Debating Women's Equality

by Gerhard, Ute; Brown, Allison; Cooper, Belinda

• ISBN13: 9780813529059
• ISBN10: 0813529050
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-07-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

Ute Gerhard places women's rights at the center of legal philosophy and discusses this struggle for eQuality as a driving force in the history of law. Focusing on Europe and taking the course of German feminism and law as primary examples, she incorporates the various social contexts in which Questions of eQuality and gender difference have been raised into an analysis that challenges misconceptions about the principle of eQuality itself.

Gerhard first discusses the history of women's movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also traces the historical development of claims for gender eQuality as well as obstacles to these claims, critically exploring the influence of philosophers such as Rousseau, Fichte, and Kant. Gerhard concludes that women need to be recognized as both eQual and different-that claims to eQuality do not simply eliminate difference, but also articulate it. Mindful of the social and political contexts surrounding eQuality arguments, Gerhard tackles in-depth three legal issues: the meaning of women's rights in the public spher

Author Biography

Ute Gerhard is professor of sociology and director of the Comella Goethe Center for Women's Studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt am Main.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Linda M. G. Zerilli
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(6)
Part I
The Meaning of Equality with Regard to Difference	7	(5)
In the Footsteps of the Philosophers: The Historical Significance of Equality	12	(26)
Human Rights for Women as Well as Men: Olympe de Gouges's Counterproposal	38	(21)
Equal Rights or Women's Distinctiveness: The Program of the First Women's Movement	59	(27)
Interim Remarks: Equal and Different	86	(9)
Part II
``Getting at the Root of the Evil'': Legal Struggles and Legal Critique by Radicals in the First German Women's Movement	95	(27)
Gender Tutelage: Women in Nineteenth-Century Legal Doctrine	122	(27)
Human Rights Are Women's Rights: Dimensions of Feminist Legal Criticism	149	(32)
Notes	181	(42)
Appendix: The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen	223	(4)
Index	227