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Sunshine for
Women Book Summaries | Home |
1. "More important, I came to the conclusion that even if de jure equality had been achieved as a result if the First and Second Women's movements, it would not have been enough because, as historian Mary Ritter Beard noted almost a half-century ago, making "man the measure" of female equality was such an inadequate standard that it could only perpetuate women's de facto inequality in society." page ix
2. Hoff is grateful to "The Women's Foreign Policy Council for permission to reprint its Declaration of Interdependence." page xi
3. "Throughout this book I am using emancipation to mean equitable treatment that is not grounded, as equal treatment is, in dominant male values of any time period and that does not violate women's sense of community, commonality, and/or culture by demanding assimilation or acceptance of stereotypic "feminine" roles as the price for full participation in U.S. society." page 9
4. "The following tripartite definition of feminism is meant to apply across time periods. In other words, using a "timeless" standard for evaluating female activity in the ageless struggle toward emancipation, my definition begins with the recognition that while all feminists are for equal rights women advocating only equal rights with men are, at most, partial feminists. Equal rights for women in the United States simply means obtaining those rights men already have when they are no longer as highly valued or important to the legal, political, and economic power of the elites. This equality based on presumed sameness is, after all, what suffrage, equal pay, and the ERA were all about. Calling women from the past or the present feminists is not justified if their only - or primary - activity was or is to obtain equality for women based on male legal standards. obviously, such activity is an example of raised consciousness among women, but it is not necessarily an indication of changed or anticipatory consciousness on the part of those women who struggle for equal rights." page 15
5. "The second component, or "test," for feminist is that its practitioners demonstrate an awareness of what constitutes antipatriarchal behavior in whatever time period they happen to have lived." page 15
6. "The third and final component of my definition of feminism focuses on the active and collective cultivation and preservation of female culture. In other words, the "complete feminist" of the past and present is not only a person who fought or fights for equal rights while perceiving women as being socialized by and yet outside, patriarchy but also a person who works to produce and/or preserve female culture in the hope of someday defining the "self" of women in female, not male, terms." page 16
7. " "The master's tools," as Audre Lorde has so cogently remarked, "will never dismantle the master's house." " page 17
8. "Since "citizenship is a form of power," the liberal premise that government should be based on the consent of the governed citizens has been particularly problematic for women and African-Americans for a number of reasons. First, neither group chose or consented to be second-class citizens before or after the American Revolution. Both were accorded that inferior legal status without consultation. Second, the legal definition of "consensual freedom" for women and racial minorities has always been different and accorded less legal status or social esteem than for white men. When certain white women and black reformers tried to become full citizens following the Civil War, they were rebuffed by the courts in proof that U.S. citizenship continued to reflect two related power concepts - namely, the contradiction between the theoretical rights of national citizens - namely, the contradiction between the theoretical rights of national citizens of the United States and the actual freedom to exercise those rights at the state level by traditionally disadvantaged groups of citizens. . . . Unfortunately, full rights of citizenship for women as women were not a major theoretical concern of progressive female activists at the turn of the century. They simply assumed it would somehow result from suffrage." page 18
9. "Women are discovering that a "raised" consciousness about equal treatment and liberation is quite different from having a "changed" consciousness about equitable treatment and emancipation when it comes not only to analyzing court decisions but also to understanding women's perceptions of themselves and their needs in any particular time period. Such terms as equality, progress, liberation, equity, justice, happiness, and emancipation have yet to be redefined by women for women, based on their actual, as opposed to prescribed, constitutional and historical experiences. In essence, therefore, women can only be emancipated when they are finally accorded equity - justice - not simply equality under the law, although equality is a precondition for equitable justice." page 25
10. "First, there is equality of rights, which is the idea that each citizen is entitled to equal protection before the law. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the equal-protection doctrine does not offer any broad guarantees of equality except to people who are "similarly situated." Thus, equality of rights can keep women and minorities in subordinate positions because they are "different." The second type of equality is ", and it is most often discussed today in terms of access to educational and economic opportunities. This type of equality is usually associated with affirmative action, for which there were at the end of the 1980s five distinct models. The purpose of affirmative action is to offset the inequality generated through the equal-protection doctrine by providing temporary, remedial legal mechanisms for eliminating the discriminatory preference under the law that have for two hundred years facilitated the rise of white males to positions of power, wealth, and privilege in the United States.
Third, there is equality of esteem, which usually comes about through the application of unwritten, informal, and often moral concepts about membership or belonging in society, rather than strictly legal aspects of citizenship. Obviously, equality of esteem, or equal respect as it is sometimes called, "depends ultimately on how citizens treat one another" and is still beyond the grasp of most women and minorities in this country. The most controversial, and putatively most radical, type of equality is equality of results. American women and minorities are also very far from achieving this type of equality." page 27-28
11. "Those liberals who ostensibly defend equality of results, such as John Rawls, Isiah Berlin, and Ronald Dworkin, argue "that only those inequalities are justified which are to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged." page 30
12. "Equality of rights guaranteed to unequal individuals is a harsh model upon which to base a system of justice." page 33
13. "When most twentieth-century feminists tried to reinterpret the Constitution, however, they almost always talked about obtaining equality with white men rather than constructing equitable treatment for women. Only after women obtained a certain amount of white, male equality, as has been the case in the last twenty years, have more of them been in a better position to assess whether such reinterpretation based on continued expansion of patriarchal jurisprudence and traditional rhetoric about individual rights is in their collective best interests. Consequently, they are now in a better position to assess whether this type of equality benefits all women (or only those who are best able to act like men), but also to determine whether the potential loss of culturally and structurally determined female behavior patterns and values is not perhaps too high a price to pay for equality based on assimilation." pages 33 -34
14. "The question that these different definitions of progress raises from a legal point of view, according to attorney Wendy W. Williams, is, "Do we want equality of the sexes - or do we want justice for two kinds of human beings who are fundamentally different?" page 47
15. " . . . in 1777 Hanna Lee Corbin of Virginia actually did ask her brother, Richard Henry Lee, to support voting rights for widows who paid taxes, arguing that otherwise it would be another example of taxation without representation. As a member of the Continental Congress, Lee indicated that he favored such a measure, but that it was not necessary because women already had "as legal a right to vote as any other person." " pages 62 - 63
16. "Only a most-radical male revolutionary like Thomas Paine asserted that revolutionary women be treated like men when, in his famous 1775 "An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex<" he had a hypothetical female speaker proclaim: "If we have an equal right to virtue, why should we not have an equal right to praise?" Moreover, it was Paine - not the female patriots - who also took advantage of American revolutionary conditions to attack the institution of marriage. Later, in the 1790s, only a few isolated women in the United States supported Mary Wollstonecraft's "the-personal-is-political" demand for the right of woman to public as well as private fulfillment on the grounds that "private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart and that public virtue is only an aggregate of private." Like Paine's, Wollstonecraft's criticisms of marital bondage were never seriously considered by American women in the postrevolutionary decade." page 65
17. "It must be remembered that plays written in the eighteenth century were for readers, not theater-goers, since a law in Massachusetts actually prohibited all public performances. The authorities believed the theater to be "the highway to hell." " page 70
18. "While British subjecthood had not prevented upper-class English and colonial women from exercising vestigial feudal and fiduciary authority over lower-class men, U.S. citizenship eliminated the possibility of even this limited form of class-based female power." page 80
19. "For centuries in England, and to a lesser extent in colonial America, equity courts offered a major means of compensating for the injustices that arose under common law as a result of the attempt to apply case law uniformly to all legal situations. Equity law brought an element of fairness to justice by allowing for the individualistic settlement of legal disputes or the moderation of legal disabilities of certain (often privileged) individuals, such as wealthy women who wanted to assume fiduciary guardianship or other legal functions not normally permitted females under common law." page 82
20. "The early colonial period in the New World was characterized by an absence of strict adherence to English statutory and common laws because of the primacy of local customs, demographic and economic considerations that did not pertain in the Old World, or because of individual colonial legislative actions." page 83
21. "Today, as in the past, economic inequality for women and other disadvantaged groups is produced largely by the fact that the vast majority of household wealth in the United States is inherited rather than earned through work." page 87
22. "Without formal political rights, colonial women had obviously been quite limited in exercising political influence and had fulfilled any civic aspirations vicariously through their husbands or other male members of their families. In 1777, for example, New York became the first state to disenfranchise women voters by inserting the word male into its constitution, and most of the remaining original states soon followed suit by specifically forbidding women or actively discouraging them from voting. While New Jersey resisted this trend initially, it finally rescinded suffrage for women in 1807 as the result of an amendment introduced, interestingly enough, by a liberal Republican member of the state legislature." page 98
23. "Yet the legal and cultural fiction that the interests of husband and wife were one masked this enormous loss of property and potential economic influence of early republican wives and mothers. As state statutes modified dower rights, decision after decision tried in various ways to rationalize the situation, by stating in essence that "statutes which have made substitutions for dower show, it is now dower and its purpose which have fallen into disrepute; it is the administration of dower which has come into conflict with modern conditions" (emphasis added.). It is this kind of legal double-talk that allowed nineteenth-century courts to continue to pretend to protect widows with increasingly meaningless circumscribed dower rights." pages 155 - 116
24. "Thus, the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments stressed wife-beating, dual standards of morality, divorce, child custody, and control over property and wages - all problems stemming from the institution of marriage as it had evolved by the middle of the nineteenth century. As Stanton said in 1853, "the right idea of marriage is at the foundation of all reforms." Both Anthony and Stanton and other radical feminists of their time reasserted for the remainder of the century that "marital bondage" was "woman's chief discontent." As their militant newspaper, The Revolution, would later proclaim on 27 October 1870:
But we are not dreamers or fanatics: and we know that the ballot when we get it, will achieve form woman no more than it has achieved for man. . . the ballot is not even half the loaf; it is only a crust, a crumb. The ballot touches only those interests, either of men or women, which take their root in political questions. But woman's chief discontent is not with her political, but with her social, and particularly her marital bondage. The solemn and profound question of marriage. . . is of more vital consequence to woman's welfare, reaches down to a deeper depth in woman's heart, and more thoroughly constitutes the core of the woman's movement, than any such superficial and fragmentary question as woman's suffrage."page 140 - This quote comes from about the middle of a nice discussion of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.
25. "Having supported was [the American Civil War] at the expense of their own movement and other reforms, leading feminists, such as Anthony, Stanton, and Lucy Stone, unlike their revolutionary sisters almost a century earlier, were politically conscious of the collective significance of their contributions to the war effort. Not until the introduction of the reconstruction amendments (beginning in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment and ending in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment), however, did the vote replace all other possible mores of recognition for their patriotic actions. Only these three amendments finally convinced the most radical women reformers that the conclusion of the war preserved the union, freed the slaves, but did nothing to enhance women's rights." page 143 - nice discussion of women's contribution during the Civil War
26. "Of the leading male abolitionists before the war, only four - Samuel J. May, Robert Purvis, Parker Pillsbury, and Stephen S. Foster - remained even minimally loyal to women's rights after the war by insisting on their enfranchisement. All the rest, including Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Tilton, Fredrick Douglass, and the brothers Samuel and Hemry Blackwell, did not want any aspect of the "women's question" to complicate their work of putting the country back together." page 148
27. "Although the Constitution of the United States gives the courts interpretive powers to assert prescribed fundamental rights, judges have been able to maintain social, sexual, and racial subordination employing the rhetoric of equality for most of this document's two-hundred-year- existence.
28. The first period in US women's history was 1787-1872, constitutional neglect. "The second period in the development of women's legal status in the United States lasted from 1872 until 1908." and was characterized by constitutional discrimination hiding behind false-protection arguments and legal fictions. page 151
29. "The arguments about the intentions of the Founding Fathers, or the drafters of a constitutional amendment, or of state legislatures was obviously a non sequitur because attitudes change over time; and the original intentions of one generation, even when possible to determine, constitute a questionable basis for action several generations later." page 162
30. "What is curious in that the Dred Scott decision has for some time been considered a blot on constitutional law, but the Minor decision and the related Bradwell one have yet to receive the same deserve castigation by the legal profession. Why? One reason is that Minor did not receive anywhere near the publicity and national attention that the Dred Scott decision had because it was not related to any important historic or constitutional events, such as the Missouri Compromise or legality of slavery in the territories where it was legally prohibited. Men were not about to fight and die over whether women could vote - domestic or national security was not at stake." page 173 - men's sexism is much more deeply ingrained than men's racism
31. Minor v Happersett, decided on October 1874, Virginia Minor had tried to vote. She was denied a ballot because she was a woman. Minor sued. Went to Supreme Court where she lost. Women could be citizens but not voters. i.e. Voting is not a right of citizenship.
32. Bradwell v. Illinois, Myra Colby Bradwell studied law under her husband Judge James B. Bradwell and passed the Illinois bar exam in 1869 but was denied admission to the bar because who was a married woman. Bradwell sued on the privileges-and-immunities clause of the first section of the 14th Amendment. She lost, the government had a right to discriminate against her.
33. "Once second-class citizenship had been unequivocally reinforced for women (who, after all, had been second-class citizens of the United States since the American Revolution), the white, male-dominated judiciary could then use this as a legal precedent to build a rationalization for Jim Crow laws. As Susan B. Anthony had predicted during her pretrial talks in behalf of her own voting rights case, once the courts established that U.S. citizenship did "not carry with it the right to vote in every State, . . . there is no end to the . . . cunning devices that will be resorted to, to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of suffrage." " page 175
34. "An avid suffragist, she [Belva Lockwood] ran for president of the United States as a candidate of the National Equal Rights party in 1884 and 1888." page 183
35. "The historical and legal importance of Lockwood lies in the fact that the Supreme Court chose to allow states to confine their definition of a "person" to males only. This, of course, was exactly the same question that Anthony had first posed in Rochester, New York, when she had voted in 1872. From 1894 until 1971, states could maintain that women were not legally "persons" by virtue of this single Supreme Court decision." Belva Lockwood was a member of the bar off several states in addition to Washington D.C. She applied for admission to the Virginia bar but was denied. the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia decided that she was not a "person" because "person" meant "male." and affirmed that she could be denied membership to the bar. the federal Supreme Court upheld the decision. page 183 - 184
36. "By the turn of the century, women had been discouraged from using the Fourteenth Amendment to improve their legal and political status. Thus, this second period in the development of the legal status of women ended on a discouraging jurisprudential note, but with one well-established constitutional and linguistic principle that would reemerge in the third and fourth periods - namely, that women should argue in masculine terms for equal rights with men under the Constitution." page 187 - Women learned how to play men's game and women learned that they would have to play men's game.
37. "Not until 1903, however, when the national Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) was formed, did middle-class women collectively begin to assist working women in organizing themselves within the existing sex-segregated labor market. . . . By seldom questioning or attacking male dominance within either the union system or the capitalist system, the WTUL never became a radical force in American labor history. . . . Probably the most valuable contribution of the WTUL to the plight of working women was the support it gave to obtaining protective labor laws." page 194
38. "The idea of a community of courageous women was one of the most consistent and enduring features of Mary Ritter Beard's writings and early political activism - namely, the search for female culture, female integration into history, and the importance of female community and associationalism. . . .
All these activities and changed attitudes stemmed from Beard's enduring conviction that through communal activities women would finally find their true place and significance in history." page 219
"What Beard opposed was any leveling system of equality that would impose juridical standardization at the expense of individual, gender, and class differences. . .
. . . Beard opposed neither equality of rights nor equality of opportunity for women as long as these approaches to equality did not become ends in themselves or as long as they were not viewed as panaceas by or for women." page 221
"Although Mary Beard highly valued examples of equality of esteem accorded women of the past, she did not believe that simply according women the rights of men would add to their intrinsic esteem. . . ." page 222
"nonetheless, Beard tried to bridge the legal gap between selective protectionism, on the one hand, and "self-interested" individualism, on the other - to establish a middle position for herself - because she realized that the two extreme positions were destroying what she continued all her life to call the "woman movement." Not until the 1980s have some feminist historians and lawyers similarly questioned whether the contemporary single-minded pursuit of individualistic equal rights with men, as represented by the ERA, was not ultimately as reformist as was the equally single-minded pursuit of protective legislation for working women in the early twentieth century. Both, after all, represent liberal legal solutions to problems that require going beyond equality and protection to equity. Mary Ritter Beard realized this in 1958 without successfully conveying this important message to others." page 223
"Until the third and fourth periods in women's constitutional development played themselves out, few feminist reformers could think about going beyond the boundaries of liberal legalism to improve their constitutional status, as Mary Beard did so long ago." page 223
39. From the California state Supreme Court ruling in the 1971 case of Sail'er Inn, Inc v. Kirby:
"The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage." page 224
40. "In Fay [v. New York 1947], the Supreme Court held that women did not have a constitutional right to serve on juries." page 226
41. "In Hoyt [v. Florida], fourteen years later (1961), the Court ruled unanimously that a state law was unconstitutional when it automatically exempted women from jury duty - unless they expressed an affirmative desire to serve." page 226
42. "Two 1970 opinions, issued by the New York courts, once again upheld the exemption of women from jury duty as a reasonable practice." page 226
43. "Not until 1975 did the Supreme Court of the United States overrule Hoyt. In Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522 (1975), the Court held that a statute denying a male defendant (ironically, in this case accused of rape) trial by a jury composed of a cross section of the community violated his rights under the Sixth Amendment. The Taylor decision did not specify that women had the right to serve on juries on equal terms with men. . . . . it nevertheless had the effect of invalidating all remaining state laws restricting jury duty on the basis of gender." page 227
44. "In retrospect, it is clear that until the last twenty-five years, U.S. judges consistently upheld the constitutionality of state statutory provisions expressly excluding women from full citizenship, without taking the trouble to create "even the appearance of fairness or equal treatment." " page 227
45. The third period - Constitutional Equality, 1963 - 1990
46. "The legal status of women in the United States changed more rapidly in the last twenty-five years than in the previous two hundred." page 229
47. " . . . LBJ remained more personally sympathetic and supportive of women's issues than JFK. As president, Johnson reversed with great fanfare Kennedy's policy of not appointing women to high government positions, but he also quietly went on to try to follow the commission's recommendations on other civil-service appointments, raising expectations, according to Cynthia Harrison, "that he then failed to fulfill." " page 232
48. "Unlike the Equal Pay Act, which had a substantial legislative history because it had been seriously debated in Congress, the word sex was added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act more by accident than design, and there is every indication that Congress did not act with the full knowledge of what it was doing." page 233
49. " . . . by 1986 the Burger Court seemed more predisposed toward according women full equality with men based on individual rights than any previous supreme Court in U.S. history. Ironically, this unprecedented record is now being critically reevaluated by two very different groups: (1) radical feminists scattered around the country who are questioning whether individual equal rights should any longer be the most important goal of the Second Women's movement as it attempts to prepare the female half of the population for life in the twenty-first century and 92) conservative Supreme Court justices appointed by president Reagan who seem determined to "roll back" affirmative-action gains for women and minorities." page 247
50. "In that decisions [Reed v. Reed 1971], the U.S. supreme Court voided an Idaho statute that automatically preferred men over women of the same entitlement class as administrators of estates. The justices said that when a statute accorded different treatment on the basis of sex alone, it "establishes a classification subject to scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause," thus setting the stage for a middle tier, or intermediate level, of scrutiny for women, instead of the strict scrutiny or suspect classification traditionally applied in cases of racial discrimination. With this decision, the Supreme Court invalidated for the first time in its history a state statute on the grounds of sex discrimination. The Idaho state law had called for the automatic appointment of a male executor, but the justices ruled in Reed that when a woman and a man were otherwise equally qualified to administer an estate, the male could not be given arbitrary preference." pages 247 -248
51. "To date, in both Canada and the United States, the most successful attempts to establish comparable worth have been at the level of state government jobs, not in the federal or private sectors." page 253
52. "Fortunately, the justices divided five to two on 27 June 1979 against Weber, saying that Congress had not intended Title VII to forbid all race-conscious affirmative-action programs on the part of private employers, as long as they were temporary in nature and "not designed to maintain racial balance, but to 'eliminate a manifest racial imbalance.' " page 267
53. "I return to attorney Wendy Williams question first posed in chapter I: "Do we want equality of the sexes - or do we want justice for two kinds of human beings who are fundamentally different?" Only the rapidly changing legal status in the past twenty years has made it possible to ask such a question - let alone begin to answer it. If feminist leaders do not revitalize and reunify the Second Women's movement in the 1990s and resolve this question for themselves, then other groups in this continuing postwar conservative era will be quite willing to do it for them." pages 274 - 275
54. "U.S. tort law does not now value or recognize emotional security as being important as physical security and property." page 280
55. "In 1970, for example, the Ohio Supreme Court held that a wife was "at most a superior servant to her husband. . . only chattel with no personality, no property, and no legally recognized feelings or rights." The 1974 Georgia legislature approved a statute that defined the husband as "head of the family" with the "wife . . . subject to him; her legal existence . . . merged in the husband, except as so far as the law recognizes her separately, either for her own protection, her own benefit, or for the preservation of the public order." Until the early 1980s, a Louisiana statute gave husbands exclusive control over the disposition of jointly owned community property." page 281
56. "It is difficult to exaggerate the economic problems created by no-fault reform of divorce because of lingering institutional disadvantages facing married women inside and outside the home. Some claim it is now a major factor contributing to the feminization of poverty. By the middle of the 1980s, research indicated that "the average divorced woman and the minor children in their households experience a 73 percent decline in their standard of living in the first year of divorce. their former husbands, in contrast, experience a 42 percent rise in their standard of living" (emphasis added)." page 291
57. Regarding early court cases on contraception: "However, as early as 1891 the Supreme Court held that "no right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law than the right of every individual to the possessions and control of his own person, free from all restraints or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law" (emphasis added). Moreover, there are a series of more recent cases upholding "bodily integrity" as one of the foundations of the right to privacy." page 301
58. Regarding Webster v. Reproductive Health Services [3 July 1989] : "For the first time, the Supreme Court took a juridically established fundamental right and said that it was up to each of the fifty states to decide how much of that right one group of citizens could exercise." page 313
59. "If the ratificationists were to succeed in the 1970s, they needed an Alice Paul and her followers, as well as NOW presidents Karen DeCrow and Eleanor Smeal and theirs. Just as Paul had rallied the more militant forces for suffrage during and immediately following World War I, militant activity would have made NOW seem more acceptable to Americans suspicious of the ERA, as it had the NAWSA a half-century earlier. Instead, mainstream ratificationists, led by several relatively colorless NOW leaders, tried to fight the anti-ERA backlash with moderation and logic - when only the emotional charisma of an Eleanor Roosevelt or possibly a Betty Ford could have succeeded under the adverse conditions faced by the ERA in the last half of the 1970s and early 1980s. (By actively discouraging the formation of militant ERA groups, NOW not only ignored a historical lesson about the last years of the successful campaign for suffrage but also a basic political tactic - using the fear of militancy to make reform acceptable.)" pages 322 - 323
60. "The legitimate fear of men by both groups [feminists and Phyllis Schlafly's conservative women] should be a unifying force within the Second Women's movement. Instead, NOW's emphasis in its campaign for the ERA on middle-class political and professional issues rather than sexual issues, such as rape, spousal abuse, and daily harassment in factories and in other low-paying jobs, prevents either group from recognizing their common fear of men because its manifestation across class lines takes distinctly different forms.
. . . The average fearful housewife resented the fact that pro-ERA groups seemed determined to break the cultural solidarity of women's "rightful" place in society, based upon their "special nature." Such women feared what would happen to them as mothers. wives, and workers if they were treated "just like" men." page 325
61. "But mainly it was the "traditionalist housewife's" fear of men and of being forced to be like men that galvanized them behind anti-ERA leaders who no more appreciated the internal qualities of their lives than the pro-ERA ones." page 327
62. "Had the ERA been ratified, it would have been absolutely noncoercive when it came to individual life styles because its enforcement powers were directed only against state and federal agencies or public officials, not against private citizens." page 328
63. "It may well be that we will come to see the value of Mary Beard's contention that women should not simply advocate equality of results based on traditional male values but instead advocate equity based on female values." page 330
64. "The overriding philosophical consideration of some of today's postmodern legal theorists is whether or not society should now consciously strive for collective equality of results and group freedoms, in contrast to the "natural" or actual inequality in the distribution of society's benefits to the individual that has attended the pursuit of variegated equality in American throughout its history." page 330
65. "Instead, Beard supported equality of opportunity and equality of esteem for women because only by combining these two types of equality could women maintain their collective identity. She opposed the ERA because its words - no discrimination "on account of sex" - embodied a form of equality that history had shown to be counterproductive." page 330
66. "Pornrotica is any representation of persons that sexually objectifies them and is accompanied by actual or implied violence in ways designed to encourage readers or viewers to assume that such sexual subordination of women (and children or men) is acceptable behavior, an innocuous form of sex education, or necessary to achieve orgasm." page 334
67. "Obscenity and pornography are two quite different concepts. Obscenity laws are meant to cover sexually explicit material when it promotes "excessive" arousal or excitement through candid portrayals of nudity, prurient appeal, and illegal or unnatural acts. Even the Meese commission's report noted that obscene material is probably not very harmful to women or society. From a radical feminist perspective, the same cannot be said of pornography, especially its more virulent forms because the "thought" or "speech" aspects of pornography cannot be separated from violent actions against women. Thus, [pornography has become "sex forced on real women so that it can be sold at a profit to be forced on other real women: women's bodies trussed and maimed and raped and made into things to be hurt and obtained and accessed and this presented as the mature of women in a way that is acted on and acted out over and over."
In a word, pornography is "injurious speech as far as women are concerned." . . . The courts have consistently refused to apply either precedent to pornography, in part because both decisions were premised on the male assumption that such words or depictions must carry the strong potential for inciting "an immediate breach of the peace" leading to public disorder and violence. Presumably, until women begin to riot over degrading pornographic representations of them, the legal system will not see any compelling state interest for protecting them from such "injurious speech." " page 335
68. "While pornography has become a litmus test of free speech for liberals, radical feminists claim that its very existence harms women and contributes to maintaining a patriarchal status quo by equating violence with virility for men and pain with pleasure for women.
Regardless of which side one favors in this legal debate, the fact remains that pornographic material dealing with sexuality has, from its invention in the nineteenth century down to the present, served the interests of the patriarchal state. Pornography functions as a vehicle for hegemonic male dominance because its pervasiveness in contemporary society makes its subordination of women appear all the more "natural" and "acceptable." " page 339
69. "In the 1980s, some contemporary feminist historians and lawyers began, more than ever before, to question whether women's long-sought-after- goal of obtaining equality based primarily on individual, male rights as embodied in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be pursued to its logical conclusion." page 350
70. "Clare Dalton has suggested three reasons that draw some feminists "away from specific questions about gender oppression and the mechanisms through which it operates." They are anger, fear, and denial over being stereotyped by the same socially constructed gender differences that such feminists purport to study. Hence, these feminists have stressed the factors that divide women in order to avoid stigmatizing themselves and other women as "only" the cultural creations of a male world." page 353
71. "Assimilation more often than not means acceptance of white, male norms, at the expense of specific cultural, behavioral, and value attributes associated with nonwhite male groups. . . . Native American, African-American, Hispanics, and now some women have questioned whether the price of assimilation is worth the loss of legitimate racial or sexual differences." page 359
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