The feminist perspective advances two claims at once, one about society and one about sociology. About society, it holds that gender is not an incidental attribute of persons but a fundamental principle by which work, property, authority, sexuality and even knowledge are distributed — as basic to social structure as class or caste, and interwoven with both. About sociology, it charges that the discipline was for a century malestream: it studied paid work and ignored unpaid work, studied the polity and ignored the household, took the male worker as the unmarked type of the citizen, and then presented its findings as general human knowledge.
The corrective was not simply to add women to existing studies. Adding women exposes that the categories themselves were built on a partial world — that work, class, violence and the political all have to be redefined once domestic labour, reproductive control and household hierarchy count as social facts. Feminism thus functions as a perspective rather than a topic: it changes what a sociological question looks like.
Strands within feminism
Liberal feminism locates the problem in exclusion and prejudice: women are denied equal access to education, employment, property and public office, and the remedy is legal equality, anti-discrimination law and the reform of socialisation. It is politically effective and analytically cautious, since it leaves the basic structure of family and market intact.
Marxist and socialist feminism ties women's subordination to capitalism. Domestic labour reproduces the labour force at no cost to the employer, women form a reserve army whose cheapness disciplines wages, and property arrangements concentrate assets in male hands. Socialist feminists such as Heidi Hartmann and Juliet Mitchell refused to derive patriarchy wholly from capital, arguing instead for two intersecting systems.
Radical feminism makes patriarchy primary and prior. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics treated the relation between the sexes as itself political — a relation of dominance sustained through sexuality, culture and force — and the movement's slogan that the personal is political made intimacy, housework and violence legitimate objects of analysis rather than private matters.
Black and intersectional feminism objected that the category woman had been filled with the experience of white, middle-class, Western women. Kimberlé Crenshaw's account of intersectionality showed that race and gender do not simply add but combine, producing harms that neither anti-racism nor feminism alone recognises. Postcolonial critics extended the point, resisting the figure of the uniformly oppressed third-world woman.
Core concepts
The sex-gender distinction separates biological difference from the socially constructed expectations attached to it, and so opens the question of variation across cultures and history; later theorists, notably Judith Butler, questioned whether even sex escapes social construction. Patriarchy names the system of male dominance itself, and Sylvia Walby's influential formulation identifies six interlocking structures — paid work, household production, the state, violence, sexuality and culture — which allows her to argue that patriarchy has not disappeared in the West but shifted from a private to a public form. The public-private divide is treated as an ideological accomplishment that hides domestic labour and domestic violence from public accountability. Reproductive labour — bearing and raising children, feeding, nursing, managing kin — is recognised as work that produces value and structures women's access to everything else. Standpoint theory, developed by Dorothy Smith, argues that knowledge is always produced from a location, and that starting from the actual everyday world of women reveals relations of ruling that a view from above conceals.
Method follows from this. Feminist research favoured qualitative, dialogic approaches and produced a sustained critique of the interview relationship. Ann Oakley argued that the textbook norm of the detached, non-reciprocating interviewer was unworkable and undesirable when women interview women about childbirth and housework: rapport, disclosure and answering the respondent's own questions produced better data as well as a more honest ethic. Her Sociology of Housework did the parallel substantive work, treating housework as a job with tasks, conditions and dissatisfactions rather than as a natural expression of love.
Feminism in India
The Indian tradition has been shaped by the fact that gender never operates alone. The women's movement moved from social reform and nationalist mobilisation to the autonomous campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s against dowry deaths, custodial rape, sati and price rise, and later towards questions of law, representation and labour. Uma Chakravarti's concept of Brahmanical patriarchy is the key theoretical contribution: caste purity depends on controlling women's sexuality, because the boundaries of the endogamous group can only be maintained through their reproductive capacity, so caste hierarchy and the control of women are a single structure rather than two. Leela Dube demonstrated through comparative work on kinship how residence, descent, inheritance and the everyday socialisation of girls — including the seed-and-earth metaphor that makes women vessels for male lineage — construct gender in South Asia. Gopal Guru's argument that Dalit women talk differently pressed a further critique: upper-caste women's claim to speak for all women reproduces within feminism the very hierarchy it opposes, and Dalit women's oppression is not the sum of caste plus gender but a distinct experience requiring its own voice.
Criticisms
Feminism is charged with essentialism — assuming a shared womanhood across class, caste, race and nation — an objection largely internal to feminism and answered by intersectional and postcolonial work. Critics allege over-politicisation, arguing that avowedly committed research abandons value neutrality, to which standpoint theorists reply that the alleged neutrality of mainstream sociology was itself a position. Some strands are said to neglect men, treating masculinity as uniform rather than as itself structured and stratified, a gap addressed by later work on masculinities. Radical feminism is criticised for reducing everything to patriarchy and understating class and race, and liberal feminism for the opposite fault of accepting the existing order. In India, autonomous feminism has been criticised for an urban, educated base and for slow recognition of Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim women's distinct claims.
For the UPSC answer
Deploy the feminist perspective on any question about family, kinship, stratification, work, movements or the sociology of knowledge, and lead with the malestream critique — that the discipline's categories, not merely its samples, were partial. Distinguish the strands crisply, since undifferentiated feminism reads as vague, and carry at least one method point such as Oakley on interviewing to show that the perspective reaches epistemology. For Indian material, Chakravarti on Brahmanical patriarchy, Dube on kinship and Guru's Dalit feminist critique supply an answer that examiners recognise as informed. Pair it against functionalism, whose instrumental and expressive roles it exposes as power described as necessity, or against classical Marxism, whose account of labour it completes by insisting that reproductive work is work.
References & further reading
- Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Doubleday.
- Oakley, A. (1974). The Sociology of Housework. Martin Robertson.
- Smith, D. E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern University Press.
- Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Blackwell.
- Dube, L. (1997). Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia. United Nations University Press.
- Chakravarti, U. (2003). Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens. Stree.