Law is often perceived as an instrument that can effect social change. While this might be so, it must be complemented by the necessary financial and human resources to make the law effective. Natalie Persadie explains that, among developing countries, such as Trinidad and Tobago, the achievement of legal advances for women--at either the international or national levels--is particularly difficult where practical measures are not subsequently implemented. This is, perhaps, attributable to a lack of political will. Important issues such as gender equality and domestic violence are not given priority and laws aimed at protecting women and promoting women's rights are ineffective, scant, or unenforced. Gender justice can only be realized through a multilevel approach from above and, more importantly, from below, as women have the potential to effect real national and international legal and institutional change to ensure gender equality at both levels.
Based on original empirical research, this book explores retributive and gender justice, the potentials and limits of agency, and the correlation of transitional justice and social change through case studies of current dynamics in post-violence countries such Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, East Timor, Columbia, Chile and Germany.
Theories of gender justice in the twenty-first century must engage with global economic and social processes. Using concepts from economic analysis associated with global commodity chains and feminist ethics of care, Ann Stewart considers the way in which 'gender contracts' relating to work and care contribute to gender inequalities worldwide. She explores how economies in the global north stimulate desires and create deficits in care and belonging which are met through transnational movements and traces the way in which transnational economic processes, discourses of rights and care create relationships between global south and north. African women produce fruit and flowers for European consumption; body workers migrate to meet deficits in 'affect' through provision of care and sex; British-Asian families seek belonging through transnational marriages.
When and why do governments promote women's rights? Through comparative analysis of state action in seventy countries from 1975 to 2005, this book shows how different women's rights issues involve different histories, trigger different conflicts, and activate different sets of protagonists. Change on violence against women and workplace equality involves a logic of status politics: feminist movements leverage international norms to contest women's subordination. Family law, abortion, and contraception, which challenge the historical claim of religious groups to regulate kinship and reproduction, conform to a logic of doctrinal politics, which turns on relations between religious groups and the state. Publicly-paid parental leave and child care follow a logic of class politics, in which the strength of Left parties and overall economic conditions are more salient. The book reveals the multiple and complex pathways to gender justice, illuminating the opportunities and obstacles to social change for policymakers, advocates, and others seeking to advance women's rights.
Human rights law and the legal protection of women from violence are still fairly new concepts. As a result, substantial discrepancies exist between what is decided in the halls of the United Nations and what women experience on a daily basis in their communities. Human Rights and Gender Violence is an ambitious study that investigates the tensions between global law and local justice. As an observer of UN diplomatic negotiations as well as the workings of grassroots feminist organizations in several countries, Sally Engle Merry offers an insider's perspective on how human rights law holds authorities accountable for the protection of citizens even while reinforcing and expanding state power. Providing legal and anthropological perspectives, Merry contends that human rights law must be framed in local terms to be accepted and effective in altering existing social hierarchies. Gender violence in particular, she argues, is rooted in deep cultural and religious beliefs, so change is often vehemently resisted by the communities perpetrating the acts of aggression. A much-needed exploration of how local cultures appropriate and enact international human rights law, this book will be of enormous value to students of gender studies and anthropology alike.
Intended for use in courses on law and society, as well as courses in women's and gender studies, women and politics, and women and the law - this book that takes up the question of what women judges signify in several different jurisdictions in the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union. In so doing, its empirical case studies uniquely offer a model of how to study gender as a social process rather than merely studying women and treating sex as a variable. A gender analysis yields a fuller understanding of emotions and social movement mobilization, backlash, policy implementation, agenda setting, and representation. Lastly, the book makes a non-essentialist case for more women judges, that is, one that does not rest on women's difference.
Although there have been notable gains for women globally in the last few decades, gender inequality and gender-based inequities continue to impinge upon girls' and women's ability to realize their rights and their full potential as citizens and equal partners in decision-making and development. In fact, for every right that has been established, there are millions of women who do not enjoy it. In this book, studies from Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are prefaced by an introductory chapter that links current thinking on.
Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women’s rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.
An analysis of the relationships between law, custom, gender, marriage and justice among northern Tanzania’s Maasai communities. When, where, why, and by whom is law used to force desired social change in the name of justice? Why has culture come to be seen as inherently oppressive to women? In this finely crafted book, Dorothy L. Hodgson examines the history of legal ideas and institutions in Tanzania—from customary law to human rights—as specific forms of justice that often reflect elite ideas about gender, culture, and social change. Drawing on evidence from Maasai communities, she explores how the legacies of colonial law-making continue to influence contemporary efforts to create laws, codify marriage, criminalize FGM, and contest land grabs by state officials. Despite the easy dismissal by elites of the priorities and perspectives of grassroots women, she shows how Maasai women have always had powerful ways to confront and challenge injustice, express their priorities, and reveal the limits of rights-based legal ideals. “This is a book that only Dorothy Hodgson could have written, with her decades of work in Tanzania, vast networks in Maasailand, and deep ethnographic knowledge, combined with her deftness in working through more theoretical work on gender and human rights. Closely argued, conceptually sharp, and engagingly written.” —Brett Shadle, author of Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970 “Dorothy Hodgson asks a number of important and clearly articulated questions, and provides thoughtful answers to them using a hybrid of historical and anthropological methodologies that combine in-depth case studies with more empirically-informed macro-level reflection. A concise and useful resource in the undergraduate as well as the graduate classroom.” —Priya Lal, author of African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World “Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture makes a significant contribution to the study of law in East Africa and elsewhere among colonized peoples, and it should be required reading not only for academics interested in such matters but for activists and policymakers.” —American Anthropologist “Hodgson’s book is both rich in detail and broad in its implications for understanding struggles for justice for marginalised groups. It deserves the attention of students and scholars of African studies, anthropology, history, political science and women’s and gender studies.” —Journal of Modern African Studies
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive investigation of gender and the law in the United States. Deborah Rhode describes legal developments over the last two centuries against a background of historical and sociological changes in women's activities and attitudes toward these new developments. She shows the way cultural perceptions of gender influence and in turn are influenced by legal constructions, and what this complicated interaction implies about the possibility-or impossibility-of using law as a tool of social change. Table of Contents: Introduction Part One: Historical Frameworks 1. Natural Rights and Natural Roles Domesticity as Destiny The Emergence of a Feminist Movement Nineteenth-Century Legal Ideology: Separate and Unequal 2. The Fragmentation of Feminism and the Legalization of Difference The Postsuffrage Women's Movement Separate Spheres and Legal Thought Part Two: Equal Rights in Retrospect 3. Feminist Challenges and Legal Responses The Growth of the Contemporary Women's Movement Governmental Rejoinders Liberalism and Liberation 4. The Equal Rights Campaign Instrumental Claims Symbolic Underpinnings Political Strategies Requiems and Revivals 5. The Evolution of Discrimination Doctrine The Search for Standards Separate Spheres Revisited: Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications Definitions of Difference Part Three: Contemporary Issues 6. False Dichotomies Benign and Invidious Discrimination in Welfare Policy: Elderly Women and Social Security Special Treatment or Equal Treatment: Pregnancy, Maternal, and Caretaking Policy Public and Private: Social Welfare and Childcare Policies 7. Competing Perspectives on Family Policy Form and Substance: The Marital-Nonmarital Divide Lesbian-Gay Rights and Social Wrongs Equality and Equity in Divorce Reform Text and Subtext in Custody Adjudication 8. Equality in Form and Equality in Fact: Women and Work Occupational Inequality The Legal Response Employment Policy and Structural Change 9. Reproductive Freedom The Historical Legacy Abortion Adolescent Pregnancy Reproductive Technology 10. Sex and Violence Sexual Harassment Domestic Violence Rape Prostitution Pornography 11. Association and Assimilation Private Clubs and Public Values Education Athletics Different But Equal Conclusion: Principles and Priorities Differences over Difference Differences over Sameness Theory about Theory Legal Frameworks Notes Index Reviews of this book: Rhode's work is impressive in its scholarship and its range...a compelling account. --Josephine Shaw, International and Comparative Law Quarterly Reviews of this book: The definitive treatment of the American legal system's struggle to deal with issues pertaining to gender...The strength of Rhode's analysis, however, is not its historical aspect but its probing view of modern gender issues...The focus is always on the deeper forces that have led to gender disadvantage...There is much to be learned from reading this volume. --Victoria J. Dodd, Bimonthly Review of Law Books Reviews of this book: A comprensive journey through the history of law and gender...The book is important in a number of ways...[It] paints in stark, irrefutable colors the irrational prejudices that have served to justify legal determinations limiting equality...[I]t has the audacity to ask the law to turn on itself and work more justly. --Sheila James Kuehl, California Lawyer Reviews of this book: Encyclopedic.. . Thorough, carefully nuanced ... [Rhode] gives all sides their fair due on every issue she takes up... A valuable resource for many years to come. --Susan 0kin, Law and Social Inquiry Justice and Gender breaks the impasse created by legal and theoretical debates over 'sameness' and 'difference.' Deborah Rhode's brilliant analysis of gender and the law in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present argues persuasively for theories rooted in careful contextual analysis and for a legal emphasis on gender disadvantage rather than gender difference. This book offers a new vantage point from which to think about the role of law in building a just society. --Sarah M. Evans, University of Minnesota
