Impact of Feminist Movements on Family: Marriage, Parenting, Housework and Law

Feminist movements changed the family by challenging the idea that men should be breadwinners and authorities and women homemakers and dependants. They won women rights to education, property, divorce, contraception, equal pay and protection from domestic violence, and made unpaid housework and violence within the home public issues ("the personal is political"). As a result, daughters are valued more, women work outside the home, couples are more equal, marriage rests more on choice and companionship, and divorce is easier. But change in the home has been slower than in law: women still do most housework and child-care, carrying a "double burden". In India, the women's movement led to laws on dowry, domestic violence, sexual harassment, inheritance and maternity benefits.

This note explains what feminist movements are, their main strands and waves, their impact on parent-child relations, marriage and housework, the Indian women's movement and its laws, and the debate about whether feminism weakened or strengthened the family, for the UPSC Anthropology Optional. It belongs to Paper I, topic 2.4 (Family: impact of urbanization, industrialization and feminist movements on family) in the Anthropology Optional syllabus.

Key points at a glance

• Feminism: movements for women's rights on issues such as suffrage, property, education, equal pay, reproductive rights, maternity leave, domestic violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence.
• Waves: first wave (suffrage and legal rights), second wave (1960s–70s: family, sexuality, work), third wave (1990s: diversity, intersectionality), fourth wave (2010s: digital activism, #MeToo).
• Strands: liberal (equal rights within existing institutions), radical (patriarchy and the family as a source of oppression), Marxist and socialist (unpaid domestic labour serves capitalism), Black and intersectional feminism.
• Parent-child relations: daughters valued more; girls' education; more equal child-rearing in principle.
• Marriage: more equal decision-making, more companionship, more divorce, and new tensions over roles.
• Housework: women still do most of it: the "second shift" (Hochschild) and "role accretion".
• India: social reform, the Towards Equality report (1974), anti-dowry and anti-rape campaigns, and laws from the Dowry Prohibition Act to the Women's Reservation Act, 2023.

What are feminist movements?

The feminist movement, also called the women's liberation movement, the women's movement or simply feminism, is a series of political campaigns for reforms on issues such as women's suffrage, property rights, education, equal pay, reproductive rights, maternity leave, domestic violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence.

The waves of feminism

The traditional family that feminism challenged

The model challenged by second-wave feminists was the post-war middle-class family of the West, described by Talcott Parsons. In this family, the father was the breadwinner and authority ("father knows best"), and the mother stayed home to care for children and husband. Parsons called the husband's role "instrumental" and the wife's "expressive". Children were expected to be born within marriage, marriage was between a man and a woman, divorce was rare, and most couples stayed married for life.

Supporters of this model regard it as stable and secure. Feminists pointed out its costs: women's economic dependence, isolation at home (Friedan's "problem that has no name"), limited opportunities, and hidden domestic violence. Historians also note that the model was never universal: working-class and rural women, including most women in India, always worked, in fields, workshops, markets and other people's homes.

Strands of feminism and their views of the family

Radical feminist writers of the 1970s made some of the strongest criticisms of marriage. Sheila Cronan, for example, argued in her essay "Marriage" (1970) that marriage was the chief institution through which the subordination of women was maintained, and compared it to slavery. Such views represented one part of the movement. Most feminists sought to reform marriage and the family, not to abolish them, and the main legal changes of the period reflected liberal demands for equal rights.

Feminist anthropology

Feminism also changed how anthropologists study the family.

• Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Woman, Culture and Society, 1974) asked why women's status is lower in so many societies, and linked it to the separation of the "domestic" and "public" spheres.
• Sherry Ortner ("Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?", 1974) argued that women are widely associated with nature and men with culture.
• Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women", 1975) reinterpreted Lévi-Strauss's exchange of women in marriage as a basis of gender inequality.
• Eleanor Leacock argued that women had high status in many egalitarian foraging societies before colonialism and the market.
• Jane Collier, Michelle Rosaldo and Sylvia Yanagisako ("Is There a Family?", 1982) argued that "the family" is a cultural idea, not a natural unit.

Impact on parent-child relations

• Valuing daughters: the women's movement worked to change attitudes in favour of girl children, so that daughters are considered as important as sons.
• Equal treatment: girls increasingly receive the same food, clothing, health care and education as boys, and choose subjects and careers more freely. Child-rearing aims to make girls as self-confident and independent as boys, and gives them responsibilities outside the home.
• India still has gaps: son preference persists, shown in the sex ratio at birth, which was 929 girls per 1,000 boys in NFHS-5 (2019–21). The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, bans sex selection, and the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme (2015) promotes the value and education of daughters.
• Mothers at home and the expressive role: in families where the mother does not work outside the home, the mother-child relationship is often the closest and most lasting. The father's long absence at work strengthens it. Parsons described this division as the mother's "expressive" and the father's "instrumental" role. Feminists criticised it as a description of one kind of family presented as natural.
• Working mothers: when both parents work long hours, children spend less time with them. Some respondents in older studies felt this weakened the mother-child relationship and enculturation. Later research shows that children of working mothers generally do as well as others when they have good substitute care, and that daughters of working mothers are more likely to work and sons more likely to share housework.
• Role accretion: although men were expected to share child-rearing once women took paid work, this rarely happened, and when it did, sharing was usually partial. Women kept most of the domestic responsibility on top of work on the farm, in the firm or in the office. Taking up paid work therefore added roles to women's existing roles instead of redistributing them.

Impact on marital adjustment

Research on how feminism and women's employment affect marriage has produced mixed findings.

1. Economic need versus control: men increasingly accept that the family needs the income of wives and daughters. At the same time, some husbands and fathers fear losing control over women who work outside the home, both over their movements and because an independent income makes women less willing to accept male dominance.
2. Type of job matters: women with more education, interesting and well-paid jobs, chosen freely or with their husbands' support, report more marital satisfaction. Women in dull, low-paid jobs who also carry most of the housework report less satisfaction.
3. Voice in decisions: working wives gain a stronger voice in family decisions and often report greater marital satisfaction, especially in the middle classes.
4. Husbands' satisfaction: some studies of the 1970s, such as Burke and Weir (1976), found that husbands of working wives were less satisfied with their marriages than husbands of housewives. Later research suggests that satisfaction depends mainly on whether the division of housework is seen as fair.
5. Divorce: as women gain equality and economic independence, divorce rates rise, because women can live independently if a marriage fails.
6. Equality and conflict: some couples report that shared decisions and independent activities strengthen their solidarity. Others report that equality has created conflict, as roles must be negotiated rather than taken for granted, and that egalitarian relations do not necessarily bring more happiness.
7. Uncertainty: many people feel that they might be happier under different arrangements, but do not know which arrangement would suit them best, or whether greater equality in society and at home will make them happier.

Impact on work within the family

The impact of the women's movement on the division of labour within the home has been limited.

• Machines did not reduce housework: Joann Vanek (1974) and Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) found that labour-saving devices did not reduce the hours full-time housewives spent on domestic work, because standards of cleanliness and child-care rose.
• Men contribute little: Ann Oakley (The Sociology of Housework, 1974) showed that housework is real work, monotonous and isolating, and that husbands did little of it. Arlie Hochschild (The Second Shift, 1989) found that employed wives worked an extra month of 24-hour days each year compared with their husbands.
• Slow change: younger, more educated couples, wives with better-educated husbands, and women with long work histories hold more egalitarian views. Husbands' share of housework has risen, but only slightly. Most of the change has come from wives spending less time on housework, not from husbands doing more. Jonathan Gershuny called this "lagged adaptation".
• India: the Time Use Survey of 2019 (National Statistical Office) found that women who did unpaid domestic work spent about 299 minutes a day on it, compared with about 97 minutes for men.

The women's movement and the family in India

Social reform in the 19th and early 20th centuries

• Raja Ram Mohan Roy: campaigned against sati, which was banned in 1829.
• Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar: promoted the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, and campaigned against Kulin polygamy.
• Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule: opened schools for girls in Pune from 1848.
• Women writers and reformers: Tarabai Shinde (Stri Purush Tulana, 1882) and Pandita Ramabai.
• Laws: the Age of Consent Act (1891) and the Child Marriage Restraint (Sarda) Act (1929).

The women's movement after Independence

• Towards Equality (1974): the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India showed that women's position had worsened in many respects since Independence, and helped launch the modern women's movement.
• Anti-dowry campaigns of the late 1970s and 1980s, led by groups such as Stree Sangharsh and Saheli in Delhi, exposed dowry deaths and led to amendments to the Dowry Prohibition Act and to the Indian Penal Code (Section 498A on cruelty in 1983, and Section 304B on dowry death in 1986).
• Anti-rape campaigns: after the Mathura case (1979), the law on custodial rape was amended in 1983. After the Delhi gang rape of 2012, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, strengthened the law on sexual violence.
• Sexual harassment: the Bhanwari Devi case led to the Supreme Court's Vishaka guidelines (1997) and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013.

Laws affecting the family

The exception in criminal law for rape within marriage has been challenged in the courts, and the debate continues.

Women's collective action at the grassroots

Self-help groups, such as Kerala's Kudumbashree, and women's participation in local government (one-third of panchayat seats reserved since the 73rd Amendment, 1992, raised to half in many states) have given many rural women income, savings and a public voice, which in turn changes their position in the family.

Did feminism weaken or strengthen the family?

Conclusion

Under the influence of feminist movements, the family has become more the private concern of its members than a collective possession of many relatives. It has become more democratic and less autocratic. The relationship between husband and wife is increasingly based on choice, mutual attraction and mutual happiness rather than fixed custom, and families reject the dominance of any one member. Burgess and Locke described this as a shift "from institution to companionship". Liberal ideas and the principle of equality in social and political life shape the modern family, which continues to change. But the "stalled revolution" (Hochschild) in housework and care shows that equality in law has not yet become equality at home.

Using this topic in a UPSC answer

• Define feminism and outline its waves and strands, especially liberal, radical and Marxist views of the family.
• Discuss the impact under parent-child relations, marriage, housework and law.
• Use thinkers: Friedan, Millett, Oakley, Hochschild, Rosaldo, Ortner and Collier et al.
• Bring in India: social reformers, Towards Equality (1974), anti-dowry campaigns, the Domestic Violence Act and Hindu Succession Amendment of 2005, the Vishaka guidelines, and the Time Use Survey 2019.
• Present the debate on whether feminism weakened or strengthened the family.
• Conclude: the family is more equal in principle, but the division of domestic labour has changed slowly.

Likely questions: "Discuss the impact of feminist movements on the family." "How has the women's movement changed the Indian family?" "Examine the feminist critique of the family." For structure and presentation, see our guide to anthropology answer writing with diagrams, thinkers and case studies. For women in tribal families, see tribal India today.

Frequently asked questions

What is the impact of feminist movements on the family?

Feminist movements won women rights to education, property, divorce, contraception, equal pay and protection from violence. This made families more equal, increased the value of daughters, gave wives more voice in decisions, made marriage more a matter of choice and companionship, and made divorce easier. But women still do most housework and child-care.

What is the difference between liberal and radical feminism on the family?

Liberal feminists seek equal rights for women within marriage and the family through law and education. Radical feminists see patriarchy as the root of women's oppression and the family as a key site of it, and some called for alternatives to marriage.

What is the Marxist feminist view of the family?

Marxist feminists argue that the family serves capitalism, because women's unpaid domestic work produces and maintains the workforce at no cost to employers.

What is the "second shift"?

Arlie Hochschild's term for the housework and child-care that employed women do after their paid work. She found that working wives did much more of this work than their husbands.

What is role accretion?

The addition of new roles, such as paid work, to women's existing domestic roles, instead of redistributing housework between men and women.

What does "the personal is political" mean?

A second-wave feminist slogan, popularised by Carol Hanisch (1969), meaning that issues within the family, such as housework, sexuality and domestic violence, are shaped by power and are matters for public action, not just private concerns.

How has the women's movement changed the Indian family?

It led to laws against dowry, domestic violence and sexual harassment, gave daughters equal rights in joint family property (2005), extended maternity benefits and reserved seats for women in local and national government. Attitudes to daughters' education and women's work have changed, though son preference and unequal housework persist.

What was the Towards Equality report?

The 1974 report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, which showed that women's position had worsened in many respects since Independence and helped start the modern Indian women's movement.