Women's Lives, Men's Laws

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the first since MacKinnon's celebrated Feminism Unmodified appeared in 1987, brings together previously uncollected and unpublished work in the national arena from 1980 to the present, defining her clear, coherent, consistent approach to reframing the law of men on the basis of the lives of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.

Introduction I. EQUALITY RE-ENVISIONED Section A. Changing the World for Women 1. To Change the World for Women 2. Unthinking ERA Thinking 3. From Practice to Theory, or What Is a White Woman Anyway? 4. Law in the Everyday Life of Women 5. Toward a New Theory of Equality 6. Law's Stories as Reality and Politics 7. "Freedom from Unreal Loyalties": On Fidelity in Constitutional Interpretation 8. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said 9. Keeping It Real: On Anti-"Essentialism" 10. Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights 11. The Power to Change Section B. Sexual Abuse as Sex Discrimination 12. Sexual Harassment: The First Five Years 13. Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law 14. Prostitution and Civil Rights 15. The Logic of Experience: The Development of Sexual Harassment Law 16. On Accountability for Sexual Harassment 17. Beyond Moralism: Directions in Sexual Harassment Law 18. Disputing Male Sovereignty: On United States v. Morrison 19. A Sex Equality Approach to Sexual Assault II. SEXUALITY, INEQUALITY, AND SPEECH Section A. Theory and Practice 20. Sex, Lies, and Psychotherapy 21. Liberalism and the Death of Feminism 22. Does Sexuality Have a History? 23. Speaking Truth to Power 24. Mediating Reality Section B. Pornography as Sex Discrimination 25. Civil Rights Against Pornography 26. Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination 27. From Silence to Silence: Violence Against Women in America 28. Pornography Left and Right 29. Vindication and Resistance 30. The Roar on the Other Side of Silence Notes Credits Index