Debating Women's Equality
Price: $45.00
Subtitle: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective
Author: Ute Gerhard
Foreword: Linda M. G. Zerilli
Translators: Allison Brown and Belinda Cooper
Subject: Law/Gender Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2905-0
Pages: 264 pp.
Series: Rutgers Series on Women and Politics
Praise for Debating Women's Equality
"Gerhard attempts to clear an intellectual space in which it would be possible to reconstruct an argument for equality that avoids the twin pitfalls of abstract universalism and cultural relativism. She does not produce a formula for equality or a model of legal reasoning that could be applied in rule-like fashion to every particular case. Rather, she directs us to attend to the social and political context in which equality arguments are made and to the importance of a third party for making claims with universal validity. More importantly, she reminds us that equality claims are political judgments that 'cannot be imported or prescribed; they apply only if the people involved are in a position to claim and defend them as rights.' In short, Debating Women's Equality directs us back to the quotidian practice of feminist activism"-Linda M. G. Zerilli, from the Foreword
Description
Ute Gerhard places women's rights at the center of legal philosophy and sees the struggle for equality as a driving force in the history of law. Focusing on Europe and taking the course of German feminism and law as primary examples, she incorporates the various social contexts in which questions of equality and gender difference have been raised into an analysis that challenges misconceptions about the principle of equality itself.
Gerhard reviews the history of women's movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and traces the historical development of claims to gender equality as well as obstacles to these claims. Critically exploring the influence of philosophers such as Rousseau, Fichte, and Kant, Gerhard concludes that women need to be recognized as both equal and different-that claims to equality do not simply eliminate difference, but also articulate it. Mindful of the social and political contexts surrounding equality arguments, Gerhard probes three legal issues: women's rights in the public sphere, especially the right to vote; women's legal capacities in private law, or the legal doctrine of so-called gender tutelage; and women's human rights, a prominent concern in the current international women's movement.
About the Author
Ute Gerhard is professor of sociology and director of the Cornelia Goethe Center for Womens Studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitt in Frankfurt am Main.
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Price: $45.00
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