Comment in about 150 words: Feminist critique of the State. (2021, 10 Marks)
The feminist critique of the state, sharpened by the second wave of the 1970s, rejects the liberal picture of a neutral umpire. Its charge is that the state’s power is defined and exercised by men, or by structures built around a male citizen, so its norms and values are themselves constructions of patriarchal power.
The charges
- Power, not neutrality. Kate Millett‘s Sexual Politics (1970) redefined politics as power-structured relationships. A state staffed and standardised by men then reproduces male dominance without anyone intending it.
- Law as male. For Catharine A. MacKinnon, Formally, the state is male in that objectivity is its norm (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1989). Liberal legalism adopts the male point of view and enforces it on society, making male dominance invisible and legitimate; for radical feminists the state’s function is to secure patriarchy’s continuity.
- The public/private divide. “The personal is political”, associated with Carol Hanisch, exposes non-intervention in the family as a policy. The state regulates marriage and inheritance but not power inside the household. India’s marital rape exception, carried from the colonial penal code into Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, is the clearest case; the Union told the Supreme Court in 2024 that criminalising it would be excessively harsh, and on 9 September 2026 the Court agreed to examine the exception’s constitutional validity.
- Welfare and security. Jane Lewis (1992) showed welfare regimes built on a male-breadwinner model that entitled women as dependants; Cynthia Enloe (Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 1989) asked where are the women? and found militarism resting on women’s unacknowledged labour.
Engaging or rejecting the state
Liberal feminists accept intervention — abortion rights, rape and harassment law, regulation of pornography — and India’s record supports them: Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) produced harassment guidelines later enacted as the POSH Act, 2013, and Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018) struck down adultery as treating wives as property. Radical feminists fear such gains extend state control over women.
Limits
- An essentially male state cannot explain variation, or reform by the same state.
- Intersectional scholars — Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Uma Chakravarti on brahmanical patriarchy — show caste and race shaping what the state does to which women.
- Its remedies fall back on the institution it distrusts.
Conclusion
The critique’s lasting gain is to make neutrality a question rather than an assumption. Its limit is that the patriarchal state and the reforming state are one institution; POSH alongside the marital rape exception shows a contested terrain, not a fixed male essence.