from the female line" - a common legal provision of the period whereby only men may inherit property. If the Bennet girls do not marry well, they will be almost penniless when their father dies. The fact that the heir of the estate, Mr. Bennet's nephew Mr. Collins, is a buffoon who already has a comfortable living of his own, might suggest that Austen considers entailment unfair.

And according to critic Julia Prewitt Brown's essay "The Social History of Pride and Prejudice":

• Women in the novel have less power and authority than men, but English matrimonial law did give power to and protect some of its women: they could retain money and property even in marriage.  She says, "Mr. Bennet cannot alter the entail requiring that his estate go to the nearest male relation, but he can settle money on his daughters that, if proper legal measures are taken, will remain their own after marriage."
• Many men, e.g., Mr. Collins, see marriage as the only salvation from "spinsterhood," the ultimate socio-economic death of a woman.
• Austen creates realistic women and a realistic hero in Elizabeth who is without exaggeration or sentimentality, who exists in society and marriage, not spitefully outside it.
• Austen uses her satirical artistry to subtely call out the injustices made against women by men without alienating men or romanticizing women.

The best example of gender injustice comes through the example of the charming bad boy Mr. Wickham.  Here is a man who has repeatedly done foolish, unwise things and yet enjoys a solid reputation in society, and could still have his pick of young ladies to marry if he so desired.  Even after he absconds with the foolish Lydia, his reputation remains relatively unscathed, while Lydia becomes a marked, fallen, disreputable woman.  If Wickham were to walk away from the Lydia situation without marrying her, he could probably have gone on to lead a life unmarked by his actions, and continue on to find another girl of some means to marry.  Lydia on the other hand, if she hadn't married, would have been ruined.  It would have been the end of her chances in society, of ever finding a suitable match, or being considered worthy of any sort of social standing.

This demonstrates the great injustices that were found in Austen's time, in regards to gender.  Women were held responsible for any bad behavior, while men could do pretty much as they pleased.  Women also became a "burden" on their parents if they didn't get married (hence Charlotte's marriage to Mr. Collins to get out of her parent's house), and were held accountable for their family's foibles and faults (Mr. Darcy convincing Bingham, in part, to walk away from Jane because of her silly family).  Overall, women really got the short end of the stick when it came to freedom to pursue love and marriage separate from reputation, money, burden of family and societal norms.

I hope that those thoughts helped a bit; good luck!

As a reader, you first read the story for the sake of the plot events and the style and themes of a work, but as that is happening, you may also consider alternative perspectives of a work.  When you do this, it is like you are standing a bit outside the text and looking at it through a specific lens to evaluate what is happening in the text.  You have been asked to look at this classic novel by Jane Austen to ask yourself, "What would a feminist say about this novel?  What is Austen intentionally, or unintentionally revealing about the place of women in society?"

Feminist criticism evaluates novels for what they illustrate about the role of women in society; how they struggle to be seen as independent individuals in a traditionally patriarchal society.  This criticism also evaluates the relationships between men and women.  Clearly this novel is a bounty for the reader who wants to create a feminist reading a novel.

The novel is dominated by female characters and focuses on their many varied attitudes about marriage.  This right there would draw the attention of feminist reader.  There are NO women in this novel who can or who are even interested in living an autonomous life outside the realm of marriage.  Getting married, for any number of additional motivations (love, financial security, sexual relations) is the primary subject of this novel.  Austen is drawing a picture of a society in which women are almost completely dependent on men for financial and emotional security.  While Elizabeth's quest for marriage for true love only is perhaps more admirable than Charlotte's practical attitude about marriage for financial security, it doesn't change the fact that Elizabeth would be absolutely destitute without a marriage of some sort.  Their father's estate is entitled to a MALE heir, and the daughters will all be literally out on the street if he should die before the girls are safely married.  (Or at least one of the girls be safely married to man of enough means who can support the unmarried sisters.)

To do a complete feminist reading of the novel, you will need to explore and prove the various similarities and differences the women in the novel have about marriage.  You could look at how the men treat the women -- what are their prejudices?  How do the men, ultimately, "hold all the cards?"  You could evaluate the strength of the female characters in comparison to the failings of the male characters -- looking specifically at Mr. Bennet, Mr. Collins, and Mr. Wickham.  You could think about the significance of the fact that this very satirical novel is written by a woman about the circumstances of women at the beginning of the 19th century.  This novel is filled with angles from which to explore what a feminist would notice or have to say about it.

Post-colonial literature is a term that describes literature written after a country’s colonial period.  It typically describes how a new country is formed, and recovers from the legacy of colonialism.  Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, is novel of Victorian England.  While England itself was never a colony, it did have many colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas.  Many of the ideas of Victorian England were imposed upon some of these colonies of Great Britain.  For example, ideas relating to property and marriage were brought over. 

Pride and Prejudice describes issues of social class, especially related to property and marriage.  Social class and marrying to improve one’s fortune were just as common among the expatriates who traveled from Victorian England to its various colonies.  They brought their prejudices, ideas and traditions with them.

Realistically, Pride and Prejudice is the novel of Austen's least susceptible to post-colonial analysis. To apply a post-colonial reading to it is more an exercise in critical ingenuity than a major contribution to our understanding of the novel. The main entry points into the novel for the post-colonial critic are the episodes involving the military. It is possible to analyze Lydia's complicity with her own abduction by Wickham as parallel to the complicity of women in countries colonized by the British in having relationships with their opressors in the British military. Another line of analysis would be to look at Austen's metaphorical descriptions of balls as battles and argue that Britain's external colonialism and militarization affected its internal gender relations by reframing class and gender within the ideological structure of strategic and militarized oppression.

The Jane Austen reader can definitely feel a sarcastic undertone within the lines of most of her writings when it comes to the themes of gender injustice, love, marriage, and relationships.

Pride and Prejudice is particularly strong in the topic of gender injustice because the novel shows how women cannot get within society unless they get married. This situation was illustrated with the case of the Bennet entailment which would have left Mr. Collins, a distant cousin, as the only heir to the Bennet estate just because he was a man. Hence, the Bennet women would have had to marry in order to move to their future husbands' households instead.

A similar situation can be seen in Sense and Sensibility when the Dashwood women had to vacate their home in favor of their half brother, who also became sole heir to his father's inheritance just because the law stated that men were the only ones to inherit.

Therefore, Austen followed a similar axiom to present the topic of gender injustice in both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Namely, that women were literally ruled by men in society, that marriage was the only way that they could come into society as worthy individuals and that, as wives, they were one of the many possessions of the husband.

This shows that Austen was not only aware but clearly against these accepted notions and used sarcasm to expose the ridiculousness of these social rules.

This is a very interesting question. I am sure that we can say a lot of things, but here is my attempt at your very good question. Perhaps we can say that the dominant society is the colonial power. In this instance, we can say that men and the social structure that they have created is the dominant power in view. They are the ones who are spinning the ideology of what is proper. The colonized, then, are the women. But here is the twist. The colonized see through the power dynamics and they now begining to challenge it and even having some success. Good luck.