Women’s Marginalisation in Literature: Patriarchy, Identity, Intersectionality, and Resistance

Abstract

Women’s marginalisation remains a central concern in feminist literary studies because gender inequality is sustained through social, domestic, economic, cultural, and representational structures. This article offers a critical qualitative synthesis of selected scholarship published between 1984 and 2025, tracing major shifts in the study of female oppression, identity, and resistance. The analysis identifies patriarchy, domestic confinement, marital control, bodily violence, economic dependency, educational exclusion, and silencing as recurrent forms of marginalisation. It also demonstrates a movement from generalised accounts of women’s oppression towards intersectional approaches attentive to caste, class, race, religion, colonialism, and economic inequality. Recent studies increasingly represent women not only as victims but as subjects who negotiate oppressive structures through education, mobility, economic independence, solidarity, refusal, storytelling, and literary expression. The article argues that women’s writing functions as a counter-discourse that makes marginalised experience visible and reclaims female agency. It concludes by identifying the need for comparative, interdisciplinary literary research connecting domestic space, identity, narrative form, and changing strategies of resistance.