Breaking down the question
The question turns on a deliberate tension. Patriarchy is named as an ideological system — a structure of ideas, values and norms that legitimises male dominance — yet the command is to discuss its material basis. The examiner is inviting you to show how patriarchal ideology is anchored in concrete economic and social arrangements rather than floating free as mere belief.
The key sociological move is to refuse a purely idealist account. Ideas about female subordination do not sustain themselves; they rest on and reproduce material conditions — the division of labour, control over property, and control over women's productive and reproductive capacities. A strong script demonstrates this materialist grounding while acknowledging that ideology, in turn, secures those material conditions.
The debate to stage is essentially the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, drawing on Marxist and materialist feminism. For the underlying concepts, see the note on patriarchy, entitlements and the sexual division of labour.
How to approach it
Open by defining patriarchy as a system of male dominance and clarifying what it means to seek its material basis — the economic and social structures that underpin the ideology.
Build the body around the principal material foundations: the sexual division of labour, control over property and inheritance, and control over women's reproduction and sexuality. Show how each generates and sustains patriarchal ideas, using Engels on the origins of women's subordination and Hartmann on the alliance of patriarchy and capital.
Then complicate the picture with the dual-systems and multiple-structures debate, drawing on Hartmann and Walby, and note the Indian dimension through dowry, land and the household. Conclude by affirming the dialectic — material base and ideology reinforcing one another.
Model answer
Patriarchy denotes a system of social relations in which men, as a category, dominate, oppress and exploit women. Described as an ideological system, it works through a web of ideas — that women are naturally suited to the home, that male authority is legitimate, that female sexuality must be controlled. But to ask for its material basis is to insist that these ideas do not sustain themselves; they are rooted in, and reproduce, concrete economic and social arrangements. A materialist reading identifies three principal foundations.
The first is the sexual division of labour. Across most societies, women are assigned the unpaid, undervalued work of the household — cooking, cleaning, childcare and caring for the elderly — while men are directed towards paid, public and higher-status work. This division is presented as natural, yet it is a social arrangement with material consequences: it confines women to economic dependence and frees men to accumulate income, skills and public authority. The ideology of female domesticity is thus the legitimising gloss on a material allocation of labour.
The second is control over property and inheritance. Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, located the world-historical defeat of the female sex in the emergence of private property. As surplus and property accumulated, men sought to transmit wealth to legitimate heirs, which required control over women's sexuality and the institution of monogamous marriage centred on female fidelity. Patriarchal ideology — female chastity, male lineage, the honour of the family — is on this account the superstructure of a property system organised around male inheritance. In India, patrilineal inheritance, the practice of dowry and women's historically weak land rights concretely embody this control.
The third is control over women's reproduction and the reproduction of labour power. Women's biological capacity to bear children, and their social role in rearing and sustaining the workforce, are appropriated within the household. Marxist feminists argue that the unpaid domestic labour of women subsidises capital by reproducing labour power at no cost to the employer. The confinement of women to this reproductive role, dressed up as natural maternal duty, is a further material anchor of patriarchal ideas.
The relationship between capitalism and patriarchy has been theorised through dual-systems approaches. Heidi Hartmann argued that patriarchy and capitalism are distinct but interlocking systems — men benefit from women's domestic labour and from their subordinate, low-paid position in the wage economy, so a partnership emerges between patriarchal and capitalist interests, expressed for instance in the family wage. Sylvia Walby extended this into an account of patriarchy as operating through several structures — household production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and culture — each with its own material dimension, and traced a shift from private to public patriarchy as women entered the labour market only to face segregation and unequal pay.
The Indian context sharpens the argument. The persistence of dowry, the devaluation of the girl child, restrictions on women's mobility and the concentration of land and productive assets in male hands show how patriarchal ideology is welded to material entitlements within the family and the wider economy. The public-private divide — men in the market and polity, women in the home — is not a natural boundary but a materially produced one.
Yet the relationship is dialectical rather than one-way. Material structures generate patriarchal ideology, but that ideology in turn secures and naturalises the structures, teaching both men and women to accept the arrangement as inevitable. Ideas and interests reinforce each other. It follows that transforming patriarchy requires changing not only attitudes but the material conditions — the division of labour, property rights and the organisation of reproduction — on which those attitudes rest.
In sum, patriarchy is an ideological system with deep material roots. Its ideas about womanhood and male authority are the visible surface of an economic order built on the sexual division of labour, male-centred property, and the appropriation of women's reproductive work. To grasp patriarchy sociologically is to hold ideology and material base together, each explaining the endurance of the other.
Examiner's perspective
The commonest weakness on this question is treating patriarchy as attitudes and prejudice alone. Examiners specifically reward candidates who honour the phrase material basis by grounding the ideology in the sexual division of labour, property and inheritance, and the control of reproduction — ideally with named theorists rather than generic feminism.
Depth comes from the capitalism-patriarchy debate. Deploying Engels on property, Hartmann on the dual-systems alliance, and Walby on multiple structures signals genuine command, and an Indian illustration such as dowry or land rights earns further credit. The strongest scripts close on the dialectic — material conditions and ideology reinforcing one another — which shows the candidate can hold structure and culture together rather than choosing one. That synthesis is what lifts the answer into the top band.