Is state intervention in the family justified?

Introduction

State intervention in the family is justified when it protects the equal rights and safety of its members, and unjustified when it merely imposes a pattern of family life. The reasons are set out below.

State intervention in the family

The case against intervention. On the conventional view the family is a private sphere of government non-interference, outside the domain of justice, which concerns the public sphere. Liberals, suspicious of political authority, value the family, caste or community only to the extent that individuals value them, and tend to put individual liberty first. Whether a grown daughter takes a job in another city, on this view, is hers to decide, not her relatives' or her community elders'.

The feminist reply. The syllabus sets the question within the feminist public/private debate and lists the 1985 essay "The Myth of State Intervention in the Family" among its readings. Susan Moller Okin argues that the family must be a main unit in any discussion of justice. A theory such as Rawls's, which leaves the household to private non-interference, has nothing to say about the oppression inside it: the unpaid work of the home, from meals to the bearing and raising of children, falls almost wholly on women, and that imbalance follows them into public life. A working mother in Kanpur who still cooks every meal and sits up with the baby every night, while her husband's evenings are his own, is the pattern in miniature. NCERT shows the same pattern in the division of labour and the double burden produced by patriarchy. And the state is never wholly absent: customs and legal systems have long protected unequal arrangements, so equality requires that the law stop protecting them. Intervention is then required to protect the equal rights of the family's members.

Where intervention is justified. (1) To secure children's rights: a constitutional right to primary education stays a right on paper for children whom household poverty keeps out of school; think of a twelve-year-old in a brick-kiln family that moves every season, who never stays long enough in one school to learn. (2) To end legal support for inequality: where a custom with the force of law gives, say, the husband alone the right to decide where the family lives, equality requires that the law stop protecting it. (3) To share the work of the household: radical feminists demanded an equal sharing of child care and housework. (4) To support family work so that women can enjoy equal rights outside it, since women sometimes need to be treated differently in order to enjoy the same rights as men; an employer that offers flexible hours to parents of young children, so that mothers are not pushed out of their jobs, is an example.

Limits. Intervention must protect persons, not enforce one pattern of family life. On reform of personal laws, NCERT's view is that the state should help change along by backing the liberal and democratic voices inside each religious community; it should not force reform through, or let one group force it, and nor should it keep entirely out of the matter. And consensual adult choices about one's own life remain the individual's.

The public/private divide and the feminist critique

The conventional division. The common view marks off a public sphere (state, law, politics, the market), the proper business of politics and of justice, from a private sphere (family and household) left to non-interference by government. NCERT shows how patriarchy builds on the division: women are made responsible for private and domestic matters, men for work in the public domain.

The feminist critique. Feminists make four points. (1) The division hides power. Calling the home private puts its arrangements, above all who does its unpaid daily work and the raising of children, beyond the reach of any test of fairness; a theory of justice that stops at the front door is, for that reason, incomplete. (2) The line is not real in practice. Women do not stay on the private side of it: most of them also work outside the home and still carry the housework alone, the double burden, and what they lose at home they lose again in public life. (3) The private is already shaped by law: unequal social arrangements have been protected by customs and by legal systems, so equality requires that the law stop protecting them; in India, personal laws on marriage, inheritance and other family matters are debated precisely because they may treat women unequally. Non-intervention is therefore itself a choice. (4) The slogan the personal is political (coined in the second wave by Carol Hanisch, and placed at the centre by radical feminists) says that women's personal lives reflect the power structures of a patriarchal society, and are therefore a matter of politics, not of private morality.

What follows. Feminists conclude that the public/private distinction and all forms of gender inequality can and should be eliminated: radical feminists sought to bring sexual politics into public discussion and to secure an equal sharing of child care and household work.

Cautions. Privacy remains a value. NCERT treats it as a right of individuals, one that can conflict with another person's freedom of expression and must then be balanced against it; reading a person's private messages and forwarding them to a family group without her consent is the kind of act it rules out. Liberals add that decisions about one's own life belong to the individual, not to the family, caste or community. The task is therefore to protect privacy as a right of persons and not as a shield for households.

Conclusion

A defensible position is selective intervention: where the family is a site of injustice or violence, the state both may and should act to protect the equal rights of its members, as feminists argue; for the rest, in matters of consensual choice and everyday family life, the state should leave persons free, as liberals insist.