Revision summary
Patriarchy is male dominance across household and work; it can change form. Family: more dual earning and law, still care, honour, and NFHS violence. Workplace: some professions and SHGs, still informal segregation. WFH and lockdown reorganised rather than ended the double day. Walby’s public patriarchy is the best short map.
Model answer
Introduction
Patriarchy is organised male dominance across household, work, sexuality, and the state. Sylvia Walby argued it can shift from private to public forms. Family and workplace in contemporary India show alteration, not abolition. Law, education, and wages have moved. Unpaid care and informal insecurity still pin the structure.
Body
Family: what has altered
- Talcott Parsons’s male-earner nuclear type is no longer the only official script. Dual earning, delayed marriage, and female-headed households appear in Census and NFHS files.
- Education and later age at marriage raise women’s bargaining in some classes. Giddens’s “pure relationship” is a limited urban possibility.
- Law on inheritance, domestic violence, and divorce opened exits that earlier household patriarchy denied.
Family: what persists
- Unpaid care, which Ann Oakley named as labour, still falls on women. Work from home during COVID-19 intensified the double day.
- Sex ratio, spousal violence, and decision-making items in NFHS show constraint inside “modern” homes.
- Kin control of marriage, often caste-endogamous, still organises honour.
Workplace: what has altered
- Women have entered professions, public office, and some factory and service lines. SHGs made credit and public meeting visible.
- Formal equal-pay rules and maternity provisions exist for a thin organised sector.
Workplace: what persists and mutates
- Informal sector dominance: no contract, home-based piece work, domestic service, and gig tasks without a career.
- Occupational segregation and a glass ceiling keep command posts male.
- WFH dashboards did not socialise childcare. They often moved the office into a gendered house.
- Lockdown dismissed informal women first and sent migrants walking; another class kept salaried screens.
How to read “altered”
- Walby’s shift from private patriarchy (husband as direct boss) to public patriarchy (state and labour market as bosses) fits much of the evidence.
- Friedrich Engels tied the family to property. Property in land and firm still skews male, so alteration is incomplete.
- Intersection with caste and class: Dalit and migrant women face a harsher workplace patriarchy than the professional dual-earner story.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD PAT[Patriarchy] --> FAM[Family care marriage] PAT --> WORK[Workplace segregation informal] LAW[Law education dual earn] --> ALT[Altered form] CARE[Unpaid care gig lockdown] --> PERS[Persistent structure] ALT --> WAL[Private to public] PERS --> WAL
Conclusion
Patriarchy has been altered in family and workplace through law, schooling, dual earning, and public patriarchy’s new offices. It has not been ended. Care, informal labour, NFHS violence and sex-ratio files, WFH, and lockdown show reorganisation. Substantiate with Walby, Oakley, Census, and the 2020 split between home-office and reverse migration.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the changing nature of kinship relations in the contemporary world.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q8(a)). View answer →
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If more women work, is patriarchy over?
No. They may work under cheaper, informal, and care-burdened terms.
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Did COVID reverse gains?
It exposed how thin the gains were: professional WFH versus informal dismissal and extra care.
PYQ trend
When UPSC asked this
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Give an account of the recent trends of marriage in the Indian context. How are these different from traditional practices?
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Traditional Indian marriage was typically early, arranged, caste-endogamous and family-led. Regional and religious diversity always qualified the textbook joint-family model. Recent trends include later age, schooling, online matching, dual earners and more public exit options. Endogamy and parental ratification persist inside modern forms such as matrimonial apps. Inter-caste, live-in and queer unions are visible but still minority or legally incomplete. The story is hybridisation of alliance, not a clean replacement by Western companionate marriage.
Q8(a) · UPSC Mains 2021 · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Discuss the changing nature of kinship relations in the contemporary world.
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Q8(a) · UPSC Mains 2019 · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
In the light of judicial intervention on 'Live-in relationships', discuss the future of marriage and family in India
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Courts recognised some live-in unions as in the nature of marriage for protection. They did not abolish marriage or copy a Western pact. Census and NFHS still show near-universal marriage and endogamy. Future: plural legal recognition at the margin; honour marriage at the centre. Feminist protection, not lifestyle, is the sociological core of the cases. Caste control continues beside the bench.
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