Feminist movement and family (Answer in 150 words)

- Feminist movement and family (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
The feminist movement treated the family not as a natural refuge but as the principal site where gender inequality is produced. Its effects on the institution are real but uneven.
Body
1. The critique: Engels traced monogamy to property and inheritance; Friedan attacked the housewife role; Delphy analysed unpaid domestic labour as a mode of production. The movement named male headship, exclusion from property, and violence within marriage.
2. What changed: dual-earner and companionate households, later marriage, lower fertility, and acceptance of single-parent families. Indian law moved with it, the Hindu Succession Amendment of 2005 making daughters coparceners and the Domestic Violence Act of 2005 recognising the home as a site of abuse.
3. What did not: the second shift persists, as Hochschild showed, and dowry and son preference continue. The critique provoked a defence of family values, and postcolonial feminists object that an argument aimed at the western nuclear family fits the joint household poorly.
Conclusion
The movement changed the family's law and household form more than its division of labour. Redistributing care work remains the unfinished part of the project.