UPSC MAINS SOCIOLOGY SYALLABUS – Paper 1 – Chapter 9 – Systems of Kinship
(a) Family, household, marriage.
(b) Types and forms of family.
(c) Lineage and descent
(d) Patriarchy and sexual division of labour
(e) Contemporary trends.
PATRIARCHY
- Ideas of male dominance have a very long history, with many religions presenting it as natural and necessary.
- The first theoretical account of patriarchy is found in Engels theory of women’s subservience under capitalism.
- Patriarchy is defined by Sylvia Walby in her ‘Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990’ as ‘a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate and oppress women’.
- According to her, patriarchy operates through multiple structures like – production relations in the household where women is subjected to unpaid labor, discriminatory allocation of occupations in labor market, capture of political power by patriarchs, male violence which is often patterned and systematic, patriarchal relations in sexuality which are manifested in sexual double standards for males and females, patriarchal cultural institutions like education, media and so on.
- Walby distinguishes patriarchy as private patriarchy which is practiced
in household and public patriarchy which is collective response of a patriarchal society to women.
SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR
- Division of labor combines specialization and the partition of a complex production task into several, or many, sub-tasks.
- Sexual Division of Labor refers to process of dividing work between different people on the basis of their sex and gender. Biological theories by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, Murdock and Parsons have attributed – for various reasons – sexual division of labor on biological factors. Tiger and Fox in their ‘The Imperial Animal, 1972’ give concept of ‘Human Biogrammar’ to explain biological basis of sexual division of labor. According to them, biogrammar is like a genetic program which has been developed due to the fact that man has spent 99.9% of his time as hunter gatherer and as a result, man is more aggressive and dominant. Women are programmed by their biogrammar to reproduce and take care for the children.
- Feminist sociologist Ann Oakley in her ‘Housewife, 1974’ has vociferously rejected biological theories and has through empirical evidences argued that it has a strong cultural basis.
- According to her ‘sex’ is natural or biological, but gender is cultural construct and it assigns different social roles for both genders. Differential rewards are attached to these roles which create gender inequalities and gender stratification. She cites numerous examples in which women take stereotypical so called ‘masculine’ roles. According to her, pre-industrial society had equal space for both men and women in all kinds of works. It was only during industrialization that such changes were brought that she was branded as ‘housewife’.
- Role of women in marriage and family also follows broader division of labor.
- According to Jessie Bernard in her ‘The Future of Marriage, 1976’, benefits that husband and wife draw from the marriage are radically different or unequal. Compared to single men, married men are likely to have more successful careers, but compared to single women, wives are more likely to suffer depression.
THE INDIAN CONTEXT
- In Indian context, caste is also viewed by feminists as a patriarchal institution as across the castes, role of women is of domestic worker.
- Together with religion, it defines role of women in Indian society.
- According to Uma Chakravorty, Brahminical traditions glorify obedient women as ‘Pativrata’ and hence put a veil on gender discrimination.
- Patriarchy legitimizes motherhood as primary role of women. In Indian society, patriarchy as a social institution gives rise to other social values such as male child
preference, sexual purity, monogamy, fasting by women and abstinence of women from public discourse.