Concept
Feminist legal theory
Overview
Feminist legal theory, also known as feminist jurisprudence, is a field of legal scholarship and activism that analyzes how law contributes to women's subordination and patriarchal power structures. The project of feminist legal theory is twofold. First, feminist jurisprudence seeks to explain how the law plays a role in maintaining women's subordinate status. Feminist legal theory recognizes that the legal system was built primarily by and for patriarchal intentions, often forgetting important experiences women, girls, and marginalized communities face.
Second, feminist legal theory is dedicated to changing women's status through a rework of the law and its approach to gender. It is a critique of American law that was created to change the way women were treated and how judges had applied the law to keep women in the same position they had been in for years. The women who worked in this area studied the law's function in holding women in a lower place in society than men based on gender assumptions (which judges have relied on to make their decisions). This movement originated in the 1960s and 1970s to achieve equality for women by challenging laws that made distinctions based on sex. One example of this sex-based discrimination during these times was the struggles for equal admission and access to their desired education. The women's experiences and persistence to fight for equal access led to low rates of retention and mental health issues, including anxiety disorders. Through their experiences, they were influenced to create new legal theory that fought for their rights and those that came after them in education and broader marginalized communities which led to the creation of the legal scholarship feminist legal theory in the 1970s and 1980s. It was crucial to allowing women to become their own people through becoming financially independent and having the ability to find real jobs that were not available to them before due to discrimination in employment. The foundation of feminist legal theory reflects these second and third-wave feminist struggles. However, feminist legal theorists today extend their work beyond overt discrimination by employing a variety of approaches to understand and address how the law contributes to gender inequality.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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For on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples).
Plato, The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2
States what Feminist legal theory is.
Again, since the first or spontaneous stage of education is entirely to be left to women, it is most desirable that they should themselves have passed through the second or systematic stage. The only department with which they need not concern themselves, is what is called professional education. But this, as I have before observed, is not susceptible of regular organization. Professional skill can only be acquired…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
States what Feminist legal theory is.
Claims are advanced in the name of justice, and resisted in the name of tradition and prescriptive right. Each side honestly believes that it deserves to triumph, because two theories of society exist side by side in our thought, and men choose, unconsciously, the theory which fits their case. Because the battle is long and arduous all general theory is gradually forgotten; in the end, nothing remains but…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
States what Feminist legal theory is.
Related ideas
- Feminist theory
- Feminism
- Jurisprudence
- Liberalism
- Postmodernism
- Empathy
- Libertarianism
- Gender
- Violence
- Catharine A. MacKinnon
- Discrimination
- Robin West
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Conventionalism.