Erika Rackley and Rosemary Auchmuty (eds), Women's Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland

Published date01 September 2019
Pages458-459
Date01 September 2019
DOI10.3366/elr.2019.0589

In recent decades, even before Merriam Webster dubbed “feminism” word of the year (see www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/13/feminism-merriam-webster-word-of-the-year ), studies on law and gender have proliferated. An example of this is the global feminist judgments movement (in which both Rackley and Auchmuty have been involved), which began in 2004 and continues to grow. Yet the task of exposing law's often-buried gender norms and blind spots is ongoing. As Cynthia Enloe reminds us, when we stop asking “where women are and where men are…who put women there and men here” and “who benefits from women being there and not someplace else”, we allow patriarchy to “glide right by us like an oil tanker on a foggy night” (C Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (2004) 4). And, as anyone who cares to look will see, patriarchy – and the misogyny that so often works to uphold it (see K Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017)) – continues to abound, in manifold ways that are impossible to document here.

How, then, can we cultivate our capacity to see patriarchy? Enloe suggests that we should work to develop a feminist curiosity, which involves “taking women's lives seriously” and “listening carefully, digging deep, and developing a long attention span, being ready to be surprised” (Enloe, The Curious Feminist 5). In my opinion, this collection of women's legal landmarks is an excellent example of how to develop, and follow, a feminist curiosity, and demonstrates clearly the profound benefits of doing so.

The book celebrates the 100th anniversary of women's admission to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland by presenting ninety-two significant events, cases, statutes, and non-legal publications (e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft's treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and Cicely Hamilton's play, A Pageant of Great Women (1909-12)) that are generally considered by feminists to be positive developments. Alongside a description of the relevant landmark, each author provides information to help contextualise it, an explanation of its significance and details of “what happened next”. The earliest of the landmarks is Cyfraith Hywel – the laws...

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