Revision summary
Individual excellence by women has not dissolved patriarchal attitudes toward women or toward the feminist movement. Beyond education and empowerment schemes, change needs political seats, enforced property rights, and a public care economy. POSH that works, non-compromise on sexual violence, and an end to sarpanch-pati are attitude interventions. Male engagement, media norms, and rural-union feminisms stop the smear that equality is only urban. Milieu is power plus culture; schemes without seats and titles leave patriarchy standing.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Post-Independence India has produced women Presidents, scientists, judges, pilots and Olympic medallists, yet everyday attitude — in the household, the shrine, the newsroom and the party office — often remains patriarchal. Education and empowerment schemes are necessary; they do not by themselves rewrite the milieu in which a feminist claim is mocked as Western or as a threat to the family.
Body
What the statement gets right
- Excellence at the tail — a woman CEO or a woman Air Marshal — coexists with son preference, unpaid care, and violence, because patriarchy is a social structure, not a shortage of role models.
- Parts of the public conversation still treat the feminist movement as man-hatred rather than as a demand for Articles 14, 15 and 21, which is itself a patriarchal attitude toward politics.
Interventions beyond classrooms and scheme portals
- Political power: legislate a fair share of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies (the long-pending reservation idea), and enforce the 73rd and 74th Amendment’s women’s seats against sarpanch-pati practice with penalties, so authority is seen in a woman’s name.
- Property and unpaid work: full, cheap enforcement of the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, coparcenary rights, and a care-economy policy — creches, maternity plus paternity leave, and time-use recognition in statistics — so the household bargain shifts.
- Violence and workplace law: fast POSH committees that are not employer-captured, time-bound trial of sexual violence, and police-station women-help desks that do not mediate rape as a ‘compromise’.
- Male engagement: school and panchayat programmes that treat boys as participants in equality, not as the audience of a women-only scheme; religious and caste sabhas that are asked to drop honour-based controls.
- Media and culture: public broadcasting and film certification that do not reward humiliation humour; sports and STEM fellowships that keep girls in the pipeline after Class 10, which is attitude work in a stadium, not only in a textbook.
- Feminist movement itself: fund rural and union feminisms (SEWA-type, forest rights, ASHA and anganwadi unions) so the movement is not typed as only urban-English, which patriarchy uses as a smear.
Changing the milieu, not only the metric
- Gender budgeting that publishes incidence of spending, and corporate board diversity with real, not dummy, directors, change what institutions honour.
- Community watch against sex-selective practices and against social boycott of mixed marriages attacks patriarchy where schemes never reach.
- Recommendation: a bundle of political reservation, care infrastructure, property enforcement, and male-targeted social norms campaigns — because milieu is power plus culture, and education schemes address only one input.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD E[Education and schemes] --> P[Partial change] R[Political reservation property care] --> M[Milieu shift] V[POSH criminal justice] --> M H[Male engagement media rural feminism] --> M M --> A[Attitude less patriarchal]
Conclusion
Women’s excellence has not automatically civilised social attitude; patriarchy still frames both the woman achiever and the feminist movement. Apart from education and empowerment schemes, the milieu changes when women hold seats and titles to land, when care is public, when violence is not compromised, and when men and local institutions are made parties to equality. That is constitutional morality in the household, not only in a ministry guideline.
Quick related
Students also ask
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In order to enhance the prospects of social development, sound and adequate health care policies are needed particularly in the fields of geriatric and maternal health care. Discuss.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q6). View answer →
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Why are education schemes not enough?
They raise capability. Patriarchy still decides whose name is on the land, who sits in the panchayat chair, and whose complaint is compromised.
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Does criticising patriarchy attack the family?
It attacks hierarchy inside the family. Articles 14 and 15 protect the woman as a citizen, not as a dependent ornament of the household.
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