In Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin explores how states abuse laws and infringe on rights to police women and their pregnancies. This book looks at the impact of these often arbitrary laws which can result in the punishment, incarceration, and humiliation of women, particularly poor women and women of color. Frequently based on unscientific claims of endangering a fetus, these laws allow extraordinary powers to state authorities over reproductive freedom and pregnancies. In this book, Michele Goodwin discusses real examples of women whose pregnancies have been controlled by the law and what has led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world for a woman to be pregnant.

In The Common Law Inside the Female Body, Anita Bernstein explains why lawyers seeking gender progress from primary legal materials should start with the common law. Despite its reputation for supporting conservatism and inequality, today's common law shares important commitments with feminism, namely in precepts and doctrines that strengthen the freedom of individuals and from there the struggle against the subjugation of women. By re-invigorating both the common law - with a focus on crimes, contracts, torts, and property - and feminist jurisprudence, this highly original work anticipates a vital future for a pair of venerable jurisprudential traditions. It should be read by anyone interested in understanding how the common law delivers an extraordinary degree of liberty and security to all persons - women included.

This fourth edition of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks's prize-winning survey features significant changes to every chapter, designed to reflect the newest scholarship. Global issues have been threaded throughout the book, while still preserving the clear thematic structure of previous editions. Thus readers will find expanded discussions of gendered racial hierarchies, migration, missionaries, and consumer goods. In addition, there is enhanced coverage of recent theoretical directions; the ideas, beliefs, and practices of ordinary people; early industrialization; women's learning, letter writing, and artistic activities; emotions and sentiments; single women and same-sex relations; masculinities; mixed-race and enslaved women; and the life course from birth to death. With geographically broad coverage, including Russia, Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula, this remains the leading text on women and gender in Europe in this period. Accompanying this essential reading is a completely revised website featuring extensive updated bibliographies, web links, and primary source material.

The University of Cape Town holds an annual Celebrating Africa Month, a programme designed to honour the university’s connectedness and engagement in and around Africa. The various activities that take place during the month culminate in The Big Debate, a panel discussion on a topic of African relevance. The panel is made up of intellectuals from UCT and around the continent. Panelists who have taken part in The Big Debate over the years have all contributed written pieces to a series of books called the Celebrating Africa Series in the hands of the managing editor, Emma Arogundade, and series editors Prof. Harry Garuba and Prof. Evance Kalula.

Contested Intimacies: Sexuality, Gender and the Law in Africa is the latest title in this series, following on from 2014’s Big Debate, the topic of which was Sexuality and the Law.

A timely collection of essays, Contested Intimacies offers five unique analyses of the ways that sexuality, gender, and the law interact in eastern and southern African countries, primarily Uganda and South Africa. The authors argue strenuously for social critiques of the law that attend to the intricate intersections between different aspects of identity, whether class, race, national identity, within national, continental, and global debates about the status of gender and sexual minorities. In one way or another, all of the essays in this book also name patriarchy and its interest in validating heteronormative bonds as the chief motivation for anti-homosexuality and ‘decency’ laws in Africa.

With such incisive research, Contested Intimacies creates a critical space in which feminists and LGBTI communities, along with their allies, can forge new strategies in the effort to create a more just world, whether at the level of immediate locality, nation, or the continent.

Feminism and liberalism need each other, argues Judith Baer. Her provocative book, Feminist Post-Liberalism, refutes both conservative and radical critiques. To make her case, she rejects classical liberalism in favor of a welfare-and possibly socialist-post-liberalism that will prevent capitalism and a concentration of power that reinforces male supremacy. Together, feminism and liberalism can better elucidate controversies in American politics, law, and society. Baer emphasizes that tolerance and self-examination are virtues, but within both feminist and liberal thought these virtues have been carried to extremes. Feminist theory needs liberalism's respect for reason, while liberal theory needs to incorporate emotion. Liberalism focuses too narrowly on the individual, while feminism needs a dose of individualism. Feminist Post-Liberalism includes anthropological foundations of male dominance to explore topics ranging from crime to cultural appropriation. Baer develops a theory that is true to the principles of both feminist and liberal ideologies.

Illegal. Underground. Deadly. August 1, 1875, Toronto: The naked body of a young woman is discovered in a pine box, half-buried in a ditch along Bloor Street. So begins Jeannie's Demise, a real-life Victorian melodrama that played out in the bustling streets and courtrooms of "Toronto the Good," cast with all the lurid stock characters of the genre. Historian Ian Radforth brings to life an era in which abortion was illegal, criminal proceedings were a spectator sport, and coded advertisements for back-alley procedures ran in the margins of newspapers. At the centre of the story is the elusive and doomed Jeannie Gilmour, a minister's daughter whose independent spirit can only be glimpsed through secondhand accounts and courtroom reports. As rumours swirl about her final weeks and her abortionists stand trial for their lives, a riveted public grapples with questions of guilt and justice, innocence and intent. Radforth's intensive research grounds the tragedy of Jeannie's demise in sharp historical analysis, presenting over a dozen case studies of similar trials in Victorian-era Canada. Part gripping procedural, part meticulous autopsy, Jeannie's Demise opens a rare window into the hidden history of a woman's right to choose.

Nancy Gertner launched her legal career by defending antiwar activist Susan Saxe, who was on trial for her role in a robbery that resulted in the murder of a police officer. After this high-profile, highly charged case, Gertner continued to cause a stir in case after riveting case. She threw herself into criminal and civil cases focused on women's rights and civil liberties, establishing herself as a talented and unrepentant advocate for women. Now she looks back on that storied career of groundbreaking firsts and tells of her struggle to succeed personally and professionally while working on benchmark cases.

This book seeks to rebalance the relationship between comparison and justification to achieve more effective equality and non-discrimination law. As one of the most distinguished equality lawyers of his generation, having appeared in over 40 cases in the House of Lords and the Supreme Court and many leading cases in the Court of Justice, Robin Allen QC is well placed to explore this critical issue. He shows how the principle of equality is nothing if not founded on apt comparisons. By examining the changing way men and women's work has been compared over the last 100 years he shows the importance of understanding the framework for comparison. With these insights, he addresses contemporary problems of age discrimination and conflict of equality rights.

Winner of the 2022 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) Book Award Winner of the 2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition What It Feels Like interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Stephanie Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader claims for justice. Investigating anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances, and the #MeToo movement, Larson reveals how our language privileges male perspectives and, more deeply, how it is shaped by systems of power-patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity. Interrogating how these systems work to propagate masculine commitments to "science" and "hard evidence," Larson finds that US culture holds a general mistrust of testimony by women, stereotyping it as "emotional." But she also gives us hope for change, arguing that testimonies grounded in the bodily, material expression of violation are necessary for giving voice to victims of sexual violence and presenting, accurately, the scale of these crimes. Larson makes a case for visceral rhetorics, theorizing them as powerful forms of communication and persuasion. Demonstrating the communicative power of bodily feeling, Larson challenges the long-held commitment to detached, distant, rationalized discourses of sexual harassment and rape. Timely and poignant, the book offers a much-needed corrective to our legal and political discourses.

Revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and '80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm in the #MeToo era #MeToo's stunning explosion on social media in October 2017 radically changed-and amplified-conversations about sexual violence as it revealed how widespread the issue is and toppled prominent celebrities and politicians. But, as the movement spread, a conflict emerged among feminist supporters and detractors about how punishment should be doled out and how justice should be served. The New Sex Wars reveals that these clashes are nothing new. Delving into the contentious debates from the '70s and '80s, Brenda Cossman traces the striking echoes in the feminist divisions of this earlier period. In exploring the history of past conflicts-the resistance to finding common ground, the media's pleasure in portraying the debates as polarized cat fights, the simplification of viewpoints as pro- and anti-sex-she shows how they have come to shape the #MeToo era. From the '70s to today, Cossman examines tensions between the need for recognition and protection under the law, and the colossal and ongoing failure of that law to redress historic injustice. By circumventing law altogether, #MeToo has led us to question whether justice can be served outside of the courtroom. Cossman argues for a different way forward-one based on reparative models that focus on shared desired outcomes and the willingness to understand the other side. Thoughtful and compelling, The New Sex Wars explores what can been learned from these stories, what traps we repeatedly fall into, how we have been denied our anger, and where to begin to make law work.

A transformative progressive politics requires the state's reimagining. But how should the state be reimagined, and what can invigorate this process? In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper explores the unexpected contribution a legal drama of withdrawal might make to conceptualizing a more socially just, participative state. In recent years, as gay rights have expanded, some conservative Christians-from charities to guesthouse owners and county clerks-have denied people inclusion, goods, and services because of their sexuality. In turn, liberal public bodies have withdrawn contracts, subsidies, and career progression from withholding conservative Christians. Cooper takes up the discourses and practices expressed in this legal conflict to animate and support an account of the state as heterogeneous, plural, and erotic. Arguing for the urgent need to put new imaginative forms into practice, Cooper examines how dissident and experimental institutional thinking materialize as people assert a democratic readiness to recraft the state.

Too much attention is paid to the absence of women leaders around the world rather than their presence, leaving a gap in our understanding of the difference women leaders make on the lives of fellow women. The Woman President presents a unique comparative study of women's leadership and the law, offering new ways for understanding the impact of female presidential leadership on women's everyday lives by analysing the legal legacies of four women presidents: Corazon Aquino (1986-1992), Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001-2010), Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001-2004), and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (1994-2005). It uses a new and innovative methodology, the Gender Legislative Index, to score laws enacted during these four tenures from a women's rights perspective. The findings challenge and expand our understanding of what constitutes a woman's issue, bringing within its gendered analysis labour law reform, democracy, anti-corruption, poverty-alleviation, and pro-peace interventions, alongside more oft-considered terrain such as gender-based violence, reproductive rights, gender equality quotas, and women's rights at work. This book also offers important insights into the institutional and social mechanisms that enable women leaders to lead for women, including women's movements and global networks of women presidents and prime ministers. The words of women leaders themselves-both from personal interviews and speeches-bring depth to the assessments and conclusions drawn. The Woman President offers new tools and sharpens old ones to provide an essential comparative contribution to our knowledge about the dynamics and impact of female presidencies, drawing from the realities of the Asia region.

This book focuses on the socio-political environment that allows for the impactful work of NGOs through their proximity to local communities. The book showcases how this space has helped South African women's rights NGOs to bring about crucial legal reforms, which are quite relevant to women's lived realities. Recognizing its limitations, the South African state encourages NGOs to work freely on the ground and with state institutions to ameliorate the conditions for women's rights. The outcome of this state-NGO dynamic can be seen in the numerous human rights gains achieved by NGOs in general, and by women's rights organizations specifically. In addition, vulnerable communities such as women living under customary law have a significantly better chance to access justice. The book then demonstrates the opposite scenario, using Egypt as a case study, where NGOs are viewed as a national threat, and consequently operate under restrictive rules.

The distinct personal laws that govern the major religious groups are a major aspect of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, and support specific gendered rights in family life. Nation and Family is the most comprehensive study to date of the public discourses, processes of social mobilization, legislation and case law that formed India's three major personal law systems, which govern Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. It for the first time systematically compares Indian experiences to those in a wide range of other countries that inherited personal laws specific to religious group, sect, or ethnic group. The book shows why India's postcolonial policy-makers changed the personal laws they inherited less than the rulers of Turkey and Tunisia, but far more than those of Algeria, Syria and Lebanon, and increased women's rights for the most part, contrary to the trend in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan and Nigeria since the 1970s. Subramanian demonstrates that discourses of community and features of state-society relations shape the course of personal law. Ruling elites' discourses about the nation, its cultural groups and its traditions interact with the state-society relations that regimes inherit and the projects of regimes to change their relations with society. These interactions influence the pattern of multiculturalism, the place of religion in public policy and public life, and the forms of regulation of family life. The book shows how the greater engagement of political elites with initiatives among the Hindu majority and the predominant place they gave Hindu motifs in discourses about the nation shaped Indian multiculturalism and secularism, contrary to current understandings. In exploring the significant role of communitarian discourses in shaping state-society relations and public policy, it takes "state-in-society" approaches to comparative politics, political sociology, and legal studies in new directions.

This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

Erika Bachiochi offers an original look at the development of feminism in the United States, advancing a vision of rights that rests upon our responsibilities to others. In The Rights of Women, Erika Bachiochi explores the development of feminist thought in the United States. Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Bachiochi presents the intellectual history of a lost vision of women's rights, seamlessly weaving philosophical insight, biographical portraits, and constitutional law to showcase the once predominant view that our rights properly rest upon our concrete responsibilities to God, self, family, and community. Bachiochi proposes a philosophical and legal framework for rights that builds on the communitarian tradition of feminist thought as seen in the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Drawing on the insight of prominent figures such as Sarah Grimke, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mary Ann Glendon, this book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women's rights in America and its critique of the movement's current trajectory. The Rights of Women provides a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern political insight that locates the family's vital work at the very center of personal and political self-government. Bachiochi demonstrates that when rights are properly understood as a civil and political apparatus born of the natural duties we owe to one another, they make more visible our personal responsibilities and more viable our common life together. This smart and sophisticated application of Wollstonecraft's thought will serve as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom. The Rights of Women will interest students and scholars of political theory, gender and women's studies, constitutional law, and all readers interested in women's rights.

Among the many important tools feminist legal theorists have given scholars is that of anti-essentialism: all women are not created equal, and privilege varies greatly by circumstances,particularly that of race and class. Yet at the same time, feminist legal theory tends to view men through an essentialist lens, in which men are created equal. The study of masculinities, inspired by feminist theory to explore the construction of manhood and masculinity, questions the real circumstances of men, not in order to deny men's privilege but to explore in particular how privilege is constructed, and what price is paid for it. In this groundbreaking work, feminist legal theorist Nancy E. Dowd exhorts readers to apply the anti-essentialist model-so dominant in feminist jurisprudence-to the study of masculinities. She demonstrates how men's treatment by the law and society in general varies by race, economic position, sexuality, and other factors. She applies these insights to both boys and men, examining how masculinities analysis exposes both privilege and subordination. She examines men's experience of fatherhood and sexual abuse, and boys' experience in the contexts of education and juvenile justice. Ultimately, Dowd calls for a more inclusive feminist theory, which, by acknowledging the study of masculinities, can broaden our understanding of privilege and subordination.

The relationship between class and intimate violence against women is much misunderstood. While many studies of intimate violence focus on poor and working-class women, few examine the issue comparatively in terms of class privilege and class disadvantage. James Ptacek draws on in-depth interviews with sixty women from wealthy, professional, working-class, and poor communities to investigate how social class shapes both women's experiences of violence and the responses of their communities to this violence. Ptacek's framing of women's victimization as "social entrapment" links private violence to public responses and connects social inequalities to the dilemmas that women face.

Two women a week are killed by a spouse or partner. Every seven minutes a woman is raped. Now is the time for change. 'Fascinating and chilling' Caroline Criado Perez, bestselling author of Invisible Women Helena Kennedy, one of our most eminent lawyers and defenders of human rights, examines the pressing new evidence that women are being discriminated against when it comes to the law. From the shocking lack of female judges to the scandal of female prisons and the double discrimination experienced by BAME women, Kennedy shows with force and fury that change for women must start at the heart of what makes society just. 'An unflinching look at women in the justice system... an important book because it challenges acquiescence to everyday sexism and inspires change' The Times

An RCMP sting caught Nicole Doucet (Ryan) trying to hire a hitman to kill her ex-husband. It was supposed to be an open-and-shut case. It wasn't. No Legal Way Out details the process, the media coverage, and the legal implications of R v Ryan, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The outcome of the case limited the legal options for women seeking to escape abuse and had a damaging impact on public perceptions of domestic violence. This unabashedly feminist analysis explains why the court, the police, and the media let down all women trapped by intimate partner terrorism.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the case of Corbett v Corbett, a landmark in terms of law's engagement with sexual identity, marriage, and transgender rights. The judgement was handed down in 1970, but the decision has shaped decades of debate about the law's control and recognition of non-normative gender identities. The decision in this case - that the marriage between the Hon. Arthur Corbett and April Ashley was void on the grounds that April Ashley had been born male - has been profoundly influential across the common law world, and came as a dramatic and intolerant intervention in developing discussions about the relationships between medicine, law, questions of sex versus gender, and personal identity. The case raises fundamental questions concerning law in its historical and intellectual context, in particular relating to the centrality of ordinary language for legal interpretation, and this book will be of interest to students and scholars of language and law, legal history, gender and sexuality.

Popular representations of third-world sex workers as sex slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist legal reforms that are harmful and ineffective, and public health initiatives that provide only marginal protection of sex workers' rights. In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets in India.

Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective.

The first wave of trailblazing female law professors and the stage they set for American democracy. When it comes to breaking down barriers for women in the workplace, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's name speaks volumes for itself-but, as she clarifies in the foreword to this long-awaited book, there are too many trailblazing names we do not know. Herma Hill Kay, former Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and Ginsburg's closest professional colleague, wrote Paving the Way to tell the stories of the first fourteen female law professors at ABA- and AALS-accredited law schools in the United States. Kay, who became the fifteenth such professor, labored over the stories of these women in order to provide an essential history of their path for the more than 2,000 women working as law professors today and all of their feminist colleagues. Because Herma Hill Kay, who died in 2017, was able to obtain so much first-hand information about the fourteen women who preceded her, Paving the Way is filled with details, quiet and loud, of each of their lives and careers from their own perspectives. Kay wraps each story in rich historical context, lest we forget the extraordinarily difficult times in which these women lived. Paving the Way is not just a collection of individual stories of remarkable women but also a well-crafted interweaving of law and society during a historical period when women's voices were often not heard and sometimes actively muted. The final chapter connects these first fourteen women to the "second wave" of women law professors who achieved tenure-track appointments in the 1960s and 1970s, carrying on the torch and analogous challenges. This is a decidedly feminist project, one that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg advocated for tirelessly and admired publicly in the years before her death.

Exploring the unintentional production of seemingly feminist outcomes In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism examines how a range of underlying mechanisms-gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories-afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, their research offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, "accidental" developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. Ballakrishnen examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist. In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, Accidental Feminism forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives.