Women's Lives, Men's Laws by Catharine A. MacKinnon


Women's Lives, Men's Laws
Title : Women's Lives, Men's Laws
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0674024060
ISBN-10 : 9780674024069
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 558
Publication : First published February 28, 2005

In the past twenty-five years, no one has been more instrumental than Catharine MacKinnon in making equal rights real for women. As Peter Jennings once put it, more than anyone else in legal studies, she has made it easier for other women to seek justice. This collection, the first since MacKinnon's celebrated Feminism Unmodified appeared in 1987, brings together previously uncollected and unpublished work in the national arena from 1980 to the present, defining her clear, coherent, consistent approach to reframing the law of men on the basis of the lives of women.



By making visible the deep gender bias of existing law, MacKinnon has recast legal debate and action on issues of sex discrimination, sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, and racism. The essays in this volume document and illuminate some of the momentous and ongoing changes to which this work contributes; the recognition of sexual harassment, rape, and battering as claims for sexual discrimination; the redefinition of rape in terms of women's actual experience of sexual violation; and the reframing of the pornography debate around harm rather than morality. The perspectives in these essays have played an essential part in changing American law and remain fundamental to the project of building a sex-equal future.

Women's Lives, Men's Laws Reviews

  • Lydia

    "The Roar on the Other Side of Silence" makes me so goddamn mad and sad. I believe I've read it before, but the essay REALLY pops and the smear campaign and defamation she and Dworkin were subject to even more sinister after engaging with more of her legal scholarship and theorizing. There are several men I wish I could have the legal apparatus to sue the shit out of.

  • Meredith

    I don't agree with MacKinnon about everything, but her views are informed and compelling. This book would be a good primer for anyone interested in civil rights law pertaining to gender.

  • Donna Jo Atwood

    This book was extremely difficult to read--many times I had to go back a reread a sentence several time because it made no sense to me, or seemed contradictory to the points she was trying to make, which seemed to me to be that women are oppressed because men make the laws, society (Men) allows women to be marginalized legally by stacking the deck legally. She is especially interested in rape and in pornography and the way society deals with them.

    Only for the dedicated.

  • Emma

    haven't finished it