Breaking down the question
The statement asks you to examine patriarchy specifically as a form of dominance. You must define patriarchy, then show how it operates as a structured system of power in which men, as a group, exercise control over women — through resources, labour, sexuality and ideology.
The phrase form of dominance is the pivot. It directs you away from describing patriarchy loosely as male attitudes and towards analysing it as an organised structure of domination, with its own mechanisms and sites, comparable to other systems of inequality.
How to approach it
Begin by defining patriarchy as a system rather than a sentiment. Then set out the mechanisms through which it dominates — control of resources and inheritance, the sexual division of labour, control over women's bodies and sexuality, and legitimating ideology. Show its sites in family, economy and polity, note how it intersects with caste and class, and close by acknowledging women's agency and resistance.
Model answer
Patriarchy literally means the rule of the father, but sociologically it denotes a system of social relations in which men, as a category, dominate women and control the means through which that dominance is reproduced. As Sylvia Walby argues, it is a structure — not merely individual prejudice — with distinct mechanisms operating across society. Understood this way, patriarchy is a genuine form of dominance, parallel in its workings to those of caste and class.
Its first mechanism is control over resources. Patriarchal systems concentrate ownership of land, property and income in male hands and route inheritance through the male line, leaving women materially dependent. In India, customary and long-standing legal denial of women's inheritance rights entrenched this economic subordination.
Second is the sexual division of labour. Patriarchy assigns women to reproductive and domestic work, devalued and unpaid, while men monopolise the public sphere of paid work and authority. The resulting public-private divide confines women and naturalises their exclusion from power.
Third is control over women's bodies and sexuality. Through marriage rules, norms of chastity, restrictions on mobility, and — in its harshest expressions — violence, dowry deaths and honour crimes, patriarchy regulates women's sexuality and reproduction to secure lineage and property. Uma Chakravarti's concept of Brahmanical patriarchy shows how in India this control was bound up with caste purity and endogamy.
Fourth is ideology and socialisation. Patriarchy sustains itself not by force alone but through beliefs — religious, cultural and familial — that present male authority as natural and legitimate. Socialisation from childhood internalises these roles, so that domination is reproduced with women's own consent.
Patriarchy operates across multiple sites — the family, the economy, the state, religion and culture — and it does not act alone. It intersects with caste and class, so that the experience of patriarchal dominance differs sharply for an upper-caste and a Dalit woman, or a rich and a poor one.
Yet patriarchy is neither total nor unchanging. Women have contested it through reform movements, feminist mobilisation and everyday resistance, and legal and educational change has eroded some of its supports. It remains, nonetheless, one of the most pervasive and resilient forms of dominance in society. For fuller treatment, see the note on patriarchy, entitlements and the sexual division of labour.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners want patriarchy analysed as a structure of dominance, not described as male chauvinism. Marks lie in naming the mechanisms — control of resources, the sexual division of labour, regulation of sexuality, legitimating ideology — and locating them across concrete sites. The strongest scripts draw on theory, such as Walby's structural account and Chakravarti's Brahmanical patriarchy, show how patriarchy intersects with caste and class, and acknowledge women's agency. That analytical framing lifts the answer above a descriptive treatment.