Feminist legal theory

No legal scholar who engages in a decently regular perusal of a well-stocked law library can fail to have noticed the development over the last decade of a growing body of what might broadly be described as feminist legal scholarship. Indeed, the breadth of this literature is greater than that reflected in most law libraries. This is because much of the work is 'interdisciplinary' and finds its way (when it is ordered at all) into Social Studies and Philosophy or Politics libraries rather than into the Law library. Needless to say, any attempt to enumerate unifying criteria to identify what should count as 'feminist legal scholarship' is fraught with difficulty: do all articles and books written by women and dealing with subjects of concern and interest to other women automatically count? Can feminist legal scholarship be written by men? What criteria can be produced which serve to identify feminism as a politically informed intellectual approach? Without becoming too agonized about these, admittedly important, issues, it will be useful to set the books we are considering in this article in context by tracing three main stages of development in recent feminist writing about law. Naturally enough, the passing of legislation (or other means of legal recognition such as constitutional interpretation) prescribing equal pay for women and men and forbidding discrimination in certain other spheres on grounds of sex provided, in many countries, a catalyst for renewed academic interest in the issue of women's legal position and treatment. Thus both research and critical analysis leading up to the passing, in Britain, of the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, combined with our accession to the EEC and its standards of equal treatment, have generated a lively debate about the success or otherwise of legal regulation in improving women's position in society. Furthermore, the debate has focused not only on discrimination covered by the legislation but also on forms of social behaviour which are discriminatory and disadvantageous to women yet which lie at or clearly beyond the margins of the legislation. For example, major disparities in the substance and operation of taxation and social security laws and the disadvantaged position of women in the family became important points of concern as the limitations of the legislation began to be understood. By the same token, the Woman's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s stimulated debate and heightened awareness of a more general sexism in prevailing culture.