Political Life and the Law

Abstract

Tracing feminist challenges to philosophical accounts of the law as universal, rational, moral, and a force for the public good, this essay demonstrates how the law has been deployed to exclude, deny rights, and control bodies. Constitutional law, conjugal law, commercial law, and criminal law were used to privilege elite men while dehumanizing and disenfranchising women, the Indigenous, and enslaved peoples. Analyzing the law as an instrument of male supremacy, women’s rights advocates crafted a political agenda to achieve emancipation, property rights, universal public education, access to higher education and the professions, divorce and custody rights, minimum wage and maximum hour legislation, occupational safety and health legislation, suffrage, maternal and infant healthcare, and reproductive justice, as well as substantive and symbolic political representation. Expanding the meaning of the political, feminists illuminated state complicity in racial and gender oppression, illuminated inequities in traditional demarcations of public and private life, and created new political spaces in which to pursue social transformation.