POLSC 219 Feminist Legal Theory

Early feminist legal theory

• Framed women’s inequality as broadly reaching, based on the supremacy of man, unequal allocation of power in family, state, and church, and different moral codes applied to men and women

• Focused on legal rights and other social/economic issues like the right to divorce, educational opportunity/employment, etc.

Protectionist approach

Involved laws that help women by treating them as different—special rules because women are different (Sojourner Truth critiqued this)

Equality-based approach

Laws with formal equality/sameness in rights and legal status (seen in Declaration of Sentiments, Married Women’s Property Act, core claim of the suffrage movement)

Why did the suffrage movement become racist?

• Hoped to get support from conservatives and southerners, so they emphasized value of granting vote to women to counterbalance votes of Blacks and male immigrants

• Suggested educational requirements

• Also refused to support Black women

• Southern states opposed women’s suffrage to the end, so racism was fruitless and divided them from natural allies

League of Women Voters

• Reformation of NAWSA

• Strictly nonpartisan

• Members pressed for many social programs supported by women reformers of Progressive era

National Woman’s Party

• Intended to get Equal Rights Amendment passed

• Social reformers and trade union activists opposed the ERA for fear of its impact upon sex-specific protective legislation they worked so hard to pass

Declaration of Sentiments

• Central document of this period, where their efforts were mostly concentrated upon reform at the state level to improve women's legal status

• List of grievances is an attack on discriminatory statutes and a statement of fundamental feminist principles

Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?”

• Emphasized strength, which contrasted with the idea of “true womanhood”

• Women had to cultivate virtues of domesticity, purity and submissiveness

• She has been through a lot, and she is still a woman

What happened after black men refused to support women in getting the vote after the Civil War?

• Rupture of their alliance within the larger equal rights movement

• Split within the woman movement

  • NWSA, which continued wide agenda under DoS

  • AWSA, which focused solely on suffrage

What happened when the struggle for suffrage grew longer?

• Movement became increasingly focused on that one goal, dropping other concerns

• Recharacterized demand for suffrage, originally based on natural law, as merited by women’s traditional role as mothers and critical to their ability to bring morality into political life

• Allied with temperance movement

• Also became more racist and nativist

• Black women focused on their own separate issues

What happened after suffrage was granted to women?

• Coalition that achieved it collapsed

• Suffragists were so concentrated on one political goal that they excluded other social and economic issues—getting the vote didn’t solve all women’s issues, so interest in further activism waned

• Conservatism and tactical expediency of second and third generation leaders separated movement from earlier and broader critique of women’s place in society, losing ground for longer-lasting movement