Subject Coordinator

Sujata Patel

Paper Coordinator

Anurekha Chari Wagh

Content Writer

Rimple Mehta

Assistant Professor,
School of Womens Studies
Jadavpur University

Content Reviewer

Anurekha Chari Wagh

Assistant Professor,
Dept. Of Sociology
Savitribai
Phule
University
Assistant Professor,
Dept. Of Sociology
Savitribai
Phule
University

Language Editor

Anurekha Chari Wagh

Professor
Dept. Of Sociology,
University of Hyderabad
Assistant Professor,
Dept. Of Sociology
Savitribai
Phule
Pune
University

Pune

Pune

Technical Conversion
Module Structure

Family, Marriage and Household

Introduction:Definitions of family, household

marriage, Normative idea of family. The module
is structured into three sections followed by a
conclusion.
Section1:Personal is Political: Feminists Critique
the Public-Private Divide
Section 2:Production and Reproduction
Section 3:Violence: Family to the State
Conclusion

Description of the Module

Items
Subject Name
Paper Name

Description of the Module

Module Name/Title

Family, Marriage and Household

Module Id
Pre Requisites

1. The idea of an ideal family is a

heteronormative one
2. The idea of the family is based on a sexual
division of labour

Objectives

3. Transgressions from the normative

expectations of a family and its members
leads to violence
The module will introduce students to the:
a)The ideal/idea of the family
b)Feminist critique of the family

Key words

Heteronormativity, Family, Domestic work,

Domestic violence, Public-Private, Marriage,
Household

Family, Marriage and Household

Introduction
Family, marriage and household have been theorised and discussed to a great extent by the
discipline of sociology. One has seen these discussions through interactionist, evolutionist,
diffusionist, functionalist and structuralist as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. Structuralists
approach the family as a pattern of inter-related statuses and roles at a particular time and as an
organised pattern of inter-related rights and obligation of its members. The interactionists are
concerned with the interaction between individual family members (Ahuja 1993). The
functionalistperspective has been an important locus of critique for the feminists. Functionalists
maintain that any social institution needs to be understood in the context of the benefit it
provides to both the individuals and the society in which they live. Hence, according to them
family serves an instrumental purpose for its members as well as the society at large. They aspire

for a fit between the family and the society. Functionalists also propound that with the change in
societys structure, the structure of the family changes. Talcott Parsons argues, in the context of
the Western society, that a nuclear family system is best adapted to fit the needs of an industrial
society. For him families must be characterised by values such as ascription (an emphasis upon
who people are) and particularism (priority for special relationships). He further points out that
one of the ways in which disruption may be avoided is by segregating the nuclear family from
the public sphere; thereby steer clear of a situation where a person has to choose between loyalty
to kin and the impersonal standards demanded by their occupational roles. By creating this
divide between the public and the private, Parsons, being essentially a modernist, described the
function of the male member of the family as instrumental and that of the female member of
the family as expressive (Bilton, Bonnett, Jones et al 1996: 486-488).For sociologists and
primarily the functionalists, social institutions are essential components of a social life, family
being an important one.
The idea of marriage inevitably gets connected with the idea of a family, as a way to establish
new kin connections and forming a household in which children are brought up (Giddens 1989:
381). However, what counts as a family, who can marry who, its connections with other kins, the
connection between marriage and sexuality differs in different societies. According to Giddens
(1989: 384), a family is a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, the adult
members of which assume responsibility for caring for children, kinship ties are connections
between individuals, established either through marriage, or through the lines of descent that
connect blood relatives, marriage can be defined as a socially acknowledged and approved
sexual union between two adult individuals. The definitions of kinship, family and marriage are
intricately linked to each other and vary considerably across socio-cultural and historical
contexts. In India, it may be difficult to draw a clear-cut distinction between nuclear family and
joint family. Though a couple and their child might be staying separately from their parents, the
overall functioning of the household is often influenced by an extended family residing
elsewhere. Family is defined by kin connections and kin connections may be defined by
marriage or by through lines of descent. Therefore, marriage becomes an inextricable part of the
definition of family. Worsley (1977: 179) points out that after marriage, the emphasis is on the
conjugal bond, to such an extent that marriage has become an index of normality or settling
down.

Further, marriage is defined by patrilocality, patrilineality, heterosexuality, monogamy and

exogamy. In the Indian context, marriage outside ones caste, religion and class is considered
blasphemous and leads to drastic punishments or ostracisation by society. Moreover, marriages
by choice and not those arranged by the parents are still discouraged and such relationships are
seen with great suspicion. In order to maintain the fit between family and society, it is
important for the institution to lay the norms of behaviour for the heterosexual couples engaged
in a marital relationship. Spatially their relationship is defined by patrilocality, where the couple
goes to live either near the parents of the groom or in the same house. Patrilineality implies that
the lineage of a child born to the couple is derived from the fathers family. In order to maintain
the purity of this lineage the sexual conduct of the married couple is of utmost importance.
Therefore, the norms of monogamy (maintaining sexual relations only with the spouse),
exogamy (marrying outside ones clan) and maintenance of ones class, caste and religious
background attains a non-negotiable status as far as the institution of family is concerned. Based
on these ideals, the family assumes a heteronormative form. Heteronormativity refers to the
overwhelming power of the assumption that heterosexuality is natural and normal, and is the
norm to be emulated (Menon 2012: 95).In the Indian context, religion, caste, class play an
important role in constituting family members and specific normative forms of behaviour. Andre
Beteille (1993) elucidates how family as an institution contributes to the reproduction of existing
inequalities in similar forms. He identifies caste and class as important resources, which
contribute to the reproduction of inequalities in a family and subsequently in the society.
Among the many shifts the family and kinship studies saw in India since the 1950s, an important
one in reference to the household dimension of family has been the shift in interest from the
morphology of the family to the political economy of the household and how it functions as a
unit of production, reproduction and consumption in the wider society (Uberoi 1993: 6).Instead
of following the conventional definition of the family, A.M Shah (1998) adopted a wider
definition of the household to describe different types of families. He classified the household
into two groups (a) simple (b) complex. Shah defined simple households as those consisting
of whole or part of the parental family and complex households as consisting of two or more
parental or part of the parental families. Feminists pointed out that it were not only important to
look at the forms of families and what they represent, but also to investigate how families
function in reality, hence the shift of focus from family to household was an important one.

According to V. Geetha (2007:63) the household is a definite spatial location, within which
identifiable concrete transactions take place between different members who inhabit this
location, across sex and age divisions. This shift from the ideological concept of the family to
the concrete functioning of the household enabled feminists to draw attention to not only the
form of the family but the different ways in which women within the household are exploited
and marginalised. Karlekar (1998: 1742) defines the household as the operational unit which
functions broadly within the parameters of a family and kinship ideology; this would include
rules of marriage, residence, property ownership, roles and functions determined according to
age and gender. It may be surmised that the household is an operational unit while the family is
an overarching conceptual unit. The trajectory of feminist thought on marriage, family and the
household will be discussed in the following section.

Personal is Political: Feminists Critique the Public-Private Divide

The concepts and institutions of family, marriage and household have been discussed and
critiqued by feminists at length. The first wave liberal feminist (19th early 20th C) critique of
the family did not question the sanctity of the family as a unit but identified the problematic
position of women in them. For them, a simple repair and reform strategy would alleviate
women from their subordination. Marxist feminists draw their critique of the family from
Engels (1884) book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, where he argues
that with the emergence of private property, production became more valued than the household;
household labour was devalued and this has led to the transformation of women into property of
men leading to the devaluation of female tasks, roles and responsibilities. Further, they point out
that women are encouraged to be wives and mothers and such ideological coercion produces
enormous benefits for capitalism. Radical feminists identify the sex/gender system as the root
cause of oppression faced by women in the family and suggest that the patriarchal institutions
need to be dismantled for radical alternatives. They attack the gender prescriptions inherent in
naturalistic family discourse where the family is projected to be an eternal non-changing entity.
The romantic picture of the family created by the functionalists was questioned by the feminists,
in a consolidated manner, in the West, from 1960s onwards and feminists in the Indian context
from late 1970s. Betty Freidans book, A Feminine Mystique (1963), opened up discussions on

the private sphere. While elucidating the Problem with No Name, Freidan brought to the
forefront the vagaries of the middle-class American housewives after the World War II. The
directionlessness, restlessness and the resultant lack of motivation to find meaning in ones life
was lucidly discussed in her book. What it did for the American society was to lay bare the
marginalisation and silencing of womens experiences within the four walls of the house. By
rejecting the myth that the only way women could find fulfilment was through child rearing and
homemaking, Freidan opened up the romantic idea of the private sphere for being challenged.
Kate Millet, in her book Sexual Politics (1970), further prodded the private-public debate by
questioning the very act of coitus. According to her,
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a
biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human
affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to
which culture subscribes. (p. 31)
Millet defined the Problem with No Name as rooted in sexual politics. Her work marked the
beginning of looking at the relationship between the sexes in a political light, as a powerstructured relationship where one group of persons is controlled by another. This apart, the
debates amongst the second wave feminists, from the 1960s to mid-1980s, around abortion,
sexuality, prostitution and pornography brought the previously silenced and tabooed issues
within the public realm of discussion. Carol Hanischs paper titled Personal is Political, in
Notes from the Second Year: Womens Liberation (1970) was widely circulated and shared
amongst the feminists. It brought forth the realisation that the problems faced by women are not
personal problems but they are political problems. They are not caused by the inability or
inefficiency of a woman to perform the roles expected of her but have a larger socio-cultural and
political context.
While discussion in the West emerged around the activism and theoretical works of the second
wave feminists; from the 1970s, the womens movement in India also began to question the
sanctity of the family, state and other patriarchal and ideological institutions. However, one
cannot overlook the fact that home, family and marriage relations were critical institutional sites
for the social reformers and early feminists in later 19th and early 20th century; though the
critique was largely around the critique of tradition (John 2005). But in the latter part of the

20th century, the focus had shifted from the individual body of the victim and tradition to the
patriarchal institutions which govern her experience. While there was a public outrage on rape,
beginning from Mathuras case, issues of dowry-related deaths, female foeticide, sati, werebeing
discussed in the public domain (see Kumar 1993). A series of legislations were passed in the
1980s and it emerged to be the golden age of women-friendly laws (Agnes 1992). While the
late 1970s focussed on dowry as a form of subordination of women in the family, the 1980s
began to focus on relationships of women to and within the family by an examination of
womens rights in marriage, divorce, property, maintenance etc, which are governed by personal
laws in India (see Kumar 1993, Parashar 1992, Mukhopadhyay 1998: 6-21). The debate on
personal laws was triggered in 1985 by The Shah Bano case, when a five member
Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court ruled that 75-year-old Shah Bano was entitled to
maintenance by her husband under section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. This case, which
ultimately spiralled into a communal issue between the Hindus and the Muslims, was a crucial
moment for the womens movement in India because it was faced for the first time with the
questions of a fractured identity of Indian women; and also brought forth the conflict between
the citizenship rights of womenand community interests and the role of the state in this
tussle(Kumar 1993: 160-171). These laws, though ineffective due to their poor implementation at
the executive and judiciary level failed to change the status quo of women. The womens
movement welcomed these laws as the step towards empowerment of women but only
discovered much later that the motive of the state was only superficial and without any genuine
concern for the rights of women (Agnes 1998). The lack of state willingness to bring about a
change in the concrete everyday realities of women and the ineffectiveness of constitutional
guarantees and legislations was highlighted by the 1974 Report of the Committee on the Status
of Women in India (CSWI) commissioned by the government of India. The report challenged the
existing discourse on issues of gender and economic well-being, political participation, law,
health and family welfare. It also ushered in a discussion on law as an instrument of social
change, marriage, divorce, adoption and guardianship, maintenance, inheritance, matrimonial
property and family courts.
The campaigns of the 1970s and 80s failed to ask difficult questions around womens chastity,
virginity, economic rights within the family but did manage to bring the family and household
and the status of women within it, into public discussion. Since the 1990s, discussions of

sexuality and desire remain central to feminist critique of family and marriage. According to
Nivedita Menon (2012: 4), The institution that manages this policing of sexuality is the
patriarchal heterosexual family. The family as it exists is the core that sustains the social order.
This normative form of the family which discards different forms of its expression have proved
to be detrimental to men, women and marginalised identities and their everyday lived
experiences. Rinchin (2005:718) points out that families are also a context of violence,
oppression and restriction, she further argues out that the overemphasis on the family of a
certain sort does not allow the exploration of any other relationship and in the process varied
forms of desires and existences are either suppressed or denied. Moving away from the second
wave feminists slogan of personal is political Rinchin (2005:720) argues that The personal is
personal, lived experiences are what start the politics of thought and resistance. Then it becomes
the job of politics to protect all kinds of personal plurality, to ensure its survival and to nurture it
with rightful security and dignity. An acceptance of plurality of family forms continues to
coexsit simulatneously with the feminist argument to think of relationships beyond the institution
of family.

Production and Reproduction

Feminists pointed out that the economic power of men and their control of production was linked
with the organisation of the family and the household. The roles assigned to men and women are
not complementary in a society where men and women constitute unequal genders. As pointed
out earlier, Marxist feminists attributed the unequal position of women in society to the capitalist
mode of production and private property; but radical feminists oppose this position and contend
that unequal gender relations persist independent of the existing mode of production. Socialist
feminists such as Hartmann (1979) point out how capitalism and patriarchy work together to
contribute to the exploitation of women.Socialist feminists have explained the material
foundations of patriarchy in terms of mens control over womens labour power.
Women are perceived to be responsible for housework and men for the reproduction of
housework. The sexual division of labour maintains the hierarchy between the work done by
men and women, rendering work done by women within the confines of the home as less
valuable than the work done by men in the public domain. Cooking, cleaning, child rearing,

taking care of the elderly and the sick are all labour intensive and time consuming activities,
moreover, it provides men with a conducive home environment to rejuvenate themselves and be
healthy and well-rested to work day after day. But this form of labour goes unacknowledged and
is not even considered worthy of any remuneration. If women of a family do not perform the
domestic labour then it is done by low-paid female domestic workers, whose number, according
to the National Sample Survey (68th round) of 2011-12, is as large as 2,38,92,791. Sexual
division of labour is projected by mainstream society as a natural division of labour. However,
feminists point out that there is nothing natural about the sexual division of labour and that it is
socially constructed and based on certain ideological assumptions. This sexual division of labour
gets extended to the labour market as well when women go out to work in the public sphere. In
this context Bina Agarwal (1997) points out that household factors interact with non-household
factors to determine each partys bargaining power. Jobs such as nursing teaching, domestic
work are seen to be essentially female professions are under paid and under-valued. Womens
roles at the workplace are also seen in terms of an extension of their feminine roles of nurturing
and caring. Unpaid housework and motherhood are perceived to be the legitimate space of
womanhood.
Until Ester Boserups path breaking study of womens contribution to economy (1970),
economists globally believed womens participation in economic activity was shaped by cultural
attitudes and not by economic necessities. This belief continued to linger on for decades and, to
some extent, still does in certain quarters, thus deflecting attention from an important factor
underlying unequal development of women and men practically in all human societies,
especially in the third world (Dutta 2007). Therefore, womens contribution in significant
processes of human reproduction biological reproduction, reproduction of the labour force,
and social reproduction (Eldholm, Harris and Young 1977 as cited in Banerjee 2012: 73) are not
only devalued but also invisibilised. Menon (2012: 14) points out that the sexual division of
labour is the source of sustenance for not only the family but also the economy, because the
burden of paid domestic labour would bear heavy on the husband or the employer. The employer
does not pay for the domestic labour that enables the employee to come to the workplace in time.
If all the employers or the husbands had to account for work done by women at home then the
economy would fall apart. Feminists, therefore, bring forth the connection between the unpaid
work done at home and the way in which it sustains the national economy. The task for feminists

has been first, the identification of household work as work, second, valuing that work and third,
questioning womens disadvantage in terms of pay.
Women and work have a complex relationship in the South Asian context. Womens
participation in the workforce is often viewed with suspicion, as it requires them to enter the
public space. The engagement of women in the public space often leads them to being labelled as
sexually permissive and immoral. In most of South Asia, the aesthetic of family claims on
daughters, sisters and wives is articulated in a moral rather than material idiom. Work, that is
public paid labour, may be perceived to be a violation of cultural expectations rather than a
reinforcement of womens identities. Status considerations are violated every time a woman is
forced to seek work to support herself and/or her family, for it renders visible her male head of
households inability to provide her with appropriate maintenance (Siddiqi 2000: L-16).
Womens participation in work in the public sphere thus raises a number of issues. While at one
level her character is questioned, at another level the ability of her husband to provide for her is
put under the scanner. Her participation in work outside the confines of the home is perceived to
threaten her family and husbands honour, both in terms of sexual morality as well as the sexual
division of labour. However, this may be negotiated differently in the lower class family where
the women are compelled to go out to work. Another issue to consider while discussing issues of
honour is the ways in which woman connect with her body in the work space. If and how do her
employees make provisions for her bodily needs and discomforts? Do the women have to shy
away from their menstruating body in certain work places, for instance when they work as
domestic helps? There are about 4 million domestic workers in urban India. How many of them
can actually speak up for the right to use a toilet during long hours of work and travel? There are
various ways in which the womans body get connected with cultural beliefs of stigma and
shame, purity and pollution. How do they deal with issues of stigma and shame that is associated
with some forms of work? Womens experiences at the workplace are shaped by all these
considerations, and the situation gets even more grave when caste, class and religious identities
interplay with gender and work to their disadvantage.
Following from these perceptions, women often face multiple forms of violence both at home as
well as at the workplace where a claim for rights may be perceived as a transgression from
femininity. Violence at the workplace is not simply a consequence of failure to perform duties

but it gets intricately linked with her female identity, a resentment of her grit and determination
to strive and struggle against all odds. This apart, the competition that women bring to the labour
market upsets the hierarchy and monopoly of male breadwinners perpetuated through the sexual
division of labour.While issues of wages, working hours, social security are of great importance
as far as discussions on women and work is concerned. What often gets overlooked is issues of
intimacy, pleasure and leisure at the disposal of these women. How does the mental health of
women get affected when a majority of them are expected to do a double shift, with no time left
for themselves? Moreover, there is an abundant amount of emotional labour that a woman puts in
both at the workplace as well as at her home. Women are expected to be peacemakers, pacifiers,
conflict solvers apart from the other normative and professional roles that they are expected to
perform at the home and their place of work. All of this labour goes unacknowledged under the
garb of labour of love.

Violence: Family to the State

The form of family which is based on normative notions of heterosexuality, monogamy,
patrilineality and patrilocality is inherently violent. Though mainstream sociologists have
ignored the social pathology concerning the family, Uberoi (1993) points out that family is also
a site of exploitation and violence. Marriage, which is perceived to be the foundation stone of a
family, requires the woman to reshape and remake the self to fit into the family of her
husband. In fact, a large part of womens lives are spent in preparing for this singular event of
marriage from making career or job related choices to making choices about appropriate
behaviour and clothing to be a suitable girl (Menon 2012:43). An institution, the edifice of which
is built on such violent grounds perpetrates violence on women in various forms. In the natal
family, violence may take the form of infanticide, foeticide, child sexual abuse, discrimination in
terms of allocation of resources and in the marital family, violence may take the form of dowryrelated violence, marital rape, domestic violence. Transgressions from the normative code of
behaviour expected of women within the family leads to violence of various forms. Violence
may take place in the natal family and/or in the marital family. Malavika Karlekar (1998:1742),
points out that violence is used to discipline and control womens bodies and desires. The
meaning and definition of domestic violence has changed within the womens movement from
the 1980s when it was used to refer to the murder of women who were burnt because their family

failed to meet the demands of dowry, to the Protection of Women from Domestic ViolenceAct
(PWDVA), 2005, which includes sexual, emotional, economic as well as verbal forms of
violence apart from physical forms of violence. The issue was first raised as kitchen deaths,
death due to accident by investigating officers. They were later referred to as dowry deaths
when dowry was identified as a cause of their death. Feminists first protested against police
inaction and then highlighted the fact that these were not deaths but murders. The 1961
Dowry Prohibition was fraught with problems and had a limited understanding of dowry and
consequently the violence faced by women. The campaigns by the womens movements, around
recognizing deaths of women in families not merely as deaths but as murders brought about a
change in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1983 through Section 498A (Cruelty to wives) which
recognized for the first time the violence faced by women within their marital homes. Prior to
this there was no law which specifically addressed the violence faced by women within the
home; husbands were convicted under the provisions for murder (Section 302), wrongful
confinement, and abetment to suicide (Section 306). In 1986 another amendment was made to
the IPC through Section 304B which focused specifically on Dowry Death. Feminists
emphasized on the need for a separate law because, first, it was difficult to get witnesses as the
violence took place within the confines of the home, second, routine and consistent beating may
cause more harm than the grievous hurt defined by the general provisions, but might not be as
evident (Agnes 1998: 107). But ever since these campaigns and laws the rate of conviction in
such cases has been extremely low and so is the rate of completion of these trials. The police,
who often reflect the mainstream mindset, refused to register cases filed by women and force
them to return to their marital family.The other fallout of the emphasis on the dowry-related
murders was that other forms of violence, intersected by religion, caste, class, community, in the
family were camouflaged and registered or referred to as dowry-related violence.
The Domestic Violence Act was enacted in September 2005, it acknowledged that domestic
violence is a widely prevalentand universal problem of power relationships, the act made
adeparture from the penal provisions, which hinged on stringentpunishments, to positive civil
reliefs of protection and injunction (Agnes and DMello 2015: 78). The Act not only expanded
the definition of what constituted domestic violence but also widened its scope beyond the
limited notion of wives as addressed under Section 498A of the IPC. The Act reduced the role
of the police to minimal to provide information about the Act to the women, direct them to the

Protection Officer (PO) and help with the enforcement of orders. Womens dependency on
lawyers reduced as the social workers and designated NGOs help women to access the courts
and obtain orders using simple formats. But this Act is also weighed down with challenges and
shortcomings. The lack of sensitive judges, lack of a convergent model and clear direction to
stakeholders about their roles and responsibilities, judicial pronouncements which limit the scope
of the Act have been major hurdles in its effective implementation (Agnes and DMello
2015).Moreover, despite several legislations and awareness campaigns, women often dont
discuss the violence they face in the marital family with their natal family. They feel a sense of
embarrassment and shame; as they feel that they would be held responsible for bringing
dishonour to their family. For fear of losing their honour in society, often family members who
are aware of the violence inflicted on their daughter, refrain from taking any action. This further
leaves the issue unaddressed and the women in isolation to bear the pain.
The womens movement struggle against domestic violence has often also led to an alignment
with movements on other connected issues. For instance, the anti-arrack movement saw women
mobilize against government policy on liquor as a response to domestic violence (see
Pande2002). Feminists have pointed out that there is a relationship between the violence faced
by women in the family and the interests of the state (see Sunder Rajan 2003). Agnes (1998: 84)
elucidates, A powerful state conversely means weaker citizens, which includes women. And the
weaker the women, the more vulnerable they will be to male violence. The feminist struggle
with the state is a simultaneous one along with the feminist struggle with family and marriage, as
they have successfully managed to draw a continuum of violence from the family to the state.

Conclusion
It is clear from the above discussions that feminists are critical of the institution of family. Some
ask for its abolition while others claim for equality within the family. Feminists have spent a lot
of their energies in trying to understand the nuances of the structure of families and how they are
constituted by marital relationships.The institution of family is a complex one, with intense
emotions, intimate relationships of labour and desire, shared physical household space where
individual identities that are suppressed under the larger notion of family keep trying to bob their
head above the everyday wave of expectations. There is an urgent need to imagine families

outside the heteronormative framework, where heterosexual families become an option amongst
many other forms. Biswas (2011) professes the need to re-cognise intimacy itself and move away
from the heterosexist imagination of romance and coupledom which not only limits the
possibilities of same-sex relationships but also possibilities of eros and desire within
heterosexual relationships. According to her,
Re-cognizing intimacy could take us from an eros of containment, appropriation and
possession to an eros of touch, caress and sharing, and openness without closure; from
kinship ties of blood, lineage, and marriage to living practices premised on
connectedness, relationality, and collective caring (p. 432).
The need of the hour is for women to organise themselves, to meet, to talk, to discuss and
identify ways in which not only can they create a dent in the instruments of patriarchy but also to
find alternatives; to find moments of leisure and pleasure even while continuing their everyday
struggles.

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