Assignment

Question: What is patriarchy? How does it manifest itself in our own lives? Explain the same by
doing a mini project, decide a topic and research on it using different authentic sources
available.

Topic: The Cinderalla syndrome in movies and the exceptions

Synopsis
● What is patriarchy
○ Feminists theorists- Firestone, Alison Jagger, Gerda Lerner, Slvia Walby,Maria
Mies, Claudia von Werlhof etc.
○ Engels, Freud
● Movies and manifestation of patriarchy
○ Movies examples
○ Housewife syndrome -Simone de Beauvoir ; Feminine mystique
● Conclusion
○ Quotes from Beauvoir
○ Quotes from The Little Women
● Bibliography

What is patriarchy?

Patriarchy literally means "the rule of the father" and comes from the Greek (patriarkhēs),
"father or chief of a race", which is a compound of (patria), "lineage, descent" from (patēr),
"father"and (arkhē), "domination, authority, sovereignty".

Feminist theorists have written extensively about patriarchy either as a primary cause of
women's oppression, or as part of an interactive system.

Shulamith Firestone, a radical-libertarian feminist, defines patriarchy as a system of oppression

of women. Firestone believes that patriarchy is caused by the biological inequalities between
women and men, e.g. that women bear children, while men do not. Firestone writes that
patriarchal ideologies support the oppression of women and gives as an example the joy of
giving birth, which she labels a patriarchal myth. For Firestone, women must gain control over
reproduction in order to be free from oppression.
Alison Jaggar also understands patriarchy as the primary cause of women's oppression. The
system of patriarchy accomplishes this by alienating women from their bodies.

Gerda Lerner, in her 1986 The Creation of Patriarchy, makes a series of arguments about the
origins and reproduction of patriarchy as a system of oppression of women, and concludes that
patriarchy is socially constructed and seen as natural and invisible. Lerner believes that male
control over women's sexuality and reproductive functions is a fundamental cause and result of
patriarchy.

Marxist theory, as articulated mainly by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, assigns the origin of patriarchy to the emergence of private property,
which has traditionally been controlled by men. In this view, men directed household production
and sought to control women in order to ensure the passing of family property to their own
(male) offspring, while women were limited to household labor and producing children.

Some proponents of the biological determinist understanding of patriarchy argue that because
of human female biology, women are more fit to perform roles such as anonymous child-rearing
at home, rather than high-profile decision-making roles, such as leaders in battles. Through this
basis, "the existence of a sexual division of labor in primitive societies is a starting point as
much for purely social accounts of the origins of patriarchy as for biological."
Patriarchy is the result of sociological constructions that are passed down from generation to
generation.In modern, developed societies, however, gender messages conveyed by family,
mass media, and other institutions largely favor males having a dominant status.

Sociologist Sylvia Walby has composed six overlapping structures that define patriarchy and
that take different forms in different cultures and different times:
"The state: women are unlikely to have formal power and representation
The household: women are more likely to do the housework and raise the children
Violence: women are more prone to being abused
Paid work: women are likely to be paid less
Sexuality: women's sexuality is more likely to be treated negatively
Culture: representation of women in media, and popular culture is "within a patriarchal gaze".

Some people believe patriarchy does not refer simply of male power over women, but the
expression of power dependent on age as well as gender, such as by older men over women,
children, and younger men. Some of these younger men may inherit and therefore have a stake
in continuing these conventions. Others may rebel.So, the psychoanalytic model of Freud's
description of the normally neurotic family using the analogy of the story of Oedipus argues that
those who fall outside the Oedipal triad of mother/father/child are less subject to male
authority.The operations of power in such cases are usually enacted unconsciously. All are
subject, even fathers are bound by its strictures.It is represented in unspoken traditions and
conventions performed in everyday behaviors, customs, and habits.The triangular relationship
of a father, a mother and an inheriting eldest son frequently form the dynamic and emotional
narratives of popular culture and are enacted performatively in rituals of courtship and
marriage.They provide conceptual models for organising power relations in spheres that have
nothing to do with the family, for example, politics and business.

Arguing from this standpoint, radical feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote in her 1970 The
Dialectic of Sex:
Marx was on to something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family
contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within
the society and the state. For unless revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the
biological family – the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be
smuggled – the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.

Maria Mies, a feminist activist and scholar writes in The Social Origins of the Sexual Division of
Labour
".....maleness and femaleness are not biological givens,but rather the result of a long historical
process. In each historic epoch maleness and femaleness are differently defined; the definition
depending on the principal mode of production in those epochs... Therefore, men women
develop a qualitatively different relationship to their own bodies. Thus, in materistic
societies,femaleness was interpreted as the social paradigm of all productivity,as the main
active principle in the production of life. All women are defined as 'mothers'. ..But mothers then
have a different meaning. Under capitalist conditions all women are socially defined as
housewives (all men are breadwinners) , and motherhood has become part and parcel of this
housewife- syndrome. The distinction between the earlier, matristic definition of femaleness and
the modern one is that latter has been emptied of all active, creative, productive(i.e human)
qualities."

Claudia von Werlhof argues that" Three hundred years of witch-hunting, running parallel with
the colonisation of the world, were necessary to snatch from the women- as from Third World
people - their power, their economy and their knowledge, and to socialize them into becoming
what they are today: housewives and the 'underdeveloped' . The housewife- and with her the
underdeveloped-- is the artificial product, resulting from unimaginably violent development,upon
which our whole economy,law, state, science, art and politics, the family, private property and all
modern institutions have been built. The Third World is the 'witch' of witch- hunting days and is
the 'general-housewife', the 'world housewife' today including, Third world men, The relation
between husband and wife is repeated in the relation between the First and the Third World".
Movies and manifestation of patriarchy.

In Aamir Khan starer movie "dangal" there is

a critical scene in the film where Mahavir Phogat instructing his wife that the daughters will not
do chulha-chowka (household work) any more, but will henceforth devote time to wrestling.

Can we consider household work — cooking, cleaning, fetching water over long distances,
caring for children, the sick and the elderly — or what is called as unpaid care work performed
by women/girls as an optional service? And, which could be forsaken at will, without having an
alternative in place?

Can we have women’s liberation without questioning the fundamental division of labour that
drives patriarchy—women primarily burdened with unpaid care work, and confined to the home
and the hearth, the private sphere?

Can we break the public/private binary by women competing in a man’s world as a man, by
following the rules set by men, in a world made for men?And can we break the man-woman
binary not by making it irrelevant, but by simply bringing a few women on board to the male side
of the division of labour?

The threat is that in the guise of breaking the public/private binary, the resistance against a
male-dominated world is co-opted, by women being offered a slice of the pie. In this process,
what is problematic is not women losing ‘feminine’ traits of long hair, or the female body
participating in a ‘masculine’ sport (for these are constructed binaries), but the erasure of female
labour, and contribution to sustaining human life.

This labour is looked down upon in the world, and is not part of national accounting or Gross
Domestic Product. But ironically, it is what sustains the economy. In material terms, women’s
unpaid care work is huge. It is estimated that women perform 75% of the world’s unpaid care
work. In India, women perform 10 to 12 times the unpaid care work of men. Even in the West,
women’s share is much higher. A paper by Ferrant, Pesando and Nowacka put the unpaid care
work at 63% of the Indian GDP, and 40% of the Swedish one.

Another South Indian movie The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) written and directed by Jeo Baby.
The film tells the story of a newly wed woman (Nimisha Sajayan) who struggles to be the
submissive wife that her husband (Suraj Venjaramood) and his family expect her to be. As the
newly wedded wife is handed over the kitchen duties. She struggles to be the submissive wife
that her husband and his family expect her to be as they believe in norms surrounding
menstruation and are reluctant to let her get employment. Things take an ugly turn when the
husband decides to visit Sabarimala, which requires him to take celibacy and avoid eating food
touched by menstruating women, this results in a series of events; including her throwing filthy
water on her husband in the traditional black clothing that pilgrims wear; ending with the wife
leaving the husband's home and going back to her parents. The film ends with a scene showing
her as an independent dance teacher arriving in her own car while her husband is married again
and the second wife seems to meet the first one's fate.

Bollywood always shows the movie where the girl is always waiting for the prince Charming.
Also whether it is dilwale dulhania le jayenge or kal ho na ho, or any karan Johar's movie, the
girl always transformed effortlessly from independent girl into a submissive wife. I remember the
dialogue in ddLJ where the mother of heroine says that the girl is born three times , first her
real birth, second when she got married and third when she give birth. These
romantisation of reproduction and marriage lure women into submission.

However, this movie The Great Indian kitchen shows the real pain and drudgery and boring
nature of the work especially kitchen work after marriage. Here, as in real life Post her marriage,
a woman tries to fit into the conventional mould that society has prescribed for married women.
But somewhere along the way, she starts feeling that this is not the life she wants.

Simone de Beauvoir writes in 'SecondSex' that "to ask two spouses bound by practical, social
and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity".She
describes the work of married women, including housecleaning, writing that it is "holding away
death but also refusing life".She thinks, "what makes the lot of the wife-servant ungratifying is
the division of labor that dooms her wholly to the general and inessential". Beauvoir writes that a
woman finds her dignity only in accepting her vassalage which is bed "service" and housework
"service".A woman is weaned away from her family and finds only "disappointment" on the day
after her wedding. Beauvoir points out various inequalities between a wife and husband and
finds they pass the time not in love but in "conjugal love".She thinks that marriage "almost
always destroys woman".She quotes Sophia Tolstoy who wrote in her diary: "you are stuck
there forever and there you must sit".Beauvoir thinks marriage is a perverted institution
oppressing both men and women.

"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the
clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife
wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating,
sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead,
grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won."

This continuous, supposedly invisible physical labour is allocated on the basis of gender.
Entitlement is not inherited but bestowed upon. And though for some women it is more easily
accessible than most, we lose even when winning. Faces in the kitchen might change but the
assumption from the gender to be there remains the same. Away from family when I was not
doing my chores someone else, a woman, was doing it for me. She had replaced Ma till I
replaced her. The contrarian argument could as well be that the lockdown was democratic when
it came to such labour but the rebuttal, one that I felt in my bones is contrary to a man, a woman
enters a kitchen to never leave. I knew it was a compulsion so I treated it as a choice till I could.
It is because women cannot give up unpaid care work that their access to paid work is severely
limited, which in turn leads to a vicious cycle. Even when they find paid work, it is mostly low-
paid, precarious or temporary work. Paid work also does not liberate women for often they are
now saddled with both paid and unpaid work, leading to what is called as “double burden”.
Because “Being a mother is a full-time job”

But it is well-established that women’s employment outside the home is absolutely crucial to
women’s well-being.But for real equality, it is imperative that women’s care work be given its
due material recognition.
According to Selim Jahan, the author of the UN report. “Earnings make for economic
independence, a critical factor towards individual autonomy, voice, and agency in households
and the community,” he writes. “An unequal distribution of care responsibilities in the household
may require one parent to take time off more frequently than the other, reducing the former
parent’s current and prospective earnings and perpetuating divergences."

Another movie Saand ki Ankh shows that large numbers of women, especially in the Third
World — as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters — are unsung heroes, but who are
systematically marginalised unless they bring home a medal or moolah, to prove they are of
equal worth as men.As Simone de Beauvoir writes,"Man is defined as a human being and
woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

Female selflessness is promoted in bollywood movies. From Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam to Hum
Apke Hain kon, it is shown that women become ideal wife's after marriage. All pativrata, doing
karvachowth etc.
However recently some movies came which are becoming more gender conscious. Women are
happily doing "all work for no pay."
As Beauvoir said "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

However some movies like R. Balki's Ki & Ka is showing wrongly by contradicting the gender
roles placed upon women and men in Indian society. Revolving around a house-husband and a
working wife, it surely is set to change how we look at the stereotypical roles put upon both the
sexes. The movie actually in the end shows that husband is anyway more rational than the wife
and wife need to learn a lesson.. Husband is always more intelligent.

Most Bollywood movies are about "promiscuous hotties”, the “simple-ones-who-got-a-

makeover”, the “damsels in distress”, and the “mothers with a god complex” to name a few.
However some movies shows women differently. Sexual desires and urges are often
stereotyped. Women were expected to want sex only from one man all their lives but they never
were allowed to express it. Her “character” was judged by how dedicated she was to her
husband. Women with sexual desires were tagged as “loose”. However, films like Shuddh Desi
Romance, Lipstick Under My Burkha, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, Margarita With a
Straw, and the recently released Badla explore, openly discuss and normalize the various
aspects of women’s sexuality like homosexuality, extra-marital relationships, casual pre-marital
sex, etc. that exist in the real world.
Also some movies where the leading girls in films like Fashion, English Vinglish, Mary Kom and
even Manikarnika, were determined to achieve a goal and worked hard for it. Special mention to
Yes Boss, where Juhi Chawla’s character Seema broke out of the cookie cutter mold that was
rampant in the 90s.

The 80s and 90s were full of women waiting to be rescued by men from their predicaments,
except maybe a rare Tejasvini .And then came characters like Shivani Roy in Mardaani who
went up against the system and her being a woman never posed a problem. Queen’s Rani was
a conventional woman but she rises to the occasion when it’s time to take care of herself. She
does it alone and she does it well. Tabu’s Simi in Andhadhun was impressively self-sufficient
and equal part evil.

Going by the age-old “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”, we have seen very few films
where the women took “badla”. Avenging the looted izzat and other categorical atrocities were a
project for the “hero”. Films like Ladies Vs. Ricky Bahl, Ishqiya, and Kahaani portrayed strong
women who know their way around laws and guns. Be is Sridevi’s Mom or Anushka Sharma’s
NH10, these leading women have no qualms channelizing their inner Liam Neeson – tracking
down and finishing off the perps who harmed their family. It’s refreshing to see the leading
ladies raise hell when they’re wronged instead of waiting for someone to make things right.

The Nirupas and the Reemas of Bollywood did great as mothers who existed simply to love their
son, the hero, occasionally performing a miracle prayer to save his life. Tabu’s Ghazala in
Haider presented to us a mother who not only wasn’t perfect, but also her relationship with her
son Haider was complex and real. It had a slight sexual undertone…just enough to make you
Google “Oedipus Complex”. Films like Nil Battey Sannata, Kapoor & Sons, and Vicky Donor
showed mothers as who they are – human beings. Neena Gupta’s Priyamvada who gets
pregnant at an older age in Badhaai Ho was endearing. We like that Bollywood is taking the
pressure off of on-screen mothers to be divine and is humanizing them instead.

All this reminds me of the book Feminine mystique.The phrase "feminine mystique" was created
by Friedan to show the assumptions that women would be fulfilled from their housework,
marriage, sexual lives, and children. It was said that women, who were actually feminine, should
not have wanted to work, get an education, or have political opinions. Friedan wanted to prove
that women were unsatisfied but could not voice their feelings.

The 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique unofficially began a re-
evaluation of gender roles in the United States.The book also carefully lays out what society has
determined to be the ideal gender role requirements for women:
“They could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them
how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training…
how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting…They learned that
truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights…All they had to do
was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (Friedan
15-16)
And, more specifically:
The suburban housewife…she was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her
husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment.” (Friedan 18)
Friedan called it "the problem that has no name"

Friedan, who had a degree in psychology, criticizes the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund
Freud (whose ideas were very influential in the United States at the time of the book's
publication). She notes that Freud saw women as childlike and as destined to be housewives,
once pointing out that Freud wrote, "I believe that all reforming action in law and education
would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a
position in society, Nature has determined woman's destiny through beauty, charm, and
sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but
the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a
loved wife." Friedan also points out that Freud's unproven concept of "penis envy" had been
used to label women who wanted careers as neurotic, and that the popularity of Freud's work
and ideas elevated the "feminine mystique" of female fulfillment in housewifery into a "scientific
religion" that most women were not educated enough to criticize.
Friedan shows that advertisers tried to encourage housewives to think of themselves as
professionals who needed many specialized products in order to do their jobs, while
discouraging housewives from having actual careers, since that would mean they would not
spend as much time and effort on housework and therefore would not buy as many household
products, cutting into advertisers' profits.

In Chapter 11: Friedan notes that many housewives have sought fulfillment in sex, unable to
find it in housework and children; Friedan notes that sex cannot fulfill all of a person's needs,
and that attempts to make it do so often drive married women to have affairs or drive their
husbands away as they become obsessed with sex.
When the mother lacks a self, Friedan notes, she often tries to live through her children, causing
the children to lose their own sense of themselves as separate human beings with their own
lives.

Also in Chapter 13: Friedan discusses the psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs
and notes that women have been trapped at the basic, physiological level, expected to find their
identity through their sexual role alone. Friedan says that women need meaningful work just
as men do to achieve self-actualization, the highest level on the hierarchy of needs.

This reminds me of two movies The little women, and the Monalisa's smile. Both shows that
women's need of self actualization and financial independence and self reliance.
These movies challenge the beauty and the beast, pride and prejudice, and Cinderella concept
of women.
Women can avoid becoming trapped in the feminine mystique, calling for a drastic rethinking of
what it means to be feminine.
Conclusion

I would like to conclude by quoting Simone de Beauvoir , "To emancipate woman is to refuse to
confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her
independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually
recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of
their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure –
worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move
us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish
the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then
the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its
true form."
"On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not
to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love
will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love
represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the
feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself."

Also two dialogues from the movie The Little Women which sums up the whole discussion.
● "I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not
enough to earn a living or to support my family, and if I had my own money, which I
don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we
had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property, so don’t sit there
and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for
you, but it most certainly is for me". – says Beth with curled lips and eyes that reflect
pain when Laurie asks her why is she marrying someone who she doesn’t love. One of
the most powerful scenes, indeed.
● "If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money, I might as well get some of it". –
Jo to the publisher, Mr. Dashwood when he asks her to marry off the protagonist of her
story.
Bibliography
● Basin Kamla; Understanding Gender (2003); Delhi: Women Unlimited- an associate of
Kali for women.
● Lerner, Gerda; Creation of Patriarchy (1986); OUP USA ( reprint edition-pdf)
● Friedan, Betty; The Feminine mystique(2001) ; Newyork ; W.W. Norton & Company (pdf)
● Menon N.(2012) Seeing Like A Feminist. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
● https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/420372/

● https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/26/
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● https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Indian_Kitchen

● https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/stereotypes-in-movies/

● https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy#:~:text=Patriarchy%20is%20a%20social
%20system,inherited%20by%20the%20male%20lineage.

● https://www.indiatimes.com/entertainment/bollywood/14-times-bollywood-endorsed-
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women/amp/

● https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.shethepeople.tv/home-top-video/15-dialogues-
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● https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Women-and-
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● https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir

● https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex

● https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/09/simone-de-
beauvoir-google-doodle-quotes

● https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique

● https://www.google.com/amp/s/indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/how-
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