6 Family, Marriage and Household

Rimple Mehta

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 society’s 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 one’s 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 father’s 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 one’s clan) and maintenance of one’s 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 Freidan’s 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 one’s life was lucidly discussed in her book. What it did for the American society was to lay bare the marginalisation and silencing of women’s 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 power-structured 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 Hanisch’s paper titled “Personal is Political”, in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s 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 women’s 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 Mathura’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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 men’s control over women’s 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 party’s bargaining power. Jobs such as nursing teaching, domestic work are seen to be essentially female professions are under paid and under-valued. Women’s 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 Boserup’s path breaking study of women’s contribution to economy (1970), economists globally believed women’s 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, women’s 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 women’s disadvantage in terms of pay.

Women and work have a complex relationship in the South Asian context. Women’s 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 women’s 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 household’s inability to provide her with appropriate maintenance” (Siddiqi 2000: L-16). Women’s 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 husband’s 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 woman’s 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? Women’s 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 women’s 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 dowry-related 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 women’s bodies and desires. The meaning and definition of domestic violence has changed within the women’s 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 women’s 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 D’Mello 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. Women’s 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 D’Mello 2015).Moreover, despite several legislations and awareness campaigns, women often don’t 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 women’s 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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