The 'Inconspicuous Impact' of Feminist Pressure Through Law

The 'Inconspicuous Impact' of Feminist Pressure Through Law Speaker: Prof. Thompson Date: Thursday 6 December 2024 Introduction - You could usefully take note of the ... feminist activism, which pre-dated the 'Second Wave' but demonstrated that the women's movement never fully disappeared after the granting of the vote. - [This is] documented in Dorothy Stetson, A Woman's Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England. The book has been routinely ignored by English legal historians because of legal scholars' unfortunate tendency only to read insider legal accounts (i.e. those by English male lawyers, not American female historians). - This tends to produce a tale as divorced from context as the judgments in your cases. Inconspicuous Impact - An effect upon the law that ultimately leads to change, but not in a linear or short-term fashion. - Relates to efforts to change the law that are not typically viewed or credited as having contributed to reform, perhaps because those efforts were initially or ostensibly unsuccessful. - The inconspicuousness of impact is especially characteristic of feminist efforts to reform the law through legal channels. - Feminist pressure through law: • The collective use of law and legal mechanisms by women and men to dismantle aspects of the law that perpetuate gendered inequality of power. My argument: - It is important to recognize inconspicuous impact - this includes paying attention to the more subtle ways in which feminists have contributed to law's development. - Inconspicuous impact can be used as a tool to reevaluate the very mechanisms of law and its reform. Teresa Billington-Greig (VP of the Married Women's Association) - Teresa Billington-Greig handwritten notes, undated, 7TBG/2/J08, The Women's Library • Wages for wives was the first slogan [of the MWA], coined or publicized by the Press and much disliked by an increasing number of [MWA] supporters. Personally, I think it did more good than harm! It emphasized that in a world full of wage-workers there was one enormous section of workers who got no wages at all - the taken for granted habit became a matter for question. Juanita Frances (Chair of the Married Women's Association) - Brian Harrison interview with Juanita Frances, 14 November 1974, 8SUF/B/022, The Women's Library. • Looking at the past I feel it's boring. People who want to go back [and say] 'oh look we've achieved this!' - to me it's insignificant and any person or organization are just cogs in a wheel. We do what we can but it doesn't rest on us if we go under and somebody else will come along Why inconspicuous impact matters - Direct impact is not the only effective form of impact - Law's potential as a mechanism for feminist reform is revealed - E Rackley and R Auchmuty, 'The Case for Feminist Legal History' (2020) 40(4) OJLS 878. • Presenting hard-fought-for legal change, for example, as a simple response to shifts in 'social attitudes', without saying who or what changed those attitudes is not merely inaccurate; it allows for the justification of inaction while waiting for the societal shift to happen. - 'a tale as divorced from context as the judgments in your cases'. 'Reform blindness' - Focus on legislation and other direct forms of impact can make us blind to subtle shifts that indirectly change perceptions of law, and the issues law regulates.