Women and Patriarchy

UNIT 1 WOMEN AND PATRIARCHY

Mary E. John
Structure

1.1 Introduction
1.2 Objectives
1.3 Locating ‘Women” and “Patriarchy” in the Indian Context
1.4 Introducing Patriarchy
1.5 Patriarchy in History
1.6 Capitalist Patriarchy
1.7 Let Us Sum Up
1.8 Unit End Questions
1.9 References
1.10 Suggested Readings

1.1 INTRODUCTION
In the first unit of this Block, we will attempt to introduce you to the
relationships between gender and power, and the root causes of gender
oppression based on unequal power structures. What is the basis of gender
discrimination in a male dominated society? You will agree that male
dominance is pervasive across all societies and that most societies of the
world are positively biased towards males, albeit, differing in extent. The
underlying structure of male domination is described by feminists as
“patriarchy”. Therefore, it is important for us to understand patriarchy as
a concept and how it operates in human society. In this unit, we will
contextualize women’s positions within patriarchy, by examining the historical
background of patriarchy as well as by obtaining a broad understanding of
capitalist patriarchy. Let us begin by looking at the main objectives of
reading this unit.

1.2 OBJECTIVES
After reading this unit, you will be able to:

• Explain the meaning of the term ‘patriarchy’;

• Locate patriarchy in a historical context and explain its origins;

• Describe the relationship between patriarchy and Marxist thought;

• Describe the relationships between patriarchy, class and caste in India;

• Discuss and analyze the concept of ‘capitalist patriarchy’; and

• Distinguish between private and public forms of patriarchy through an

analysis of the structures which produce these.
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Concepts
1.3 LOCATING “WOMEN” AND “PATRIARCHY” IN
THE INDIAN CONTEXT
It might seem too obvious for you to say that any thinking or research in
the field of women and gender studies must begin by focussing on “women”.
When the women’s movement emerged in a new form in the 1960s and
1970s in many parts of the world with the cry of “women’s liberation” and
“equality for women”, one of the sites of struggle was that of knowledge
creation. Whose knowledge and what knowledge was relevant, and what
had been left out or suppressed? Many of the activists of the women’s
movement were simultaneously writing about women, both within institutions
such as universities and outside them. There is no uniform or single story
to be told here, as situations varied a great deal across the world, including
countries like Britain, France and the United States where feminists were
more visible than elsewhere.

In India, the pre-independence women’s movement appeared to have

retreated after independence. According to one of our foremost feminist
scholars Neera Desai, the reason for this retreat was that the women
leaders of that generation believed that the new nation-state led by
Jawaharlal Nehru would deliver on its promises of equality for women and
men, and that the new claims of national development (after colonialism)
would indeed bring about progress for all. It was in the 1960s and especially
the 70s that the nation entered an economic and political crisis. People’s
movements struck out to protest issues such as rising prices, the exploitation
of the poor, the loss of tribal lands, and so on. A small group of scholars
and policy makers were brought together in the early 70s to collect data
and undertake research on the “status of women in India”. Their research
resulted in the compilation of a Government of India Report entitled Toward
Equality, (by the Committee on the Status of Women in India) which was
completed in 1974 and was prepared for the United Nation’s Women’s Year
of 1975. Its findings were a shock to all, since with only a few exceptions,
the data showed that women’s status, far from gaining ground, had been
declining in the past decades. Neera Desai established the first Research
Centre for Women’s Studies in Bombay (in SNDT Women’s University) in
1974. So in India, too, the 1970s saw a new focus on women, as subjects
of research.

We have to imagine the many ways in which “woman” as a new subject

have changed our understanding and perspective on the world:

• Some feminists have emphasized the absence of women in the classroom

curriculum and textbooks.

• Others have talked about how their assumptions of equality between

women and men were belied.
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Therefore an early impulse in women’s studies has been to question such Women and Patriarchy

absences and such assumptions of equality.

Box No. 1.1

In India, “women’s studies” was conceived by a founding generation

as bringing to the social sciences (that is to say, those disciplines
most engaged with questions of development) the missing
perspective of women’s lives.

One of the routes that was followed in the work that was published from
the 1960s onwards was to question the ‘invisibility of women’ in social life
and in knowledge production. Economists, sociologists, and subsequently
teachers of literature, history and other subjects, including many outside
the academy have been undertaking pioneering research in a range of
fields. Most of their efforts have gone to show that, far from being absent
in history, society or literature, women have been fundamental, often creative
in their own right. Thus anthropological work has demonstrated the critical
roles women played in many different cultures, whether “primitive” or
“advanced”. Economists have questioned the non-recognition of women’s
labour, arguing that if all the work done by women were to be counted
(whether paid or unpaid), women as a group do more work than men.
Scholars in the field of literature have been discovering a wealth of writing
by women, hitherto unknown or not considered worthy of attention. A
powerful example in India would be the twin volumes Women Writing in
India: From 600 B.C. to the Present (Tharu & Lalita, 1991, 1993). These
volumes contain writings by women from across the sub-continent, across
time and region, astounding literary scholars and the general reader but
hitherto largely unknown or belittled. Many more examples could be given.

However, it should be clear to you even at this stage that only focussing
on the lives and work of women, unrecognized in history and society is not
enough. Surely one cannot escape the question, if indeed women have
been so essential, why has this not been acknowledged? Why have women
been hidden from history, undervalued in their work, treated as secondary
to men? Why have only exceptional women been remembered? To appreciate
the nature of the problem more fully, it became necessary therefore to
examine reasons for the overall marginalisation of women. Towards this
aim, certain concepts came to be used. One of the first major ones is that
of patriarchy to which we will turn now.

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Concepts
1.4 INTRODUCING PATRIARCHY
It would be interesting for you to know , the term patriarchy was by no
means invented by feminist scholars. This term comes from nineteenth
century anthropology and literally means ‘the rule of the father’ (from
latin, pater=father and arche=rule) . This is a term that lends itself to easy
translation into other languages, so, for example, in Hindi the term is pitr-
sattha. This concept emerged in the mid nineteenth century in the context
of studies of kinship and investigations into the origins of human societies.
Some European scholars of that time proposed that the earliest human
societies (referring to pre-historic times for which no direct evidence is
available) took the form of a matriarchy, where, as the term would suggest,
groups living together were under the control of a mother figure (matriarchy
= mother rule). Because of women’s capacity to give birth to children and
the power associated with this unique capability, these historians speculated
that women themselves could have been very powerful figures. This social
system then gave way to a patriarchal form of organisation, where the
eldest male of the clan held power over both other men and all women in
the group. It is not possible here to go into the details of these more or
less speculative theories of that time. There is no evidence that there ever
were matriarchies at the dawn of human history, in the sense of women
who had complete control over their group. However, the idea that different
stages of human development were associated with different kinds of family
and kinship relations continued to be debated. We must keep in mind that
these debates focussed on societies that were relatively simple in structure,
without the kinds of complex divisions that we are used to today, and
without states in which authority was centralised.

The first person to use the term patriarchy to denote a generalised form
of male dominance over women was Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). In a
sense this makes him the first “feminist” to give a different kind of meaning
to the term, one shaped by questions of women’s oppression by men.
Engels was a close companion of Karl Marx (1812-1883), who wished to
complement the materialist account of history as a series of successive
class-based societies. In his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (1886), Engels made the famous proposition that the earlier,
more egalitarian forms of organization, gave way to “the world historic
defeat of the female sex” following the emergence of private property. In
the Marxian scheme of conceptualising stages in history, Engels postulated
that the earliest societies were classless and relatively egalitarian in
structure, with a simple division of labour between men and women and
common property relations. This system gave way to distinctions based as
much on property as on controlling women’s sexuality and reproduction in
the family through relations of servitude. While Engels’ frames of thinking
such as using evolutionary biology and some of his sources of evidence have
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now been superceded and many appear dated, there is little question that Women and Patriarchy

the value of his efforts lay in trying to give a history to women’s

marginalisation in society rather than to assume this to be simply a natural
fact not worthy of further attention.

The concept of patriarchy has had mixed fortunes. Other than in Engels’
work, the term continued to be used by various anthropologists to denote
what we would today call patriliny, that is to say, kinship systems where
descent and inheritance is through the father. By the early twentieth
century the term patriarchy (and matriarchy) lost their credibility as kinship
theories shifted their concerns, and anthropology itself moved away from
this field. It is therefore of considerable interest to us to appreciate how,
several decades later, a new generation of feminists and women’s studies
scholars, from the 1970s onwards re-invented this term. They took it out
of kinship and anthropology to denote a more general structure of male
dominance, which enabled men to control the labour and sexuality of
women. It was this control, especially within the family, that was meant
to explain women’s lack of value and status both historically and socially.
Now that we have come to have some basic understanding of the term,
let us examine patriarchy in its historical context.patr

1.5 PATRIARCHY IN HISTORY

Harking back to Engels’ efforts a century ago, one of the most famous
attempts to give patriarchy its place in history has been the work of Gerda
Lerner, an American historian and Professor in women’s studies. Her major
work The Creation of Patriarchy was published in 1986. This was the
culmination of many years of research into one of the earliest civilisations
of ancient Mesopotamia – which corresponds broadly to the regions of
contemporary Iraq in Western Asia. As she herself describes her aims,
Lerner wanted to search for the history of the patriarchal system, one
which had emerged thousands of years ago. She believed no single factor
would serve as an adequate explanation, and, further, that whatever came
to be created must have been created jointly by both men and women.
Lerner is closer than she perhaps realises to the nineteenth century searches
of origins, when she begins her work by going all the way back to the early
neolithic hunter-gathering societies, where the precariousnes of life
necessitated an initial division of labour between women who did the
mothering as well as economic activities that could be combined with
childbearing like food gathering, while men were more singularly engaged
in big game hunting. Lerner was particularly keen to look for different
explanations for changes in the relations between men and women due to
the developments associated with agriculture, sedentary social forms of
living and the emergence of new, more unequal family structures. With
agriculture, production becomes central, and so does the need for more
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Concepts labour. She believes this led to men wishing to acquire the reproductive
potential of women, since children are now an economic asset. Her
hypothesis is that the entry of agriculture brought with it greater inter-
tribal warfare, and also with men having more leisure time than women to
manage surpluses and enhance their power. Women, in her view, are
captured from other tribes while their men are killed, so that such captured
women were not only the first slaves but also the first forms of private
property. She therefore contests Engels’ hypothesis that private property
preceded the greater control over women’s sexuality, by effectively arguing
the opposite – women as slaves may well have constituted the first forms
of private property apart from animal husbandry. Over time, women thus
come to be valued yet controlled in a relation of dependency. The position
of women becomes more complex with the further creation of wealth, the
development of urban centres and states. In her own investigations into
Mesopotamian history from approximately 3000 B.C. to 1000 B.C., for which
archaeological evidence exists, Lerner reconstructs an account where women
occupy very different positions in the social structure, from royal wives and
other women of significant rank and limited power (as stand-ins for their
men), concubines (some of whom could also rise socially), labouring women
and slaves (who were the most exploited). Thus women could be active in
economic, political and religious life (though in quite different ways), while
simultaneously being in relations of dependency to the ruling elite, male
relatives and/or husbands. This is a more dynamic form of thinking about
patriarchy in its historical emergence, according to Lerner, who believes
that patriachy underwent further changes in subsequent periods of history.
Nor should one assume that all societies went through the exact same
processes.

Inspired in part by the work of Lerner, the historian Uma Chakravarti has
investigated the history of early India for signs of forms of patriarchy in our
past. Interestingly, while Lerner emphasized the significance of slavery and
class in her work, Chakravarti brings caste into her account of patriarchy
in ancient India. The term she uses is “brahmanical patriarchy”. Looking
at ancient texts such as the Dharmasatras (including the Manusmriti), as
well as subsequent Buddhist sources, Chakravarti reconstructs early Indian
society from approximately 1000 B.C. onwards. Social organisation is
reconstructed through these texts to show how the control over women by
men was mediated through the creation of caste and class hierarchies and
differences. Such reconstruction is bound to be an extremely complex
task, given the paucity of sources and the dilemmas of providing a coherent
account about actual social structures on the basis of a limited set of texts.
In her own interpretation and use of the work of other scholars, Chakravarti
argues that maintaining the necessary distance and control over lower
castes by upper castes was as crucial as were differential forms of control
over women, their sexuality and labour. Chakravarti takes her cues from
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the ways in which for instance the Dharmashastras prescribed severe Women and Patriarchy

punishments equally for lower caste men who violated their place and for
women who behaved in transgressive ways. Retaining ownership over land
and maintaining caste purity thus required regulating women’s sexuality
and reproduction, who are then the pivots in this interlocking structure.
While upper caste men have maximum leeway in such a system, lower caste
men are both directly oppressed in terms of their labour, as well as prevented
from having access to upper caste women. While upper caste women are
thus the most severely guarded and monitored by their male kin as part of
their upper caste privilege, lower caste women can never be sure of such
protection, and suffer multiple privations. This uneven form of control over
women’s labour and sexuality is brahmanical patriarchy.

One of the more unusual aspects of the place of women in these texts (such
as the Manusmriti and the Mahabharata) is that women are all too frequently
identified with their (hetero)sexuality, at times obsessively so. Manu has
frequent references to women’s essentially sinful nature, with being
untruthful and fickle, and having an overflowing and uncontrollable sexuality.
The greatest danger for the husband is a woman’s promiscuity according to
Manu. Or to put this another way, there appears to be a repeated emphasis
on men’s dependence on women to preserve the family and lineage, which
is then justified by claims about women’s insatiable sexuality and the
consequent need to control it. Chakravarti also goes on to postulate that
the need to make upper caste women economically and ritually dependent
was therefore particularly necessary in order that such women would consent
to perform their duties (stridharma) in exchange for their care and
protection. Upper caste women were supremely lacking in autonomy and
only had paths of virtue (through pativrata) by which they could actively
consent to their subordination as chaste wives and mothers, especially of
sons. Upper caste women’s status was thus a complex affair, and included
their distinction from those below them in rank. While the Manusmriti is
direct to the point of obsessiveness about the need to control women, epics
such as the Ramayana (at least in the popular versions of the story) offer
a more fully worked out ideal in the character of the long-suffering and
patient Sita, who maintains her virtue even in the face of the most unjust
accusations.

We must remember the extent to which such texts are basically addressing
upper caste men, so that references to women (unless otherwise specified)
are invariably to upper caste women. A fuller account of how brahmanical
patriarchy works would, however, have to acknowledge the many differences
and hierarchies within this structure, including therefore, diverse patriarchal
forms of control. This is the most difficult to track historically, and it is
perhaps better to look at more recent historical periods including
contemporary times to understand how the graded nature of inequality that
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Concepts characterises caste translates into graded patriarchies. Sociological studies
have shown for instance how different the marriage practices can be among
so-called upper and lower castes. Till not so long ago, especially in rural
India, upper castes maintained very strong norms of seclusion for their
women, including extreme forms of treatment towards widows that Uma
Chakravarti likens to a form of “social death”. Lower caste women, on the
other hand, were frequently engaged in agricultural labour outside the
home, and widows from these castes were frequently remarried. Of course
there have been and continue to be considerable variations in the treatment
of women of different castes in different regions of the country. Some
scholars have for instance documented efforts on the part of lower castes
to emulate the practices of castes above them in the hierarchy, in an effort
to gain in status. On the other hand, there are frequent cases where upper
castes have claimed sexual access to lower caste women, as part of their
upper caste power and privilege. Some of the worst atrocities have been
upper caste attacks on lower castes for exceeding their place, including
sexually assaulting lower caste women as a form of revenge. What then is
the form of control that lower caste men have on their women? We will
return to these kinds of questions at the conclusion of this unit. Before that
however, we will look at another significant notion, namely, that of ‘capitalist
patriarchy’. But, before going further you can assess your own learning by
checking your progress so far.

Check Your Progress:

1) Discuss in your own words what do you understand by patriarchy.

2) Write a note of about 500 words on the origin and history

of patriarchy.

1.6 CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY

It is important in this discussion to also examine some of the ways in which
patriarchy has been used in the contemporary world, including so-called
advanced societies such as Britain or the US. Otherwise we run into the
danger of supposing that patriarchies only existed in older civilisations and
that the term has little use in the present time.

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But this is not the case. During the 1970s, a number of feminists who were Women and Patriarchy

also Marxists, and were therefore interested in looking at capitalist social

relations, came up with the notion of a “capitalist patriarchy”. These were
among the earliest explicit efforts on the part of scholars who were very
active in both left and women’s movements to theorize the nature of
women’s oppression by drawing from existing theories of Marxism and the
new efforts to understand male domination. These feminists have looked
for ways to integrate Marxism and feminism in terms of finding the
relationships between a capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual
structures.

In order to proceed, they begin with an account of Marxist class analysis:

In its barest form, the class relation beween the capitalist and the worker
has been theorised in two complementary ways: in its economic form as a
structure of exploitation, and secondly as a form of consciousness about
their condition as workers, thus implying the potential of change through
political struggle. Thus, the fact that marxism embodied both a theory of
society and a politics has made it very attractive to feminists, who have
undertaken analogous investigations into the position of women. They
criticise Marx’s writings for having very little to say about women, though
acknowledging the efforts of someone like Engels.

An important point made by the socialist feminist Zillah Eisenstein in her

edited volume Capitalist Patriarchy and the case for Socialist Feminism
(1979), is to distinguish between the worker (whether man or woman)
under capitalism and the woman in the household. Workers are exploited
in the workplace (by the capitalist factory owner or the landlord) by paying
them wages that are less than the value of the labour they do, so that the
surplus goes to the owner. However, most women are dependent for their
livelihood and security on a specific set of social relations, defined by
marriage and motherhood, and their daily work takes place in the context
of these relations. In this situation where women are working in the home
but not being paid wages, the nature of their domination in the household
is similar and different to that of someone engaging in paid work. It is
similar in so far as she has to labour for others – typically she will be
engaging in all kinds of housework, cooking, cleaning, looking after children
and all those who need care, including her husband and others living with
them, – but does not receive the just value for this work. She gives much
more than she receives in terms of her own needs, care and protection.
This relationship is not very easy to define, and has been called a relationship
of patriarchal oppression by feminists. It should be obvious why it is so
difficult to name, because firstly, most women do not think of themselves
as workers, since they are not being paid a wage, and secondly, because
their labour is interwoven with notions of love, care and duty to the family
– typically towards their husband, children and others who may be living
with them.
15
Concepts Calling this relationship one of oppression has therefore been a major
theoretical and political statement on the part of feminists, and allowed
many women to realize that the long hours of drudgery they performed
everyday, which is taken for granted by others, deserves to be called work,
as much as any work performed for a wage.

Box No 1.2

The situation is even more oppressive for those women who do

paid work outside the home, and are yet expected to take primary
responsibility for housework – this has been called ‘the double
shift’.

Think, too, of the double shift of domestic workers, who labour in other
people’s homes and then have to undertake housework in their own homes
as well.

There has been considerable debate by feminists about how to understand

the work that women perform in the home, and therefore its relation with
the nature of patriarchy. Should women then be paid just wages for this
kind of work as a step forward? Or would this only serve to further confine
them to the home? Is the solution to transform housework in a social
activity, such as through collective kitchens, creches for children and so on,
so that women no longer have to undertake this kind of work alone and can
be freed up like men to work elsewhere? What about the domestic work
of servants, who receive some of the worst wages ever to be paid to a
worker anywhere?

Box No. 1.3

The term “capitalist patriarchy” seems to indicate that there is

one overall system whereby women in households are responsible
for the reproduction of the family and future workers, while
production in the form of goods and services in the economy is
happening outside the modern home.

Yet another arena of debate has been to understand the nature of the
relationship between all the work done in private homes and the other
spheres of work in public offices, factories and fields.

Other feminists believed that the relationship could be more complex. Yet
others tried to introduce other terms for exploitation and oppression, such
as for those based on race. Thus the nature of oppression is differentiated
across class, race (or caste) lines – think of the oppression of a black
woman under conditions of slavery in the USA compared to that of her
white mistress; or that of working class women compared to elite women,
16 all of whom are engaged in the reproduction of society.
At least one feminist, Sylvia Walby, has argued that too much emphasis in Women and Patriarchy

most theories of patriarchy has been given to the home. She has argued
that patriarchy is as much public as it is private, and that its public form
is particularly important in modern societies. She has given a very general
theory of patriarchy as being a system of social structures whereby men are
in a position to dominate, exploit and oppress women. She emphasizes the
structures of patriarchy which are not the same in different societies or at
different stages in history. According to Walby, at present time, patriarchy
has six relatively autonomous structures. Needless to say that these are
connected to one another, and also by other structures such as capitalism
and racism, but she wishes to look at them separately in order to account
for the variation in gender relations in contemporary societies, especially
western ones. Let us take a quick look at each one of these structures:

• Patriarchal mode of production

The first one is like the ones discussed already – women’s labour in the
home which is expropriated by men and other members in exchange
for her maintenance.

• Patriarchal relations in paid work

The second structure means that women in the world of paid work are
effectively excluded from the better forms of work and confined for
the most part in lower levels of work, considered less skilled and more
appropriate for women, for which they then receive lower wages.

• Patriarchal relations in the state

The third factors, the state, on its part, in its policies and actions is
patriarchal towards women, being biased against them.

• Male violence

The fourth structure is that of male violence, which is not as

individualised as is often made out to be. Only the most extreme
forms of such violence – such as rape, or wife beating – have been
denoted as a crime, though more recently other forms of domestic
violence and sexual harassment are beginning to be recognised.

• Patriarchal relations in sexuality

Fifthly, sexual relations constitutes another patiarchal structure,

composed of compulsory heterosexuality (that is to say, that the
normative form of sexuality is that with a member of the other sex),
and, that the onus of chastity and virtue falling on women. The double
standards of men are condoned, while women who have sexual relations
outside of marriage are more severely stigmatised and punished.

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Concepts • Patriarchal relations in cultural institutions

Finally, Walby looks at institutions such as education, religion and the

media. Here, particularly in the field of representation, she believes
that biases against women are produced and legitimised.

Walby finally argues that there have indeed over the course of history been
changes both in the form that patriarchy has taken and in the degree of
patriarchy. Thus, if the gap in wages between men and women closes or
both girls and boys go to school, this lessens the degree of patriarchy.
Walby’s discussion on the changing forms of patriarchy focusses mainly on
what she calls “private” and “public” patriarchy. Where women are largely
excluded from public life, whether in the economy or politics, so that their
main dependency is on men in the household and the work of reproduction
within it, this is private patriarchy. This has existed in many societies, and
was certainly the norm for middle class women in the mid nineteenth
century in countries such as Britain, who were never meant to be active
outside the home. However, since then, the twentieth century has seen
more public forms of patriarchy where women are indeed actively present
in work and other public spaces, but in a subordinated position. Moreover,
the very effect of women’s movements has been to change older structures
so that women are participating to a greater extent than before in many
spheres of life. However, their participation is hardly open or free but
structured by forms of discrimination and disadvantage.

1.7 LET US SUM UP

As you may have noted already, this unit has been concerned with opening
up the relationship between women and patriarchy to further exploration
so that we can understand better how these concepts illuminate the
inequality of women in society. Patriarchy, as you have seen, has been used
both historically as well as in contemporary societies as a description of the
unequal social relations that women suffer from. Whatever the origins of
the term, it has been widely used by feminists both in India and elsewhere
to emphasize the structures that control women. While some have
emphasized women’s unique control within families and households in terms
of their labour, their sexuality and their reproductive capacities, others
have looked at differing structures as well. You have seen how the origins
of patriarchy can be traced back to ancient times and cultures, as done by
Gerda Lerner, in her work on Mesopotamia and the historical emergence of
patriarchy. In India, we looked with Uma Chakravarti at the caste system
together with patriarchy; with Marxist feminists we looked at capitalism
and patriarchy; and with Sylvia Walby we looked at different structures that
combine to produce more private and more public forms of patriarchy. You
will come across the term “patriarchy” in various contexts throughout this
course, as well in other courses of this programme too.It would be helpful
18
for you to relate what you have learnt here to other contexts in order to Women and Patriarchy

gain a better and deeper understanding of patriarchy.

1.8 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1) Briefly describe the inter-relationships between patriarchy, caste and
class in India, as summarized in the work of Uma Chakravarti. Do you
agree or disagree with her analysis? Use examples from ancient Indian
texts, or from contemporary situations that you are familiar with, to
support your answer.

2) Explain the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy as described

by Marxist feminists. Can you draw similarities between what you have
described and some real life examples in India?

3) Summarize the different structures that combine to form private and

public forms of patriarchy as discussed by Sylvia Walby. Give examples
of private and public forms of patriarchy and explain each of the
structures in your own words.

4) In your view, how can the negative impacts of patriarchy on women be

reduced? What are some of the things Indian women need to do to
empower themselves and transform the social system?

1.9 REFERENCES
Chakravarti, Uma (2004). Gender and Caste Through A Feminist Lens.
Calcutta: Stree.

Desai, Neera (2001). Women in Indian Society. New Delhi: National Book
Trust.

Government of India (1974). Towards Equality. Report prepared by the

Committee on the Status of Women in India.

Eisenstein, Zillah ( 1979). Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism.

Boston: Beacon Press.

Engels, Friedrich (1975) ( Revised 1886). The Origins of the Family, Private
Property and the State. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lerner, Gerda (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Tharu, Susie & Lalita, K. (1991 & 1993). Women Writing in India: From 600
B.C. to the Present (two volumes). Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Walby, Sylvia (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Concepts
1.10 SUGGESTED READINGS
Lerner, Gerda (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University
Press.

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