Deniz Kandiyoti

One of her lasting legacies in the feminist economics academic sphere has been her analysis on ‘bargaining with the patriarchy’. The term was coined to describe and analyse how and why women reproduce certain conditions and attitudes which, at a group level, disadvantage women, but at an individual level may benefit women by allowing them some power and agency.

Only considering women’s actions as choices free of various institutional constraints often led Western feminist literature to analyse Muslim women as submissive victims or passive agents, or the equally unsophisticated argument that women were ‘separate-but-equal’ within Islamic societies. Kandiyoti found neither of these arguments nuanced enough to explain the heterogeneity of women’s positions within Islam. In varying political economy and patriarchal contexts, women are faced with distinct “rules of the game” and thus, optimising strategies for individuals look different.
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Within this framework, bargaining with the patriarchy allows women to make trades by acquiescing to some patriarchal standards/practices (which may look like passiveness to the outsider) which allows them freedom or power within certain other activities (Kandiyoti 1987). At an individual level, acquiescence can be partially advantageous to a woman, despite perhaps having the opposite effect at the group level.

She used a Kuhnian analogy to explain this phenomenon of patriarchal bargains going through phases of widespread acceptance, crisis, and transformation (Kandiyoti 1988). Similar to analyses of capitalism, when the bargain works for enough people, the underlying assumptions and systems are not fundamentally questioned, but when that starts to break down, perhaps if one side stops being fulfilled, the bargain loses credibility and power and widespread resistance may appear. This itself is not a smooth process, with many feminist movements (and economic ones) being most harshly opposed by other women, especially those who exist between the transformation.

To illustrate this point, she gave the example of new brides who move away to live with a husband’s family as the member with the lowest status and highest work burden. A bargain is made under these patriarchal conditions with the knowledge that one day she will rise to the status of mother-in-law and be able to exert some power over the woman currently in her position. When the bargain is called into question, it is understandable why those who have already paid the high price resist the change (Kandiyoti 1988).

When she later revisited her work, she agreed with critiques that this analysis was a little essentialist, and that using analogies of bargaining and negotiating, especially with assumptions of self-interest, is itself a result of neoclassical framing and dominant Western philosophy of science. She acknowledged that ``the messiness of social reality has always exceeded the explanatory power of our conceptual frameworks”, and this is especially true to any gender analyses (Kandiyoti, 2005).

She held that in some cases, such as the reformations that came when the Republic of Turkey was born, “women’s education has acted not so much as a means of mobility as a means of class consolidation, because these women might have posed less of a threat than upwardly mobile men from humbler origins (Kandiyoti 1987, p.323)”. Where feminism has imperial associations as top-down ‘project feminism’, where gains are realised mostly by elite women, feminist endeavours become an easy scapegoat in post-colonial societies. Additionally, focus on political rights or representation in professional arenas, ensured both that women’s work and economic contributions within the household sphere, as well as the power and labour divisions present – remain invisible. She questioned if women were, in this case, ‘emancipated but unliberated’ (Kandiyoti 1988).

She points out how women’s strategies and support systems regarding childcare and domestic duties can be reciprocal or they can be exploitive (i.e. of domestic workers, or younger/poorer relatives) – but in both cases whilst women’s roles and women’s distribution of labour are augmenting, the male role is sheltered from “any fundamental redefinition, as domestic tasks continue to be effectively absorbed by other women even when wives lead demanding professional lives” (Kandiyoti 1987, p.330). Although much of her work was written over 30 years ago, much of it is still relevant today, including this is a point that feminists and feminist economists are still making. For all the change and transformation of women’s roles and their mass entry to public and professional spaces, an equal transformation of men’s roles and entry in domestic duties and childcare has not been observed, nor has it been encouraged by policy in the same manner.


Further Reading

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1988. ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’. Gender & Society 2 (3): 274–290.
———. 2005. ‘Rethinking Bargaining with Patriarchy’. Feminist Vision of Development: Gender, Analysis and Policy, 135–154.
Kandiyoti, Deniz A. 1987. ‘Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case’. Feminist Studies 13 (2): 317–38. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177804.

https://gazetesu.sabanciuniv.edu/2015-03/deniz-kandiyoti-kadin-haklarinin-ates-hattina-suruldugu-bir-donemden-geciyoruz

https://bianet.org/bianet/toplumsal-cinsiyet/213510-prof-dr-deniz-kandiyoti-toplumsal-cinsiyet-esitligi-krizi-tum-dunyada-var