Bargaining with Patriarchy

Why might women defend arrangements that subordinate them, or resist a development project presented as an improvement? Deniz Kandiyoti’s 1988 article approaches patriarchy through the strategies available within particular social arrangements. A patriarchal bargain names the expectations, constraints and exchanges through which people navigate male dominance. It is neither an agreement between equals nor proof that women consent freely to their circumstances.

The article develops comparative ideal types from historical and ethnographic scholarship. Its authorized anthology reprint, chapter 3, preserves the argument while using different pagination from the original journal article. These are analytical sketches of variable arrangements, not a newly conducted multinational survey or a division of the world into homogeneous cultures.

One example concerns irrigation in Gambia. Development resources went to men, accompanied by an assumption that wives would supply unpaid labour. Women’s own rice cultivation and customary allocation of work gave them alternatives: men had to offer wages or access to irrigated plots to obtain their labour. During the rainy season, women could prioritize their own fields. Their resistance becomes intelligible through control over work and production, rather than through an abstract label of traditional obedience.

Authority promised later

Kandiyoti contrasts such arrangements with what she calls classic patriarchy, organized around patrilineal descent and residence with the husband’s family. A young bride may face authority from both men and senior women. The prospect of later authority over daughters-in-law and support from sons helps reproduce the system. A woman’s position changes over a life course; being subordinated in one relationship does not prevent exercising power in another.

This helps explain investment in sons and the policing of younger women without reducing either to a timeless female disposition. Anticipated security can depend on maintaining the very rules that constrain one’s present life. The analysis makes that dependency visible, but it does not excuse coercion or imply that every mother-in-law follows the same strategy. Class, caste, kinship and local histories alter the available bargain.

Economic change can also remove the promised protection before it removes restrictions. When men cannot or will not provide support, women may acquire greater responsibility without comparable autonomy or resources. Calls for men to fulfil established obligations can therefore be a response to insecurity, even if they do not resemble an external observer’s preferred language of liberation. A collapsing bargain does not automatically generate an emancipatory replacement.

The framework’s productive tension is between explaining a constrained strategy and endorsing its terms. Calling something bargaining can overstate negotiability if violence, exclusion or destitution make refusal dangerous. Kandiyoti acknowledges asymmetry and treats the regional contrasts as provisional. Reading them as permanent African or Asian character types would reinstate the abstraction the essay challenges. Its strongest question is historical: what supports a strategy, and what happens when those supports disappear?

Agarwal’s discussion of land and environmental resources follows the material conditions that make alternatives viable. Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” cautions against explaining diverse women through a single image of victimhood. These connections support an account of agency that can recognize action without mistaking unequal survival arrangements for freedom.