Family Law: Feminism and Family Law

249 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliog.: Includes bibliographical references and index
Summary: "Essentially a Mother argues that the law of pregnancy and motherhood has been overrun by sexist ideology. As Jennifer Hendricks documents, courts have shockingly held over the past half century that a pregnant woman's nine months of gestation hardly count in her claim to parent the child she bears, and that a man's brief moment of ejaculation matters more than a woman's labor. Armed with such dubious arguments, courts have stripped women of the right to an abortion, treated surrogate mothers as mere vessels with no moral rights to their offspring, and handed biological fathers-even those who became fathers through rape-automatic rights over women and their children. The law of pregnancy is now infected with a misogyny that has brought tragedy to innumerable women and even to many men who don't meet the traditional definition of a father. In this incisive and groundbreaking book, Hendricks argues that feminists must work to overthrow this skewed value system that subordinates women, devalues caregiving, and strips many of us of one of our most fundamental rights: the right to parent"-- Provided by publisher
Contents: Mothers at work -- Fathers at home -- What the law protects . . . -- . . . and why -- Expanding fathers' rights against mothers -- Sidelining inconvenient fathers -- Leveling down to genes -- How to reason from the body -- The body and beyond -- Conclusion

xxxv, 697 pages ; 26 cm
Series: Oxford handbooks series
Includes bibliographical references and index
Summary: "Earlier. While the term "feminist" was not used in the United States until the 1910s, the foundations of feminist legal theory were first conceptualized as early as 1848 and developed over the next one hundred and fifty years. This chapter traces that development. It begins with the establishment of the core theoretical precepts of gender and equality grounded in the surprisingly comprehensive philosophy of the nineteenth-century's first women's rights movement ignited at Seneca Falls. It then shows how feminist legal theory was popularized and advanced by the political activism of the women's suffrage movement, even as suffragists limited the feminist consensus to one based on women's maternalism. Progressive feminism then expanded the theoretical framework of feminist theory in the early twentieth century, encapsulating ideas of global peace, market work, and sex rights of birth control. In the modern era, legal feminists gravitated back to pragmatic and concrete ideas of formal equality, and the associated legalisms of equal rights and equal protection. Yet through each of these periods, the two common imperatives were to place women at the center of analysis and to recognize law as a fundamental agent of change"-- Provided by publisher