Reflections on feminist legal thought

Abstract

For close to a decade I have been reading work by feminist law scholars to learn two things: How does the law treat women and gender difference? How do feminists think the law should treat women and gender difference? In this essay, my remarks do not do justice to the many feminist analyses of law.1 Instead I consider themes that unfolded during the 1980s around the meanings of "equality" in light of differences between men and women, as well as among them. Although I draw mostly from work by U.S. feminists, I will also include work by Canadian, Australian, and British feminists. My aim is to make sense of feminist legal analyses from a non-lawyer perspective, and my reason for doing so is straightforward: those of us working in the sociology of law, crime, and justice cannot ignore this body of work. At the same time, we have something to contribute to it, namely, our theories and research on how gender relations organize social life and social institutions.