Page 203 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes and complex have changed over the periods of history. The nature of control and subjugation
of women varies from one society to the other as it differs due to the differences in class,
caste, religion, region, ethnicity and the socio-cultural practices.
• Patriarchal societies propagate the ideology of motherhood which restrict women’s mobility
and burdens them with the responsibilities to nurture and rear children. The biological
factor to bear children is linked to the social position of women’s responsibilities of
motherhood : nurturing, educating and raising children by devoting themselves to family.
“Patriarchal ideas blur the distinction between sex and gender and assume that all socio-
economic and political distinctions between men and women are rooted in biology or
anatomy”
• “Feminism is an awareness of patriarchal control, exploitation and oppression at the material
and ideological levels of women’s labour, fertility and sexuality, in the family, at the place of
work and in society in general, and conscious action by women and men to transform the
present situation”
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1972) was the first text of modern
feminism which campaigned for women’s right to vote/ female suffrage. Wollstonecraft
claimed that if women gained access to education as rational creatures in their own right the
distinction of sex would become unimportant in political and social life.
• Marxist feminist believed that both subordination of women and division of classes developed
historically with the development of private property.
• Thus maternal authority gave place to paternal authority and property was to be inherited
from father to son and not from woman to her clan. The bourgeois families which owned
private property emerged as patriarchal families where women were subjugated. Such
patriarchal families became oppressive as men ensured that their property passed on only to
their sons. Therefore bourgeois family and private property as a byproduct of capitalism
subordinated and oppressed women.
• Most socialist feminists agree that the confinement of women to the domestic sphere of
housework and motherhood serves the economic interests of capitalism. Women relieve men
of the burden of housework and child rearing, and allow them to concentrate on productive
employment. Thus unpaid domestic labour contributes to the health and efficiency of capitalist
economy and also accounts for the low social status and economic dependence of women on
men. But, unlike the Marxist feminists, socialist feminists look at both relations of production
as well as relations of reproduction to understand patriarchy.
• However, patriarchy and capitalism are concretely intertwined and mutually supportive
system of oppressions. Women’s subordination within capitalism results from their economic
exploitation as wage labourers and their patriarchal oppression as mothers, consumers and
domestic labourers.
• The state is a site of patriarchal relations which is necessary to patriarchy as a whole as it
upholds the oppession of women by supporting a form of household in which women
provide unpaid domestic services to male. Thus capitalism benefits from a particular form of
family which ensures cheap reproduction of labour power and the availability of women as
a reserve army. Patriarchy is also located in the social relations of reproduction and masculinity
and femininity are not biological givens but products of long historical process. Thus, socialist
feminists combine both marxist and radical approach and neither is sufficient by itself.
Patriarchy is connected to both relations of production and relations of reproduction.
• Unlike the liberal and socialist traditions, radical feminists developed a systematic theory of
sexual oppression as the root.
• Eco-feminists accept women’s attitudes and values as different from men. They believe that
in certain respects women are superior to men and possess the qualities of creativity, sensitivity

198 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY