Authors Goldstein, Baer, Daum and Fine skillfully blend doctrinal and political developments to document and explain the evolution of women's rights and the law as well as the dynamics and dissension among feminist activists. Building on three previous editions, this book combines updated material on constitutional law, sex and gender discrimination, and women's reproductive rights, with new cases and readings on family law, criminal law, and LGBT rights. Discussion has been expanded to include questions of whether or not the prohibitions on sex discrimination in Title VII and Title IX protect trans individuals. New material covers emerging policy concerns such as female genital mutilation, child marriage, and the Trump Administration's policy changes on gender issues. This edition takes a more socio-political and institutional approach than other books on women and the law. The authors consider issues such as institutional questions of constitutional interpretation, the scope of judicial power, the balance of federal-state power, the interaction between law and other social and political institutions, the capacity of law to effect societal change, and the effect of presidential and Senate politics on U.S. Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. The inclusion of state and lower federal court decisions greatly strengthens the book's focus on the law's relationship to gendered inequality. Topics also include constitutional history, shifting interpretations of employment discrimination and gender equality, changes in reproductive technology and associated policy responses, divorce and dissolution of domestic partnerships, child custody, education, same-sex marriage, pornography, and domestic violence.

In this landmark book, the historian Linda K. Kerber opens up this important and neglected subject for the first time. She begins during the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," and ends in the present, when men and women still have different obligations to serve in the armed forces.

Erika Bachiochi offers an original look at the development of feminism in the United States, advancing a vision of rights that rests upon our responsibilities to others. In The Rights of Women, Erika Bachiochi explores the development of feminist thought in the United States. Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Bachiochi presents the intellectual history of a lost vision of women’s rights, seamlessly weaving philosophical insight, biographical portraits, and constitutional law to showcase the once predominant view that our rights properly rest upon our concrete responsibilities to God, self, family, and community. Bachiochi proposes a philosophical and legal framework for rights that builds on the communitarian tradition of feminist thought as seen in the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Drawing on the insight of prominent figures such as Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mary Ann Glendon, this book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women’s rights in America and its critique of the movement’s current trajectory. The Rights of Women provides a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern political insight that locates the family’s vital work at the very center of personal and political self-government. Bachiochi demonstrates that when rights are properly understood as a civil and political apparatus born of the natural duties we owe to one another, they make more visible our personal responsibilities and more viable our common life together. This smart and sophisticated application of Wollstonecraft’s thought will serve as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom. The Rights of Women will interest students and scholars of political theory, gender and women’s studies, constitutional law, and all readers interested in women’s rights.

Considers whether and how constitutions have affirmed women's equal citizenship status, from the birth of constitutionalism to the present.

The principle of equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed in the Constitution does not distinguish between individuals according to their capacities or merits. It is written into these documents to ensure that each and every person enjoys equal respect and equal rights. Judith Baer maintains, however, that in fact American judicial decisions have consistently denied individuals the form of equality to which they are legally entitled—that the courts have interpreted constitutional guarantees of equal protection in ways that undermine the original intent of Congress. In Equality under the Constitution, Baer examines the background, scope, and purpose of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and the history of its interpretation by the courts. She traces the development of the idea of equality, drawing on the Bill of Rights, Congressional records, the Civil War amendments, and other sections of the Constitution. Baer discusses many of the significant equal-protection cases decided by the Supreme Court from the time of the amendment’s ratification, including decisions on reverse discrimination, age discrimination, the rights of the disabled, and gay rights. She concludes with a theory of equality more faithful to the history, language, and spirit of the Constitution.

Explores the relationship between constitutional law and feminism, offering a spectrum of approaches and analysis set across a wide range of topics.

An account of the ramifications of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the divisions it created in the courts and Congress, and in the women's movement itself.Constitutional Orphan explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman's Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters, and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book then connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a thin conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the Congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth, and connects that with the NWP's perceived need for southern Congressional votes for the ERA. It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election; and then evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA, and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth could be used today to expand gender equality.

The legal status of women has changed more rapidly in the last 20 years than in the previous 200, Hoff argues, but these changes have become less important over time. The American power structure has relinquished rights to women and minorities only after these rights have been diminished by a white-male-dominated legal system. She calls for a reinterpretation of legal texts to create a feminist jurisprudence. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 190 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion.

To explain how constitutions shape and are shaped by women's lives, the contributors examine constitutional cases pertaining to women in 12 countries, covering cases about reproductive, sexual, familial, socio-economic, and democratic rights, and focussing on women's claims to equality.