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Home/Anthropology/Mains PYQ/2020/Paper I/Marriage & Family
UPSC MainsAnthropology Optional Paper I 2020 20 Marks Model Answer Available

Feminist Movement, Marriage and Family Structure — 2020 Paper I

Question · 2020 · Paper I · 20 Marks

Explain the impact of feminist movement on universality of marriage and family structure.

Model Answer

VAID ICS

Approach

  • Demand of Question: Explain how feminist anthropology challenged the assumption that marriage and family are universal and structurally uniform institutions.
  • Structuring the Response: Present the classical view, feminist critiques, cross-cultural variations, and the resulting rethinking of marriage, family and gender roles.
  • Key Dimensions to Cover: Leacock, Rubin, Rosaldo, Ortner, Collier and Yanagisako; domestic-public divide, patriarchy, same-sex unions, matrifocality and chosen families.

Model Answer

Introduction

Classical anthropology often treated marriage and family as universal institutions, usually centred on heterosexual unions, reproduction and domestic cooperation. Feminist anthropology questioned both the universality of these forms and the assumption that gender relations within them were naturally given.

Classical understanding

Early anthropologists generally viewed marriage as regulating:

  • sexual relations;
  • reproduction;
  • legitimacy of children;
  • inheritance;
  • alliance between groups;
  • domestic cooperation.

Similarly, the nuclear or extended family was often treated as a basic universal unit of social organization.

Feminist critique of universality

  1. Questioning the naturalness of gender roles: Feminist anthropologists argued that the sexual division of labour is culturally constructed rather than biologically fixed.

Michelle Rosaldo examined the opposition between domestic and public spheres, showing how women’s association with domesticity often affected status and power.

  1. Critique of universal female subordination: Sherry Ortner asked whether female subordination was universal and related it to symbolic associations of women with “nature” and men with “culture.”

Later feminist scholars criticized such universal explanations for ignoring historical and cultural diversity.

  1. Eleanor Leacock: Leacock argued that women’s subordination intensified with the emergence of private property, class relations and colonial-capitalist transformation, rather than being a timeless feature of all societies.

Marriage reconsidered

Feminist anthropology demonstrated that marriage cannot be reduced to a single heterosexual reproductive model.

Cross-cultural variation includes:

  • polyandry;
  • polygyny;
  • woman-woman marriage in some African societies;
  • visiting unions;
  • matrilocal and duolocal residence;
  • flexible conjugal arrangements.

Thus:

Marriage ≠ Universal single form

Rather, marriage is a culturally variable institution organizing combinations of sexuality, reproduction, property, labour, descent and alliance.

Gayle Rubin and gender systems

Gayle Rubin, in “The Traffic in Women” (1975), introduced the idea of the sex/gender system, showing how kinship and marriage systems may transform biological sexuality into culturally structured gender relations.

Marriage can therefore reproduce:

  • gender hierarchy;
  • exchange relations;
  • control over women’s sexuality;
  • property and descent arrangements.

Rethinking the family

Feminist research also challenged the assumption that the male-headed nuclear family is universal.

Ethnographic realities include:

  • matrifocal households;
  • female-headed households;
  • matrilineal families;
  • joint and extended families;
  • single-parent families;
  • same-sex households;
  • “chosen families”.

The concept of family therefore shifted from a fixed genealogical unit to a more flexible set of care, residence, reproduction and relatedness practices.

Collier and Yanagisako

Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako criticized the tendency to treat “family” and “gender” as natural categories existing identically across cultures. They argued that both must be studied as historically and culturally constructed relations.

Impact of feminist movement

The feminist movement led anthropology to:

  1. make women visible as social actors;
  2. distinguish biological sex from socially constructed gender;
  3. question male-centred models of kinship;
  4. analyze power within household relations;
  5. recognize reproductive labour and unpaid care work;
  6. treat marriage and family as historically changing institutions;
  7. recognize diversity in sexuality and household formation.

Critical perspective

Feminist anthropology did not prove that marriage and family are irrelevant. Rather, it showed that their forms, meanings and internal power relations vary cross-culturally.

Hence:

Biological reproduction ≠ Universal social form of family

Conclusion

The feminist movement transformed anthropology from viewing marriage and family as fixed and universally similar institutions to understanding them as culturally constructed, historically variable and deeply shaped by gender and power relations.

2026 Feminist movement and family. 2025 How the study of variation in forms of marriage led to rethinking on the concepts of social reproduction, kinship and family? 2024 Define urbanization and discuss its impact on family in India with examples. 2023 Discuss the role of marriage regulations in traditional societies in India for strengthening social solidarity.

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