Bargaining with Patriarchy

Of all the concepts generated by contemporary feminist theory, patriarchy is probably the
most overused and, in some respects, the most undertheorized. While radical feminists
encouraged a very liberal usage, to apply to virtually any form or instance of male
domination, socialist feminists have mainly restricted themselves to analysing the
relationships between patriarchy and class under capitalism. As a result, the term patriarchy
often evokes an overly monolithic conception of male dominance, which is treated at a level
of abstraction that obfuscates rather than reveals the intimate inner workings of culturally and
historically distinct arrangements between the genders.
t I will term the patriarchal bargain' of any given society, which may exhibit variations
according to class, caste, and ethnicity. These patriarchal bargains exert a powerful influence
on the shaping of women's gendered subjectivity and determine the nature of gender ideology
in different contexts. They also influence both the potential for and specific forms of women's
active or passive resistance in the face of their oppression. Moreover, patriarchal bargains are
not timeless or immutable entities, but are susceptible to historical transformations that open
up new areas of struggle and renegotiation of the relations between genders.
AUTONOMY AND PROTEST: SOME EXAMPLES FROM SUB-SAHARAN
AFRICA
Wherever new agricultural schemes provided men with inputs and credit, and the assumption
was made that as heads of household they would have access to their wives' unremunerated
labor, problems seemed to develop. In the Mwea irrigated rice settlement in Kenya, where
women were deprived of access to their own plots, their lack of alternatives and their total
lack of control over men's earnings made life so intolerable to them that wives commonly
deserted their husbands (Hanger and Moris 1973).In Gambia, in yet another ricegrowing
scheme, the irrigated land and credit were made available to men only, even though it was the
women who traditionally grew rice in tidal swamps, and there was a long-standing practice of
men and women cultivating their own crops and controlling the produce. Women's customary
duties with respect to labor allocation to common and individual plots protected them from
demands by their husbands that they provide free labor on men's irrigated rice fields. Men
had to pay their wives wages or lend them an irrigated plot to have access to their labor. In
the rainy season, when women had the alternative of growing their own swamp rice, they
created a labor bottleneck for the men, who simply had to wait for the days women did not go
to their own fields (Dey 1981). In Conti's (1979) account of a supervised smallholder
settlement project in Upper Volta, again, the men were provided with land and credit, leaving
the women no independent resource base and a very inadequate infrastructure to carry out
their daily household chores. The result was vocal protest and refusal to cooperate.
Typically, it is the woman who is primarily responsible for her own and her children's
upkeep, including meeting the costs of their education, with variable degrees of assistance
from her husband. Women have very little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming totally
dependent on husbands, and hence they quite rightly resist projects that tilt the delicate
balance they have to maintain. In their protests, wives are safeguarding already existing
spheres of autonomy.
Clearly, there are important variations in African kinship systems with respect to marriage
forms, residence, descent, and inheritance rules (Guyer and Peters 1987). These variations are
grounded in complete cultural and historical processes, including different modes of
incorporation of African societies into the world economy (Mbilinyi 1982; Murray 1987; S.
Young 1977). Nonetheless, it is within a broadly defined Afro-Caribbean pattern that we find
some of the clearest instances of noncorporationess of the conjugal family both in ideology
and practice, a fact that informs marital and marketplace strategies for women. Works on
historical transformations (for example, Etienne and Leacock 1980) suggest that colonization
eroded the material basis for women's relative autonomy (such as usufructuary access to
communal land or traditional craft production) without offering attenuating modifications in
either marketplace or marital options.
SUBSERVIENCE AND MANIPULATION: WOMEN UNDER CLASSIC
PATRIARCHY
The clearest instance of classic patriarchy may be found in a geographical area that includes
North Africa, the Muslim Middle East (including Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran),and South and
East Asia (specifically, India and China).* The key to the reproduction of classic patriarchy
lies in the operations of the patrilocally extended household, which is also commonly
associated with the reproduction of the peasantry in agrarian societies (E. Wolf 1966). Even
though demographic and other constraints may have curtailed the numerical predominance of
three-generational patrilocal households, there is little doubt that they represent a powerful
cultural ideal. It is plausible that the emergence of the patriarchal extended family, which
gives the senior man authority over everyone else, including younger men, is bound up in the
incorporation and control of the family by the state (Ortner 1978), and in the transition from
kin-based to tributary modes of surplus control (E. Wolf 1982).The implications of the
patrilineal patrilocal complex for women not only are remarkably uniform but also entail
forms of control and subordination that cut across cultural and religious boundaries, such as
those of Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam. Under classic patriarchy, girls are given away
in marriage at a very young age into households headed by their husband's father. There, they
are subordinate not only to all the men but also to the more senior women, especially their
mother-in-law. The extent to which this represents a total break with their own kin group
varies in relation to the degree of endogamy in marriage practices and different conceptions
of honour.
Whether the prevalent marriage payment is dowry or bride-price, in classic patriarchy,
women do not normally have any claim on their father's patrimony. Their dowries do not
qualify as a form of premortem inheritance since they are transferred directly to the
bridegroom's kin and do not take the form of productive property, such as land (Agarwal
1987;Sharma 1980).In Muslim communities, for a woman to press for her inheritance rights
would be tantamount to losing her brothers' favor, her only recourse in case of severe ill-
treatment by her husband or divorce. The young bride enters her husband's household as an
effectively dispossessed individual who can establish her place in the patriliny only by
producing male offspring. The patrilineage totally appropriates both women's labor and
progeny and renders their work and contribution to production invisible. Woman's life cycle
in the patriarchally extended family is such that the deprivation and hardship she experiences
as a young bride is eventually superseded by the control and authority she will have over her
own subservient daughters-in-law.The cyclical nature of women's power in the household
and their anticipation of inheriting the authority of senior women encourages a thorough
internalization of this form of patriarchy by the women themselves. In classic patriarchy,
subordination to men is offset by the control older women attain over younger women.
However, women have access to the only type of labor power they can control, and to old-age
security, through their married sons. Since sons are a woman's most critical resource,
ensuring their life-long loyalty is an enduring preoccupation. Older women have a vested
interest in the suppression of romantic love between youngsters to keep the conjugal bond
secondary and to claim sons' primary allegiance. Young women have an interest in
circumventing and possibly evading their mother-in-law's control. There are culturally
specific examples of how this struggle works to the detriment of the heterosexual bond ), but
the overall pattern is quite similar. The class or caste impact on classic patriarchy creates
additional complications. Among the wealthier strata, the withdrawal of women from
nondomestic work is frequently a mark of status institutionalized in various seclusion and
exclusion practices, such as the purdah system and veiling. The institution of purdah, and
other similar status markers, further reinforces women's subordination and their economic
dependence on men. However, the observance of restrictive practices is such a crucial
element in the reproduction of family status that women will resist breaking the rules, even if
observing them produces economic hardship. They forego economically advantageous
options, such as the trading activities engaged in by women in parts of Africa, for alternatives
that are perceived as in keeping with their respectable and protected domestic roles, and so
they become more exploitable.
Thus, unlike women in sub-Saharan Africa who attempt to resist unfavorable labor relations
in the household, women in areas of classic patriarchy often adhere as far and as long as they
possibly can to rules that result in the unfailing devaluation of their labor. The cyclical
fluctuations of their power position, combined with status considerations, result in their active
collusion in the reproduction of their own subordination. They would rather adopt
interpersonal strategies that maximize their security through manipulation of the affections of
their sons and husband.
In other areas of classic patriarchy, changesin material conditions have seriously undermined
the normative order. As expressed succinctly by Cain et al. (1979, p. 410), the key to and the
irony of this system reside in the fact that "male authority has a material base, while male
responsibility is normatively controlled." Their study of a village in Bangladesh offers an
excellent example of the strains placed by poverty on bonds of obligation between kin and,
more specifically, on men's fulfilment of their normative obligations toward women. Almost
a third of the widows in the villages were the heads of their own households, struggling to
make a living through waged work. However, the labor-market segmentation created and
bolstered by patriarchy meant that their options for work were extremely restricted, and they
had to accept very low and uncertain wages. Paradoxically, the risks and uncertainties that
women are exposed to in classic patriarchy create a powerful incentive for higher fertility,
which under conditions of deepening poverty will almost certainly fail to provide them with
an economic shelter. Greeley (1983) also documents the growing dependence of landless
households in Bangladesh on women's wage labor, including that of married women, and
discusses the ways in which the stability of the patriarchal family is thereby undermined.
THE DEMISE OF PATRIARCHAL BARGAINS: RETREAT INTO
CONSERVATISM OR RADICAL PROTEST?
The material bases of classic patriarchy crumble under the impact of new market forces,
capital penetration in rural areas (Kandiyoti 1984), or processes of chronic immiseration.
While there is no single path leading to the breakdown of this system, its consequences are
fairly uniform. The domination of younger men by older men and the shelter of women in the
domestic sphere were the hallmarks of a system in which men controlledsome form of viable
joint patrimony in land, animals, or commercial capital. Among the propertyless and the
dispossessed, the necessity of every household member's contribution to survival turns men's
economic protection of women into a myth. The breakdown of classic patriarchy results in
the earlier emancipation of younger men from their fathers and their earlier separation from
the paternal household. While this process implies that women escape the control of mothers-
in-law and head their own households at a much younger age, it also means that they
themselves can no longer look forward to a future surrounded by subservient daughtersin-
law. For the generation of women caught in between, this transformation may represent
genuine personal tragedy, since they have paid the heavy price of an earlier patriarchal
bargain, but are not able to cash in on its promised benefits. M. Wolf's (1975) statistics on
suicide among women in China suggest a clear change in the trend since the 1930s, with a
sharp increase in the suicide rates of women who are over 45, whereas previously the rates
were highest among young women, especially new brides. She relates this change explicitly
to the emancipation of sons and their new possibility of escaping familial control in the
choice of their spouse, which robs the older woman of her power and respectability as
mother-in-law. Despite the obstacles that classic patriarchy puts in women's way, which may
faroutweigh any actual economic and emotional security, women often resist the process of
transition because they see the old normative order slipping away from them without any
empowering alternatives. Thus, when classic patriarchy enters a crisis, many women may
continue to use all the pressure they can muster to make men live up to their obligations and
will not, except under the most extreme pressure, compromise the basis for their claims by
stepping out of line and losing their respectability. Their passive resistance takes the form of
claiming their half of this particular bargain protection in exchange for submissiveness and
propriety. The response of many women who have to work for wages in this context may be
an intensification of traditional modesty markers, such as veiling. Often, through no choice of
their own, they are working outside their home and are thus "exposed"; they must now use
every symbolic means at their disposal to signify that they continue to be worthy of
protection. It is significant that Khomeini's exhortations to keep women at home found
enthusiastic support among many Iranian women despite the obvious elements of repression.
The implicit promise of increased male responsibility restores the integrity of their original
patriarchal bargain in an environment where the range of options available to women is
extremely restricted.