Overview
PART
ONE
Part
1 asks the ‘woman question’ in law – and examines the idea that there is a
legitimate area of inquiry about the relationship between women and ‘legal
process’ derived from women’s historical exclusion from the process of making and
interpreting law; and that there are problems that need to be addressed on an
ongoing basis for women and which will involve using and seeking to transform
law.
The
first Chapter, Connections, has two sections. In the first section, uses
the story, A Jury of Her Peers, written in 1917 to explore ideas about women’s
silences and exclusion in law. It probes whether law is different for women?
Whether women and men may see social and legal issues differently or have
different processes and styles of decision-making? Commentary is used to draw
out central points in the story. The second part of the chapter introduces a
number of other ‘voices’ of women: voices of challenge, resistance, wisdom
across time, class and race.
The
second chapter is designed to be a ‘bridging’ chapter: introducing law and
feminist legal scholarship to ‘each other’ : the section on Law, is designed as a law primer for
non-law students and to introduce some key concepts about legal studies; the
section on feminism is designed as a
primer for non-women’s studies students. The second section explores conditions
for ‘learning’ in this area. Adrienne Rich argues that to reinterpret knowledge
requires a community with our past, with our co-workers and with those we
“envision as our hearers, our co-creators, our challengers who will urge us to
take our work further...” Elsa Barkely Brown, in her piece, “African-American
Women’s Quilting”, uses the analogy of different modes of quilting to “pivot
the centre” in order to see from another point of view. Christine Boyle’s classic article on the law
curriculum links these ideas to legal education. The remaining articles explore
issues in legal education.
Chapter
Three has two sections. The first opens by posing readers with an “EQ” test to
examine their own knowledge. The material in the section examines the
challenges and demands that women have made of the legal system over time,
starting with the historic Seneca Falls Declaration. Paul Halsall in the
Internet Modern History Sourcebook (1997, rev 1998) provided the following
background to this Declaration:
“Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two American activists in the movement to abolish slavery called together the first
conference to address Women's rights and issues in Seneca Falls, New York, in
1848. Part of the reason for doing so had been that Mott had been refused
permission to speak at the world anti-slavery convention in London, even though
she had been an official delegate. Applying the analysis of human freedom
developed in the Abolitionist movement, Stanton and others began the public
career of modern feminist analysis
The
Declaration of the Seneca Falls
Convention, using the model of the US Declaration of Independence, forthrightly
demanded that the rights of women as right-bearing individuals be acknowledged
and respectd by society. It was signed by sixty-eight women and thirty-two
men.”
Women in Canada have also laid out their visions of
change. I include the 1976 demands made by WAVAW in Toronto (Women Against
Violence Against Women) and the more recent ‘Feminist Dozen’ raised by the
World March of Women. The official UN Declaration from the Fourth World
Conference on Women lays out the international commitments made to improve the
status of women.
The
second section introduces the conceptual challenges to the legal system posed
by women. It opens with a collage of ‘firsts’, of the women who have forged
public, professional lives and opened up previously closed areas in the legal
profession, the judiciary and the legislatures. That these are not isolated or
individual actions but linked to conceptual challenge and change in the law is
explored by the material by two women Supreme Court judges.
Learning
Objectives
At
the conclusion of this Part, readers should be able to:
·
outline the dimensions of the “gender issue” in law in historical and
current contexts
·
understand the positivist or doctrinal account of Canadian law and the
place of judicial opinions and legislation within this account
·
identify critiques of the positivist account of law and elements of
other knowledge about law and legal processes provided by socio-legal study of
law
·
outline the objectives of feminist (legal) scholarship
·
understand the role of legal education in constructing and conveying
legal knowledge, and the nature of barriers women have faced within both legal
education and the legal profession
·
identify women who made breakthroughs in the legal profession,
judiciary and legislatures.