Feminism in Third World Societies: Addressing Patriarchy and Inequality

Feminist approaches to international relations begin with a simple observation: most theories of global politics were built without women in mind. When we study how nations wage war, sign trade deals, or define security, the experiences of half the population often disappear from view. In Third World societies, this gap becomes even sharper. Here, gender oppression intersects with poverty, colonial histories, and uneven development, making feminist critiques not just academically interesting but practically urgent for understanding how power actually works.

Why feminism matters for studying global politics 🔗

Feminist theory entered International Relations in the late 1980s, when scholars started asking why women’s experiences were almost entirely absent from mainstream debates. Writers like J. Ann Tickner challenged the field directly, arguing that conventional theories reconstruct international relations through gender-sensitive lenses that mainstream approaches had ignored. The core claim is straightforward. Because women have been subordinated across societies and throughout history, feminism offers a powerful analytical tool to study that subordination in order to change it.

This matters because traditional theories like realism and liberalism focus mostly on states, military power, and economic cooperation. They treat the international system as a neutral arena of competing nations. Feminist scholars argue this framing hides as much as it reveals. By treating the state as the only actor worth studying, mainstream IR ignores how political decisions affect men and women differently, and how the supposedly “private” sphere of households and families connects to the “public” sphere of war and diplomacy.

The personal is political 🔗

A central feminist principle holds that the personal is political. Private experiences like domestic violence, unpaid care work, and economic dependence are not isolated personal problems. They are connected to broader political and economic structures. When a trade agreement shifts which industries grow and which collapse, women workers often absorb the impact first, frequently in informal and unprotected jobs. Feminist critiques insist that any honest analysis of global politics must account for this gendered division of labour, which conventional theories tend to make invisible.

Patriarchy across borders: same logic, different forms 🔗

One of the most useful insights of feminist analysis is that patriarchy operates across societies with a similar underlying logic, even though its cultural expressions vary widely. Forms of oppression carry their own historical and cultural specificities, but the basic power relationship between dominant and subordinate groups tends to remain constant. A woman facing restricted property rights in one region and a woman facing workplace discrimination in another are both experiencing systems that concentrate power in male hands, even if the mechanisms look different.

This shared structure is what allows feminism to function as a cross-cultural tool. It does not require pretending that all women face identical conditions. Instead, it lets us recognise common patterns of power while staying attentive to local context. That balance, between identifying a global problem and respecting local difference, is exactly where Third World feminist thought makes its biggest contribution.

The danger of seeing all “Third World women” as one group 🔗

Feminist analysis in developing societies must avoid a serious trap, one identified by the scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty. In her landmark 1984 essay “Under Western Eyes,” Mohanty argued that Western feminist scholarship often constructed a single, homogenised category of the “Third World woman”, portraying her as uniformly poor, powerless, and victimised. This image, she pointed out, says more about Western assumptions than about the actual diverse lives of women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Mohanty’s critique is sharp and deliberate. She rejected a universal patriarchal framework as the single mode of exploitation, warning that it suggests either an international male conspiracy or a fixed, ahistorical hierarchy. What she called for instead was careful analysis of how oppression works in specific contexts. Veiling, the gendered division of labour, and women’s financial dependence on men cannot be read as automatic signs of oppression. They have to be understood within their actual social and historical settings.

Postcolonial feminism and double colonisation 🔗

This is where postcolonial feminism enters the picture. Scholars in this tradition argue that women in formerly colonised societies experienced what is sometimes called “double colonisation”, oppression both as colonised subjects and as women. Gayatri Spivak’s influential question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, drew attention to the marginalised women whose voices were silenced by both colonial rulers and patriarchal structures within their own communities.

Postcolonial feminist theory also examines the uneasy relationship between Western and indigenous women. During the colonial era, European women in colonies across Africa and India campaigned around practices like sati and female seclusion. Whether this advocacy genuinely improved the lives of local women remains debated. The lesson is that solidarity across borders requires listening rather than rescuing, and recognising women as a heterogeneous group differentiated by class, caste, region, and culture.

Rethinking power and the state 🔗

Feminist critiques fundamentally challenge how we define power itself. Mainstream IR tends to understand power as domination, the ability of one state to coerce another, usually backed by military force. Feminists question this. They challenge the doctrine of essentialism, which casts women with a fixed identity as naturally peaceful and men as natural aggressors. These projections, they warn, are often exploited in ultra-nationalist projects and dangerous political agendas that use the image of the vulnerable woman to justify aggressive policy.

The feminist critique of the state is equally important. The state is not gender-neutral. Its laws, institutions, and priorities have historically reflected and reinforced male dominance. In India, this recognition shaped landmark interventions. The 1974 report Towards Equality acted as an eye-opener on the condition of women, exposing the declining sex ratio and pushing for gender-sensitive policy-making and an emphasis on girls’ education. Feminist scholars stress that the process of democracy itself is integral to women gaining and protecting their rights.

Militarism and the security debate 🔗

Feminist approaches reframe security in a way that traditional theories cannot. Realism assumes that states pursue security through military strength, and because the dominant powers behave this way, others follow suit, choosing militarism over negotiation. Feminists argue that this narrow, state-centred and militarised definition of security ignores the daily insecurities that shape most people’s lives, especially women’s. Hunger, domestic violence, lack of healthcare, and economic precarity are security threats too.

This expanded view connects directly to the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda, which calls for women’s participation in peacekeeping and conflict resolution. Bodies like UN Women in India promote gender perspectives in governance and peacekeeping operations, treating gender equality as a pillar of inclusive security rather than an afterthought. A gender-sensitive approach asks not just whether a state is safe, but whether its people, all of them, actually are.

Connecting development, gender, and global structures 🔗

Development is another arena where feminist critiques prove their worth. International economic policies do not affect men and women equally. Structural changes, market liberalisation, and shifts in global trade reshape labour markets in ways that often push women into low-paid, informal, and invisible work. Feminist economists argue that ignoring this unpaid and underpaid labour distorts our understanding of the most pressing problems in the world economy.

The concept of women’s empowerment has itself evolved through international development thinking. Early framings emphasised legal rights, while later approaches, including Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, redefined development as the expansion of substantive freedoms and stressed addressing systemic power inequalities. Tools like the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index emerged to measure these gaps. Yet measurement alone does not solve the problem. Indian feminist scholar Srilatha Batliwala observed that empowerment laws are passed relatively easily but implemented poorly, a gap between law and practice that affects marginalised women most.

Intersectionality in the Indian context 🔗

Feminist critiques in developing societies must take intersectionality seriously. A woman’s experience of oppression is shaped not only by gender but by caste, class, religion, and location. Dalit women, for instance, face overlapping layers of discrimination that a single-axis analysis would miss entirely. Policies designed for urban, educated women may do little for rural, marginalised ones. This is why context-sensitive feminist analysis, rather than a one-size-fits-all model, is so essential in diverse societies.

It is worth noting a tension that feminist scholars themselves raise. As non-governmental organisations took on a larger role in addressing gender inequality, some critics warned of the professionalising and deradicalising of feminist activism, which can limit its potential for deeper political change. Feminism in Third World societies, then, is not a finished doctrine but a living, contested set of debates.

Why these critiques remain relevant 🔗

The enduring value of feminist critiques in developing societies lies in what they reveal that other frameworks hide. They show that international relations are deeply interconnected, that foreign policy is shaped by how states respond to one another, and that the supposedly neutral world of high politics carries gendered consequences all the way down to the household. By deconstructing traditional power structures, feminism does not just add women to the existing picture. It changes the picture entirely.

For students and citizens in developing nations, this perspective offers practical tools. It helps explain why economic growth alone does not automatically improve women’s lives, why security policy must look beyond borders and armies, and why genuine development requires confronting power, not just distributing resources. The patriarchal structures that feminism analyses are global, but their solutions must be rooted in local realities.

What do you think? Can a single feminist framework genuinely capture the experiences of women across such different societies, or does meaningful change require entirely locally grounded approaches? And if security were redefined around everyday human safety rather than military strength, how differently might governments set their priorities?

References

1. https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/1230/Tickner.pdf
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Talpade_Mohanty
3. https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/34776/3/Ismail%20Mohanty%20and%20Third%20World%20Feminism%20-%20FINAL.pdf
4. https://nickledanddimed.com/2021/01/14/third-world-feminism-a-tool-for-post-colonial-writers-to-detangle-double-colonization/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_Equality
6. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/india
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12250622/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srilatha_Batliwala
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11625700/