Patriarchy literally means the rule of the father, but sociology has stretched the word far beyond the household. In its modern feminist usage — given its sharpest formulation by Sylvia Walby — patriarchy is a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women. Three words in that definition do the analytical work. It is a system, not a collection of individual attitudes; it is structural, embedded in institutions that outlive any particular man or woman; and it involves exploitation, the appropriation of women's labour and bodies, not merely unequal esteem.

Defining patriarchy this way separates it from sexism (prejudiced belief) and from male dominance as a simple description of who holds office. It also makes patriarchy a variable rather than a constant: if it is a configuration of structures, then its degree and its form can change, and different societies can be patriarchal in different ways.

Walby's six structures

In Theorising Patriarchy (1990) Walby rejects both the single-cause explanations of radical feminism and the reduction of gender to class. She proposes six relatively autonomous structures, each with its own dynamic:

  • Paid work — occupational segregation and the wage gap.
  • The household — unpaid domestic and care labour appropriated by men.
  • Culture — representations of femininity in religion, media and education.
  • Sexuality — compulsory heterosexuality and the sexual double standard.
  • Violence — battering, rape and harassment, tolerated by the state through under-enforcement.
  • The state — patriarchal in its policies and personnel, though contested.

Because the structures are relatively autonomous, gains in one can coexist with losses in another. This lets Walby describe a historical shift from private patriarchy, where women are controlled individually within the household by fathers and husbands and largely excluded from public life, to public patriarchy, where women enter paid work, education and politics but are subordinated collectively through segregated labour markets, the state and the media. Exclusion gives way to segregation; confinement gives way to unequal inclusion.

Classic patriarchy and the patriarchal bargain

Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) added a crucial corrective: women are not passive victims of these structures but strategic actors who bargain within them. Under what she calls classic patriarchy — characteristic of the belt running from North Africa through West Asia to North India and China — young brides enter their husbands' patrilineal, patrilocal households in a position of extreme dependence, and acquire authority only later, over their own sons' wives. The patriarchal bargain is the resulting rational trade: women accept present subordination in exchange for the security and eventual power the system promises. This explains why senior women often police junior women, and why patriarchal norms can be defended most fiercely by those they constrain — a point of great use in answers on dowry, veiling or son preference.

Patriarchy in Indian kinship

Leela Dube showed that in India patriarchy is written into the grammar of kinship rather than merely into attitudes. Patrilineal descent makes the son the carrier of the line and the daughter a transient member of her natal home; patrilocal residence and village exogamy in the north move a bride among strangers, severing her support network; dowry converts marriage into a transfer of resources that redefines daughters as economic drains; inheritance practice, despite the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, still favours sons in custom; and the control of female sexuality — early marriage, restrictions on mobility, the language of family honour — polices caste boundaries themselves. Uma Chakravarti's concept of Brahmanical patriarchy makes that last link explicit: endogamy can only be maintained if women's reproductive capacity is controlled, so caste purity and female subordination are produced together. B. R. Ambedkar had already argued in 1917 that practices such as sati, enforced widowhood and child marriage were mechanisms for maintaining endogamous caste groups.

Regional variation and the matrilineal qualification

Patriarchy in India is not uniform. Tim Dyson and Mick Moore (1983) mapped a broad north-south contrast: northern kinship — exogamous, patrilocal, with dowry-heavy marriage among unrelated families — is associated with lower female autonomy, while southern Dravidian kinship, permitting cross-cousin and close-kin marriage within familiar circles, gives women more accessible natal support and correlates with better female survival and later demographic outcomes. Matrilineal groups such as the Nayar, Khasi and Garo qualify the picture further but do not refute it: descent and property may pass through women while authority remains with brothers and maternal uncles. Matriliny is not matriarchy.

Criticisms

Three objections recur. First, universalism: early usage, as in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), treated patriarchy as a transhistorical constant, leaving its variation unexplained — Walby's structural pluralism is a response. Second, insufficient attention to caste and class: an upper-caste professional woman and a Dalit agricultural labourer do not inhabit the same patriarchy, and Dalit feminist writing argues that "patriarchy" alone flattens caste-specific sexual violence and labour coercion. Third, biological determinism by the back door — critics warn that the concept can imply men are inherently oppressors, foreclosing the question of how gender orders are historically made and unmade.

For the UPSC answer

Open with Walby's definition verbatim — system, structures, practices — and immediately stress that patriarchy is a variable, not a constant. Use the six structures as your skeleton, then convert them into Indian evidence: dowry and the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 for the household and the state; the falling female labour force participation recorded by the Periodic Labour Force Survey for paid work; declining child sex ratios in the Census of India for the value placed on daughters. Two moves lift a middling answer: the private-to-public shift, which lets you argue that modernisation transformed rather than abolished patriarchy, and Kandiyoti's patriarchal bargain, which explains women's complicity without blaming them. Close on the intersectional critique — invoke Chakravarti and Dalit feminism to show that caste, class and patriarchy must be theorised together.

References & further reading

  1. Walby, S. (1990). Theorising Patriarchy. Blackwell.
  2. Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Doubleday.
  3. Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with Patriarchy. Gender and Society, 2(3).
  4. Dube, L. (1997). Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia. United Nations University Press.
  5. Chakravarti, U. (1993). Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State. Economic and Political Weekly, 28(14).
  6. Dyson, T. and Moore, M. (1983). On Kinship Structure, Female Autonomy, and Demographic Behavior in India. Population and Development Review, 9(1).