Discuss the material basis of patriarchy as an ideological system. (2022)
Gerda Lerner (The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986) dated patriarchy’s beginning to the second millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, arriving with the state, class and the appropriation of women’s reproductive capacity. If it was made, something made it. Patriarchy is best defined as an institutionalised appropriation of women’s productive and reproductive labour — carried in belief, resting on property, work and progeny. Ideology, here, is what makes such an arrangement look natural.
The property thesis and its limits
Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) gives the classic account: surplus, private property in herds and land, and the need for certain heirs produced the overthrow of mother-right — the world-historic defeat of the female sex. Monogamy binding women is an instrument of inheritance, not affection. Two standard weaknesses: the sequence rests on a now-discredited primitive matriarchy, and property cannot explain dominance among the propertyless.
Labour as the deeper base
- Heidi Hartmann fills that gap. Calling the attempt to dissolve patriarchy into capitalism the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism, she defines patriarchy materially as men’s control over women’s labour power, secured by excluding them from resources and controlling their sexuality.
- Christine Delphy (Familiar Exploitation, 1992) posits a domestic mode of production in which the husband, not capital, appropriates the wife’s work.
- Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) generalises this into a patriarchal mode of production in the household, and traces the shift from private patriarchy — husbands appropriating by exclusion — to public patriarchy, where state and labour market do so by segregation. India runs both at once.
The Indian material base
- Land. The Mitakshara coparcenary vested birthright in men while women held limited estates: land was what patriliny existed to transmit.
- Dowry. M. N. Srinivas (Some Reflections on Dowry, 1984) read modern dowry not as tradition but as an expanding groom-price riding on Sanskritisation and salaried jobs — a pre-mortem, unequal inheritance buying a daughter out of the land.
- Endogamy. Uma Chakravarti (EPW, 1993) shows caste purity is secured by controlling whom women reproduce with, so their sexuality is a question of caste order, not private morality.
- Bargaining power. Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) establishes that effective rights in arable land, not attitudes, most determine rural women’s position.
The belief the arrangement requires
Leela Dube’s seed-and-earth metaphor (1986) is exactly the ideology this base needs: the man supplies the seed, carrying identity and varna; the woman is the field, nourishing but not determining. Descent then looks patrilineal by nature and control of the field becomes common sense — which, Nivedita Menon (Seeing Like a Feminist, 2012) argues, is what an ideology is for.
Measuring the base, and testing whether it has moved
The Time Use Survey 2024 found women spending 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services against 88 for men — none of it entering GDP. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 made daughters coparceners by birth, and Vineeta Sharma v Rakesh Sharma (2020) confirmed the right accrues by birth regardless of when the father died. Yet relinquishment in favour of brothers stays routine: claiming means suing a brother and losing the natal home. Amartya Sen’s perceived contribution response explains why: unpaid work is uncounted, so the claim it should ground is not felt legitimate.
Conclusion
Patriarchal ideology is neither free-floating nor a hangover. It keeps one arrangement — land held by men, labour given by women, progeny certified for caste — looking natural. Lerner’s corollary is the judgement: because it was made it can be unmade, but only at that base, since a right no woman can afford to exercise moves ownership on paper and leaves the ideology intact.