Advanced Introduction to Feminist Perspectives on Law

Margaret Thornton, Emerita Professor, ANU College of Law, The Australian National University, Australia

‘Margaret Thornton’s extraordinary Introduction provides a concise summary of the efforts of feminist law reformers, worldwide, to use law in order to combat the subordinating and oppressive constraints on women’s lives at work, in family life, as citizens, and as professionals and producers in civil society, their forced dependency as caregivers and the impoverishment that dependence brings, their relative rights-lessness in their reproductive role, bodies, and lives, and their sufferance of sexualized violence, from rape and femicide to their subjection to cyberstalking, pornography, sex trafficking and prostitution. Thornton shows that over centuries, and in all corners of the globe, feminists have used law to achieve notable advances against the pervasiveness of patriarchal patterns of control. Each legal advance however, has been plagued by contradiction and limitations, as the sought after reformed law itself carries with it the weight of the assumptions and limitations that the feminist legal reform targets. Antidiscrimination law does not address the debilitating second shift; no-fault divorce has not arrested the impoverishment suffered by many divorced and divorcing women; the reform of rape laws has not notably slowed the rate of sexualized violence. Thornton provides dozens of such examples. Law’s homage to tradition seemingly limits its own liberatory potential. Today, not only the limits of law, but also the assumptions of neoliberalism and postfeminism further threaten feminism’s substantial advances. Equality remains elusive.