Feminist Theories on Socialisation: Challenging Patriarchy through Gender Roles

For most of human history, the differences between men and women were treated as fixed by nature. Women cooked, cared, and stayed indoors because their bodies “made” them suited for it. Men earned, ruled, and acted because that was supposedly their biological calling. Feminist thinkers from the mid-twentieth century onwards turned this idea on its head. They argued that what we call “masculinity” and “femininity” is not stitched into our chromosomes but stitched into us by family, school, media, and the wider culture. This shift from biology to society is one of the most important contributions feminism has made to socialisation theory, and it continues to shape how we understand gender inequality today.

Why feminists challenged traditional socialisation theories 🔗

Classical socialisation theorists, especially functionalists like Talcott Parsons, viewed gender roles as natural and necessary for social stability. Women were assigned “expressive” roles inside the home, men “instrumental” roles outside it, and society supposedly ran smoothly because of this division. Feminists found this account deeply unsatisfying. It described inequality but treated it as inevitable, even desirable. Worse, it ignored the power imbalance baked into these roles.

Feminist scholars asked sharper questions. Why is care work unpaid and unrecognised? Why are girls disciplined into “good behaviour” while boys are allowed to be loud? Why does almost every society, despite vast cultural differences, place men above women? Answering these required separating what is biological from what is social, and that is where the sex-gender distinction became revolutionary.

Distinguishing sex from gender 🔗

Before feminist sociology, “sex” and “gender” were treated as interchangeable words. The feminist intervention was to pull them apart and show that one belongs to biology while the other belongs to society.

Simone de Beauvoir and the becoming of woman 🔗

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir laid the philosophical groundwork for this distinction in her landmark 1949 book The Second Sex. Her now-famous line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” captured the entire feminist argument in a single sentence. Beauvoir was attacking what is called biological determinism, the belief that anatomy decides destiny. According to her, being born with female reproductive organs does not automatically make someone a “woman” in the social sense. Womanhood is something assembled over a lifetime through expectations, restrictions, instructions, and rewards.

Beauvoir argued that society treats men as the default human being and women as the “Other”, defined only in relation to men. This Othering happens not at birth but through years of social conditioning. A girl learns she must sit a certain way, speak softly, dress modestly, and put others first. By the time she is an adult, these learned behaviours feel as natural as breathing, which is precisely how patriarchy disguises its work.

Ann Oakley and the sociology of gender 🔗

British sociologist Ann Oakley took Beauvoir’s philosophical insight and gave it a sociological framework. In her 1972 book Sex, Gender and Society, Oakley made the distinction crystal clear: sex refers to the biological division into male and female, while gender refers to the socially unequal division into masculinity and femininity. This separation is now standard in sociology textbooks, but in 1972 it was groundbreaking.

Oakley argued that gender roles are taught, not inherited. To explain how, she described four key processes of gender socialisation in childhood. Manipulation refers to how parents handle children differently from infancy, encouraging girls to be gentle and boys to be sturdy. Canalisation describes the channeling of children towards gender-specific toys and activities, such as dolls and kitchen sets for girls, cars and construction kits for boys. Verbal appellations are the words used to describe children, such as “pretty” for daughters and “strong” for sons. Different activities refer to the household tasks assigned by sex, with girls helping in cooking and boys being sent on errands.

By the time a child enters school, these patterns are already deeply internalised. Oakley’s work showed that gender socialisation serves the interests of patriarchy by preparing girls for subordinate domestic roles and boys for dominant public ones.

Gender as a social construct: Gayle Rubin’s sex/gender system 🔗

If Beauvoir and Oakley separated sex from gender, American anthropologist Gayle Rubin explained the machinery that connects them. In her influential 1975 essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, Rubin introduced the concept of the sex/gender system. She defined it as the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, turning raw biological difference into structured social inequality.

How biology becomes hierarchy 🔗

Rubin’s key argument is that the human body, on its own, does not produce inequality. What produces inequality is the cultural system that takes the basic fact of biological difference and builds an entire hierarchy on top of it. Women’s reproductive capacity is real, but the idea that this capacity makes them suited only for housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour is a social invention. Different societies build the system differently, which proves the system is not natural.

Rubin drew on the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud to argue that kinship structures, particularly the exchange of women through marriage, are the foundation of male dominance. In many traditional societies, women are moved between families through marriage while men remain in control of property, lineage, and decision-making. This is visible in Indian practices like patrilocal residence, where a bride moves into her husband’s home, and the dowry system, which treats women as objects of exchange between families.

What makes Rubin’s framework powerful is her insistence that female oppression is not inevitable but a product of specific social relations. If society built the system, society can dismantle it.

The sex/gender system in the Indian context 🔗

India offers a vivid example of Rubin’s framework in action. From birth, a girl child is often treated differently from her brother. The expression paraya dhan, meaning “someone else’s wealth”, reflects how a daughter is seen as a temporary member of her natal home, destined to leave for her in-laws. This single cultural concept shapes investment decisions in education, nutrition, and health. Pew Research found that a majority of Indians still consider earning money to be primarily the duty of men, and many believe men deserve greater rights to jobs when work is scarce. These attitudes are not biological reflexes. They are the residue of generations of socialisation through the sex/gender system.

Nancy Chodorow and the reproduction of mothering 🔗

While Oakley emphasised conscious teaching of gender roles, American sociologist Nancy Chodorow asked a deeper question: why do women, generation after generation, end up wanting to be mothers in the way society expects them to? Her 1978 book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender offered a striking answer.

Mothering as a learned, not biological, role 🔗

Chodorow directly challenged the assumption that women have a natural maternal instinct. She argued that women mother because they were mothered by women, not because of any biological programming. The mother-daughter relationship, she said, is the central engine of gender reproduction.

According to Chodorow, both boys and girls begin life in close identification with their mother, who is usually the primary caregiver. But the path diverges as they grow. A daughter sees herself as similar to her mother and maintains this identification, developing what Chodorow called a relational, nurturing self. A son, however, learns that he is different from his mother. To form a masculine identity, he must psychologically separate from her and identify with a more distant father figure. This process makes men more autonomous and emotionally detached, while women remain oriented towards caregiving and relationships.

The result is a self-perpetuating cycle. Daughters grow up wanting to mother because mothering feels central to who they are. Sons grow up unprepared for caregiving because masculinity was built by rejecting it. So the same gendered division of labour reappears in the next generation, not through force but through deeply internalised desire.

Why Chodorow matters for socialisation theory 🔗

Chodorow’s contribution is significant because she pushed feminist analysis beyond simple “boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls” arguments. She showed that gender is built into the unconscious through early relationships, which is why it feels so natural and is so hard to change. Her insistence on social learning rather than biological instinct reframed motherhood as a structural feature of patriarchy, not a personal calling.

She also proposed a radical solution: shared parenting. If men were equally involved in raising young children, boys would not have to define masculinity through emotional distance, and girls would not have to absorb mothering as their core identity. The cycle could be broken.

The lasting impact on socialisation theories 🔗

Feminist contributions have permanently changed how sociology talks about socialisation. Where earlier theories described children as passively absorbing roles that helped society function, feminist theories revealed those roles as instruments of inequality. Three shifts stand out.

First, feminism made power visible. Socialisation is no longer seen as neutral. It is a process through which patriarchal hierarchies are passed down. Second, feminism brought the family into focus as a primary site of political activity, not just a private haven. The household is where the sex/gender system reproduces itself daily. Third, feminism connected personal experience to structural critique. The way a mother holds her son differently from her daughter is not trivial; it is part of how a society manufactures gender.

These ideas continue to fuel contemporary movements. Campaigns to involve boys in household chores and to encourage girls in science and sports are practical applications of feminist socialisation theory. Government programmes like Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao operate on the assumption that changing social messages about daughters can change their material outcomes, an idea that would have been foreign before feminist scholarship.

Criticisms and the road ahead 🔗

No theory is beyond critique. Oakley has been accused of presenting children as too passive, as if they simply absorb gender without resisting or reshaping it. Chodorow has been criticised for assuming a universal heterosexual nuclear family, which ignores single mothers, queer families, and non-Western kinship arrangements. Rubin’s framework, while powerful, has been questioned for being too sweeping in equating all forms of female oppression with kinship exchange.

Newer feminist thinkers, including Judith Butler, have pushed further, arguing that even the category of “sex” itself is shaped by social discourse. Intersectional feminists have added that gender socialisation cannot be separated from caste, class, race, and religion. An upper-caste Hindu girl in urban Mumbai and a Dalit girl in rural Bihar are socialised into different versions of femininity, both governed by patriarchy but mediated by other hierarchies.

Still, the foundational insight remains intact. Gender is made, not born. And anything that is made can, in principle, be remade.

What do you think? Looking back at your own childhood, can you identify specific moments when you were taught to behave in “masculine” or “feminine” ways, and how might shared parenting between mothers and fathers change the gendered patterns you see around you today?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
2. https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/social-studies/famous-sociologists/ann-oakley/
3. https://revisesociology.com/2023/03/17/feminist-perspectives-on-socialisation/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayle_Rubin
5. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/150945/24-201-spring-2016/contents/readings/MIT24_201S16_Gayle_Notes.pdf
6. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/how-indians-view-gender-roles-in-families-and-society/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Chodorow
8. https://www.smilefoundationindia.org/blog/how-close-is-india-to-its-gender-roles/