustainable resource management, and their exclusion from decision-making is a loss of capacity as well as an injustice.
• The Indian argument is concrete rather than abstract. Environmental degradation raises women’s labour directly — longer distances for water, fuel and fodder — so ecological damage is experienced first as an increase in unpaid work.
• The standing criticism is essentialism: the claim that women are by nature conservationist and men by nature consumerist reinstates precisely the fixed feminine nature that de Beauvoir spent a career dismantling.
  • Bina Agarwal‘s feminist environmentalism is the corrective. Women’s relationship with the environment is grounded not in nature but in the gendered division of labour and property — women do the collecting because they have been assigned to, and lack secure land rights.
  • That reformulation keeps the empirical claim and drops the metaphysics, which is why it has largely displaced the original.

Unpaid Work and the Second Shift

• Arlie Hochschild documented the double burden carried by employed women in the late twentieth century, and named the unpaid half the second shift.
• In the workplace women face occupational segregation, lower wages and sexual harassment; at home they perform the emotional labour that is both expected and unrecognised.
• The content of the second shift is the reproduction of society itself — women bear children, socialise them and care for the sick, and make the home a retreat for men from the workplace.
• The bearing on state theory is direct. National income accounting excludes unpaid care, so the work on which the whole economy rests is invisible to the instrument by which states measure the economy — a technical decision with the political effect of making the subsidy disappear.
• Time-use surveys are the corrective, and India’s confirm the pattern: women spend several times as many hours as men on unpaid domestic and caregiving work, and that gap accounts for much of the difference in participation in paid employment.

The Security State and Feminist International Relations

International relations was the last field to be reached by feminist analysis, and the state’s external face turns out to be the most heavily gendered of all.

• Women were historically located in IR only as wives of diplomats and politicians, or as women attached to military establishments — present throughout the system and absent from every account of it.
• Cynthia Enloe, in Bananas, Beaches and Bases, made the invisibility itself the subject, asking where the women are in the workings of international politics and finding them holding up the system at every point it claims not to depend on them.
  • Women are the worst affected by war, ethnic conflict and separatist movements, and their position deteriorates further in displacement; in peacetime they are exposed to trafficking and the sex-tourism economy.
• J. Ann Tickner produced the field’s central intervention by reformulating Morgenthau’s six principles of political realism, arguing that realism is only a partial description of international politics because of an embedded masculinist bias.

• Other founding works are Jean Bethke Elshtain‘s Women and War and Christine Sylvester‘s Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era.
• The critics are serious. Keohane argued that feminist IR must develop scientific, testable theories if it is to be evaluated on the discipline’s own terms; Fukuyama doubted the claim that a world run by women would be more peaceful.
• The record of practical achievement is nonetheless real.
  • Feminists and international lawyers succeeded in getting rape classified as a war crime for the first time, with the tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda categorising it as a form of torture.
  • Sexual discrimination and maltreatment have been accepted as grounds for political asylum in some jurisdictions.
  • UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security put women’s participation in conflict resolution on the Council’s formal agenda.
  • Development agencies have moved gender concerns to the centre of assistance policy.
• Feminist foreign policy was the most ambitious application, and its trajectory is instructive. Sweden adopted one first, in 2014; a new Swedish government abandoned the label in 2022, while other states — France among them — have since adopted feminist diplomacy strategies of their own.
  • That reversal is itself evidence for the poststructural position: a state’s gender character is a contested political outcome, not a fixed property, and it can be reversed by an election.

The Indian State and Gender

India offers the fullest available test of the competing models, because its state has acted as ally and as patriarch simultaneously and in the same decades.

The State as Ally: Constitutional Design

• The Constitution does not merely permit gender equality; it mandates asymmetric action to achieve it.
  • Article 14 guarantees equality before law and Article 15(1) prohibits sex discrimination, while Article 15(3) expressly permits special provision for women — a deliberate departure from formal equality that liberal feminism alone could not justify.
  • Article 16 covers equality of opportunity in public employment; Article 39(a) and (d) direct the state toward an adequate means of livelihood and equal pay for equal work.
  • Article 42 requires provision for just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief; Article 51A(e) makes renouncing practices derogatory to the dignity of women a fundamental duty.
  • Article 243D, through the 73rd and 74th Amendments, reserves not less than one-third of seats and chairperson posts in panchayats and municipalities for women — the country’s largest experiment in political affirmative action.

The State as Ally: Jurisprudence

• Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan filled a legislative vacuum with judicially framed guidelines on workplace sexual harassment, later enacted as the POSH Act — a case where the state’s judicial arm acted while its legislative arm had not.
• Shayara Bano v. Union of India struck down instant triple talaq, holding that a religious practice cannot survive constitutional scrutiny merely because it is religious.
• Joseph Shine v. Union of India struck down the offence of adultery, and the reasoning matters more than the outcome: the provision treated a wife as the property of her husband, and the Court rejected the idea that the state may enforce a proprietorial conception of marriage.
• Secretary, Ministry of Defence v. Babita Puniya granted permanent commission to women officers in the Army and named the government’s reasoning for what it was — sex stereotypes about physiological limitations and troop acceptance, which the Court held could not sustain a classification.
• X v. Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department, NCT of Delhi extended access to abortion to unmarried women, and — for the limited purpose of the medical termination law — recognised marital rape as a ground.
• The Supreme Court’s Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes went further than any judgment by identifying stereotyped language in judicial writing itself and supplying alternatives.

The State as Patriarch: What Has Not Changed

• The marital rape exception survives. The exception carried forward from colonial law into the current penal code means that non-consensual intercourse within marriage is not rape, and the constitutional challenge remains pending before the Supreme Court.
  • The Union’s position in that litigation is that consent is not extinguished by marriage, but that labelling the violation “rape” would be excessively harsh and disproportionate — a formulation that concedes the wrong and disputes the name for it.
  • This is the single strongest piece of evidence for MacKinnon’s thesis available in Indian law: the state recognises the harm and declines to recognise the woman as a person capable of refusing.
• Personal law leaves marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship and inheritance substantially to religious jurisdiction, so the state’s writ over the family is partial by design — Okin’s objection in its Indian form, and the reason the uniform civil code debate is a gender debate as much as a secularism one.
• Political representation. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 — the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — reserves one-third of Lok Sabha and state assembly seats for women, but made commencement conditional on a census and a subsequent delimitation, deferring the benefit indefinitely.
  • An attempt to break that deadlock failed. The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill would have enabled delimitation on 2011 census data and expanded the Lok Sabha so the quota could operate sooner; on 17 April 2026 it secured 298 votes, 54 short of the required two-thirds majority, and fell.
  • The reason for its defeat is the analytically interesting part. Opposition came not from resistance to women’s representation as such but from southern states’ objection to seat redistribution, and from a demand that reservation be delinked from delimitation and applied to the existing 543 seats at once.
  • The episode shows a gender entitlement hostage to a federal dispute it has nothing to do with — precisely the poststructural point that the state is a set of arenas rather than a single actor with a single disposition toward women.
• Local government has produced real change and a real workaround.
  • Panchayat reservation put over a million women into elected office, the largest such intervention anywhere.
  • The sarpanch pati phenomenon — the elected woman’s husband exercising the office — shows that formal access is not substantive power, and that patriarchy adapts to reform rather than yielding to it.
• Economic participation remains the weakest link.
  • Female labour force participation for those aged 15 and above stood at about 40% in 2025, with rural participation near 46%.
  • Those figures have risen, but still leave India’s women far less present in measured work than in comparable economies.
  • The gap tracks the unpaid care burden rather than any preference, which is why Hochschild’s second shift is an economic argument and not only a sociological one.

Criticisms of the Feminist Theory of the State

• There is, on its own account, no theory of the state. MacKinnon’s admission — feminism has a theory of power, not of the state — is the criticism most often made, and it is made from inside.
• The theory describes but does not analyse. It offers rich description of how states treat gender difference, and much less analysis of the state as a gender hierarchy — of how the apparatus itself is structured, as opposed to how it behaves.
• Overemphasis on gender. Treating gender as the primary axis of oppression can crowd out class, caste, race and the ordinary distribution of political power — the objection that produced intersectionality.
• Essentialising men. Casting men uniformly as oppressors misses the ways men are themselves positioned and constrained by patriarchal structures, which de Beauvoir herself acknowledged.
• Weak empirical grounding. The reliance on experience and consciousness-raising as evidence, while methodologically deliberate, limits generalisability and makes claims hard to test.
• The prescriptive gap. The critique is far more developed than the programme, and translating it into concrete policy has largely fallen to state feminism, which the radical strand distrusts.
• Fragmentation. The five models are not variants of one theory but rival theories with incompatible strategies, which is why “the feminist theory of the state” is a convenience rather than a description.
• The strategic dead end. If the state is essentially patriarchal, working through it is co-optation; if it is capturable, the deep structures go unchallenged. The in-or-out dichotomy consumed a generation of argument before the differentiated-state position dissolved it.
• It has been overtaken by its own subject. Anti-discrimination law, gender budgeting, quotas and violence legislation now exist in most states.
  • The theory must therefore explain why formal victories deliver so little substantive change — a question its strongest versions cannot even pose, having predicted those victories would not occur.

Conclusion

• The feminist contribution to state theory is best measured not by the theory it built but by the question it forced every other theory to answer: whose experience is the state’s neutrality modelled on?
• Its most durable achievement is the collapse of the public–private distinction as a natural boundary. Once the family is understood as a political institution and non-intervention as a policy rather than a restraint, liberal, Marxist and pluralist accounts of the state all have to be rewritten — and largely have been.
• The tradition’s own ambivalence turns out to be its most honest feature rather than a failure of nerve. The state is both the institution through which patriarchy is enforced and the only institution with the reach to dismantle it, and any theory that resolves that tension cleanly has resolved it falsely.
• The evidence supports the differentiated account over both extremes. States vary enormously in what they do to and for women, the same state acts as ally and patriarch in different arenas simultaneously, and gender character is won and lost politically rather than fixed structurally.
• India makes the case as plainly as any country can.
  • The same state struck down adultery as a proprietorial offence and opened permanent commissions to women officers.
  • The same state maintains the marital rape exception and has kept a legislated quota unimplemented since 2023.
  • That is not inconsistency. It is the ordinary condition of a state composed of contested arenas.

The state is not one thing that is either for women or against them. It is the terrain on which that question is fought, arena by arena — and feminism’s mistake was ever to have expected a single answer.