Patriarchy as a form of dominance. (UPSC CSE Mains 2016 - Sociology, Paper 1).
- Patriarchy can be defined as “a system of social structure and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women”. This definition clearly outlines the nature of patriarchy which is engrained in our social structure that gives it a very fundamental character. Based on this social structure, men dominate and exploit women and their action gets legitimised by the existing structure through institutions like family, kinship, marriage, religion, class, caste, race, etc.
- Patriarchy envisages within itself a form of power relation between men and women. In this relationship a hierarchy exists that places men in an advantageous position and this makes a complete recipe for female exploitation. In a more literal sense patriarchy denotes rule of father in a male-dominated family. This rule emerges from an unequal resource distribution like land which is invariably inherited by the male line of descent. This control over the resources later gets translated into control over the production and reproduction of women. However later in this unit we will also see that how matrilineal and bilateral kinship structures alter this power relation in family and outside.
- Patriarchal ideology silently exaggerates biological differences between men and women, making certain that men always have the dominant, or masculine, roles and women always have the subordinate or feminine ones. This ideology is so powerful that “men are usually able to secure the apparent consent of the very women they oppress”. They do this “through STRUCTURES such as the Education, Religion, and the family, each of which justifies and reinforces women’s subordination to men without much notice”. So patriarchy is a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.
- Patriarchy, which pre-supposes the natural superiority of male over female, shamelessly upholds women’s dependence on, and subordination to, man in all spheres of life. Consequently, all the power and authority within the family, the society and the state remain entirely in the hands of men. So, due to patriarchy, women were deprived of their legal rights and opportunities patriarchal values restrict women’s mobility, reject their freedom over themselves as well as their property. The subordination that women experience at a daily level, regardless of the class they might belong to, takes various forms – discrimination, disregard, insult, control, exploitation, oppression, violence – within the family, at the place of work, in society. For instance, a few examples are illustrated here to represent a specific form of discrimination and a particular aspect of patriarchy. Such as, son preference, discrimination against girls in food distribution, burden of household work on women and young girls, lack of educational opportunities for girls, lack of freedom and mobility for girls, wife battering, male control over women and girls, sexual harassment at workplace, lack of inheritance or property rights for women, male control over women’s bodies and sexuality, no control over fertility or reproductive rights.
- So, the norms and practices that define women as inferior to men, impose controls on-them, are present everywhere in our families, social relations, religious, laws, schools, textbooks, media, factories, offices. Thus, patriarchy is called the sum of the kind of male domination we see around women all the time. In this ideology, men are superior to women and women are part of men’s property, so women should be controlled by men and this produces women’s subordination.
- Subordination is the situation in which one is forced to stay under the control of other. So women’s subordination means the social situation in which women are forced to stay under the control of men. In this way to keep women under men’s control, patriarchy operates some social customs, traditions and social roles by socialization process. To preserve the male supremacy, patriarchy created ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics, private-public realms by gendered socialization process. Socialization is considered to take place primarily during childhood, when boys and girls learn the appropriate behaviour for their sex.
- All agents of socialization process such as the family, religion, the legal system, the economic system and political system, the educational culture that has characterized much of human history to the present day. Patriarchal institutions and social relations are responsible for the inferior or secondary status of women in the capitalist wage-labour market. The primacy of the sexual division of labour within the family has several consequences for the women who seek wage employment.
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