Assignment Code: MWG-009/AST/TMA-2022

Course Code: MWG-009

Assignment Name: Women and Social Structure

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Q.1. Write a critical essay on women and development. Discuss in the light of feminist contributions.

Ans) Women and Development Approach supporters thought that the problem wasn't that women weren't included in development, as WID supporters thought, but that they weren't included in the same way as men. This was because global capitalism used women's cheaper labour to make money. That is, unlike the WID approach, the WAD approach thought that society was not in balance but in conflict. Capitalists use different rewards based on class to keep the working class split up and fighting with each other. This view says that the structure of capitalist patriarchy, not just gender role stereotypes, was the main reason why women had a lower status than men.

Most of the people who supported the Women and Development approach came from developing countries in the South. Women from developed countries were slowly realising that "Third World" women's worries that capitalists in developed countries were making money off of the work that women did for free were also valid. Women from the "Third World" were treated less condescendingly than they used to be. On the local, national, and international levels, people tried to connect family issues with politics. At the 1985 Nairobi Third World Conference on Women, women from both the first world and the third world came together to try to work together. At this meeting, it was brought up how important it is to question the laissez-faire approach and patriarchy as a system.

Between 1950 and 1980, when India had five-year plans, the government thought of women as passive people who got help from welfare programmes. Starting with the Sixth Plan, policies were made based on what was happening on the international level. The government saw women as active agents of change and created programmes based on the empowerment approach, the efficiency approach, the equity approach, the anti-poverty approach, and the welfare approach. In the Eleventh Plan, policies for socioeconomic development were clear about how they were based on a rights-based approach and how they protected women and people who were left out of society. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program is one of these programmes. It started in 2006 in 200 districts and then spread to the rest of the country. The programme has many important parts for women, such as a one-third quota for women, multi-layered monitoring and accountability procedures, job offers based on the household, crèche facilities, and a one-year minimum job guarantee . Overall, the programme was made with a rights-based approach to make changes in the lives and ways of making a living for women and people who are left out.

In terms of wages, the programme is based on the Equal Remuneration Act, which says that everyone should be paid the same. The worker's pay must be put in his or her bank or post office account. When the accounts are opened, the Gram Panchayat needs to explain the difference between a single account and a joint account. If a man is the head of the family, the women may be encouraged to open their own accounts. The Program also counts as households families with only one member. Along with making sure that one-third of the workers are women, there should also be women on monitoring committees and committees at the local level for social audit.

In Kerala and Rajasthan, there are a lot of women taking part in the programme, which has been found to have different effects on men and women. This success is because of how the programme was run, how well people knew about it, how well local organisations worked together, and how well off the villagers were. The Kerala government linked its Kudambashree with MGNREGA. The Kudambashree programme began in 1998. It brought together women from several households living below the poverty line to form groups in their neighbourhoods. These groups of women ran small businesses to help their families make more money. Women workers were encouraged to join self-help groups, work sites were run by women, and workers could choose their own hours. Women's past experience managing projects and working together helped their case even more.

Ashok Pankaj and Rukmini Tankha did a study in 2010 that showed that the women who worked in this programme were better off because of it. Women have been able to get paid jobs through MGNREGA, which has helped them become change agents. They had more choices about what to buy and were less dependent on the economy when they could make money on their own. They could see how much they helped the family make money, which gave them more power to bargain within the family. Aside from making decisions in their own homes, women are now much more involved in their communities. After the programme was put into place, a number of women took part in gramme sabha and ward sabha meetings and talked to gramme panchayat and government officials. The study also said that under this programme, women's issues were brought up, such as increasing workloads, physical and emotional stress at work, and problems for mothers who are breastfeeding. The above case study shows that the programme will change because it is made with both men and women in mind. At the same time, there are things that slow things down. There are many things that make it hard for women to get what they want. Change could happen if people in civil society worked together and knew their rights.

Several people have said bad things about the WAD method. The WAD approach focused on using women to make money, but it didn't take into account how important women were for meeting needs, like taking care of the sick and elderly and making more cheap workers for the market. The WAD approach has kept the "biology-less" assumption of the WID approach. Also, even though people talked about capitalist-patriarchy, they tended to read gender relations and class relations separately and not look at how they affect each other in different situations. In fact, the word "women" was used instead of "gender relationship" or "power relationship between women and men." Even though gender relations are different and capitalism benefits from them, households and workplaces are set up in different ways, and capitalist patriarchy has both helped and hurt women in different ways.

Kabeer also says that the WAD approach doesn't explain how biological differences lead to social differences. That is, it doesn't explain how gender, race, class, caste, and other social relationships are built by social institutions. It was hard to make patriarchy and capitalism the same all over the world. She also says that Mies's idea to go back to subsistence farming may not be the best way to move forward. Instead, women need to work with social institutions to get what they want. These institutions were being pushed in different ways by capitalism, patriarchy, race, caste, etc., and they created spaces where women's different interests could be negotiated.

Q.2. What is understood as public/private dichotomy? Discuss in the context of women’s position within the family.

Ans) Gender studies became interested in the private/public divide because it has different meanings for men and women. Men are usually associated with the public, and women are usually associated with the private. Different feminist writers have taken different sides in this debate. Some have looked at the public/private divide from an anthropological point of view, while others have looked at it from a historical point of view. For instance, L. Davidoff talks about the private/public divide in the context of England in the 19th century. S.S. Ortner says that women are always associated with domestic work, and S. Walby talks about the difference between private and public when she explains the idea of private patriarchy and looks at how women's status has changed in Britain.

The liberal political view of the private/public divide comes from the works of social contract theorists, who saw the social contract as having two parts: the "public and political" and the "private and non-political." In feminist writing, this divide between private and public life has been criticised. Feminist questions about the dichotomy can be linked to the ideas that led to the rise of individualism. Feminists have said that women, like everyone else, are free and equal. Because of this, they say that women can be freed and given more power by breaking down the hierarchy between the private and public spheres. Feminist criticism of this dichotomy focuses on questions like where and why this line is being drawn between these spheres, if this line is necessary, and so on. During different parts of the feminist movement, feminist criticism in this area has changed. In general, the fight for equal rights for women and men in the home and in politics has been an important part of the feminist movement.

Liberalism thought that the private and the public were two different things. So, the social differences that exist in the private sphere have never been thought about in the public sphere. Claims about political equality, universal suffrage, and civil liberties have everything to do with public sphere activities. In the past, feminists questioned these structures of public and private life because they were seen as problematic and political. They thought that the two spheres being separate was the patriarchal side of liberalism. Except for liberal feminism, all other types of feminism disagree with liberal ideas about what is public and what is private. They also see the social structure of liberalism as a political arena, so debates about equal rights may not start with the public/private divide. Pateman said that political liberals like Benn and Gaus's idea of the liberal state agree that there is a difference between the private and the public. Liberals believe that keeping a clear line between private and public will allow the state to use its power in a way that is not personal. This means that privacy will allow the state to use its power to protect the common interests of the people. Feminists have criticised this acceptance of the dichotomy, saying that "Benn and Gaus do not explain why these two terms are important or why the private sphere is opposed to the public rather than the political realm."

Dichotomy between private and public obscured the subjection of women to men within an apparently universal egalitarian order. This dichotomy was based on the idea of natural differences between men and women that leads to subjection. Women’s natural function of childbearing prescribes their domestic and subordinate place in the order of things. As you may have learnt that women are associated with nature, emotion, love, morality and the sphere of private whereas men are associated with culture, reason, justice and the sphere of public. Mental work is always seen as superior to physical work.

The work that women do such as child bearing, dealing with unsocialised infants and raw materials, household chores is all seen as unproductive physical work. So, women and physical work is taken to be inferior to the cultural sphere of men and male activities. Men were the advantaged as they existed in both the spheres but women were confined to the private sphere. This whole process of deprivation and subordination of women is aptly described by Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle- “This notion of the public and the private as separate spheres, each appropriate to different sex’s has a long and contested history but has been of particular importance. Since the development of industrial capitalism and urbanization in advanced economies which resulted in the increasing separation of men and women’s lives”.

The authors stated that the notion of separate spheres has its origin in political theory and practice, and had a marked impact on women due to its social embeddedness. Further, this distinction had relegated women from the public sphere like excluding their rights of citizenship and thus considered them as less than full individuals.

Gendered socialization, patriarchal nature of family and marriage, prevalence and normalization of gender violence in the name of family and marital sanctity, and overall subordination of women within these institutions led feminists to criticize these institutions and sometime even reject them. Feminists consistently criticized the claim that marriage is no longer a sacrament but a contract between equals. They argued that marriage is not a proper contract as in this contract the parties involved are not equal, and do not go on to live a life of equality, with equal restraints and privileges. They emphasize that throughout history and till date almost always women entered into this contract placed in a secondary position to the man in marriage.

Feminist criticism takes a ‘contract’ to be an agreement between two equal parties who negotiate until they arrive at terms to their mutual advantage. For them if marriage were a proper contract, women would have to be brought into civil life on exactly the same footing as their husbands, which still is largely not the case. Social customs and law deprived women of the opportunity to earn their own living, so that marriage was their only hope of a decent life. Therefore, though there have been large scale changes in the condition of women yet gender discrimination still exists which spills over to the marriage contract keeping women in a subordinate state within marriage.

The state and family alliance was also brought to light during the anti dowry campaign and domestic violence which refuted the public/private dichotomy. Feminists argued that the state ruled women’s lives and actively restricted them from enjoying equal status within family through marriage, divorce, child custody, property and other such laws. Yet, in matters of women’s resistance against gendered norms of the patriarchal family including violence against them the state in the name of family privacy claimed non interference