After Misogyny
How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A rigorous analysis of systemic misogyny in the law and a thoughtful exploration of the tools needed to transcend it through constitutional change beyond litigation in the courts.
Just as racism is embedded in the legal system, so is misogyny—even after the law proclaims gender equality and criminally punishes violence against women. In After Misogyny, Julie C. Suk shows that misogyny lies not in animus but in the overempowerment of men and the overentitlement of society to women's unpaid labor and undervalued contributions. This is a book about misogyny without misogynists.
From antidiscrimination law to abortion bans, the law fails women by keeping society's dependence on women's sacrifices invisible. Via a tour of constitutional change around the world, After Misogyny shows how to remake constitutional democracy. Women across the globe are going beyond the antidiscrimination paradigm of American legal feminism and fundamentally resetting baseline norms and entitlements. That process, what Suk calls a "constitutionalism of care," builds the public infrastructure that women's reproductive work has long made possible for free.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intriguing scholarly treatise, Fordham University law professor Suk (We the Women) documents how the law protects men's "overentitlement" and "overempowerment" and examines efforts to correct the problem through constitutional reform. In the book's most engrossing chapters, she revisits the legal strategies of the late-19th-century temperance movement, showing how the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol in the U.S. "reduced the power of men in relation to women in the home by abolishing spaces of toxic masculinity like the saloon and by reducing the political power of the corporate liquor industry." Suk also surveys feminist constitutional movements in other parts of the world, including Iceland's 2008–9 "Pots and Pans Revolution," which blamed the country's financial collapse on a "masculine ‘Viking' mindset" that promoted "risk-taking economic behavior." Explaining how the Equal Rights Amendment got stalled by an arbitrary deadline imposed by its opponents, Suk outlines potential reforms (citizens' assemblies, an advisory council) to make the constitutional amendment process in the U.S. easier. Though dense with obscure legal cases, this is a well-informed and actionable diagnosis of one of society's most persistent ills.
