Women,Law and John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill's intellectual reputation is unarguable; his liberal credentials seemingly impeccable. Moreover there seems to be a Mill for everyone; liberal, radical, feminist. The precise nature of the feminist Mill has however remained a matter of considerable debate. The purpose of this article is less to engage this speculation, but rather to invite closer consideration of what Mill actually said and wrote about women and the law in nineteenth-century England. For Mill, the law was both an instrument of women's subjection and a prospective means of liberation.     

Women Law Professors – Negotiating and Transcending Gender Identities at Work

This paper reports a research project on womenlaw professors in the U.K. Despite theirsimilar social and educational backgrounds,successful women legal academics disclosemarked differences in their perceptions of theinfluence of gender on their work identities.Many emphasise the caring and pastoral rolesthey adopt, or are expected to adopt.Organisational cultures also emerge as asignificant factor in determining the genderexperiences of women law professors. The fewwith experience as head of school downplay thesignificance of gender while simultaneouslyacknowledging the influence of genderconstructions and expectations.     

Racialized Women,the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism

In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’ concept of the violence continuum, I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism.     

Law and the Power of Feminism: How Marriage Lost its Power to Oppress Women

In Feminism and the Power of Law Carol Smart argued that feminists should use non-legal strategies rather than looking to law to bring about women??s liberation. This article seeks to demonstrate that, as far as marriage is concerned, she was right. Statistics and contemporary commentary show how marriage, once the ultimate and only acceptable status for women, has declined in social significance to such an extent that today it is a mere lifestyle choice. This is due to many factors, including the ??sexual revolution?? of the 1960s, improved education and job opportunities for women, and divorce law reform, but the catalyst for change was the feminist critique that called for the abandonment (rather than the reform) of the institution and made the unmarried state possible for women. I conclude that this loss of significance has been more beneficial to British women in terms of the possibility of ??liberation?? than appeals for legal change and recognition, and that we should continue to be wary of looking to law to solve women??s problems.     

Women in counselling

During the last few years many new types of counselling institutions, offices, firms, and agencies dealing with giving advice have come into existence. In Poland, women's participation in these new institutions as well as in the traditional counselling offices differs depending on the type of problems which are solved there. Women more often fulfill the role of counsellor in counselling offices dealing with health, family, and childcare, which are traditionally treated as women's issues. At the same time, more women than men apply for counsel in these types of counselling offices. By contrast, in the new types of counselling/guidance offices dealing with economic, legal, and management problems, a woman counsellor appears more rarely than a man counsellor. When there are women in these new types of counselling offices, these women are forced to continuously demonstrate their competence and expertise. Women also more rarely use counsel given in the matters of economy, law, and management, but, as counsellors noticed, if a woman applies for advice, she is usually better informed and better prepared for taking advantage of the advice.     

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. ‹Other’ women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, ‹other’ women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from all other systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted.