Travelling with Susie King Taylor

Susie King Taylorââ¬â¢s 1902 memoir of her Civil War experiences, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, comprises a complex document testifying to the contest over the meaning of the Civil War in historical memory as well as the struggle of freed people, and black women in particular, to insert themselves into public dialogues as authorized subjects. Viewing Taylorââ¬â¢s narrative, the positioning of its author and the changing conditions of its reception, through the lens of black womanist theory and travel literature criticism presents an opportunity to consider the nature of knowledge in a way that resists dichotomizing authenticity and objectivity, or experience and interpretation

Response to The Duke Rape Case Five Years Later: Lessons for the Academy, the Media, and the Criminal Justice System by Dan Subotnik

There are all kinds of injustices in the world—unwarranted punishments and deprivations of liberty as well as undeserved material, psychological, and emotional injuries, inequities, and wrongs. False accusations provide the basis for one of the most poignant narratives of injustice because we have the sense that someone punished for a specific, discrete act that they did not commit is entirely innocent, not only of that discrete act but in some sort of existential sense of the word. ...Tragic irony is always compelling in a narrative, but, if one can identify with that falsely accused person, either because one shares similar background, circumstances, personal characteristics or because one has experienced a similar situation—or feels vulnerable to the same forces— the injustice seems to outweigh other wrongs, takes on greater importance than other inequities. The suffering rendered in such cases can seem more monstrous than other unwarranted deprivations that also arise from imperfect systems, and the institutional defects appear more glaring. Professor Subotnik’s tale of flawed institutions giving rise to the charges of rape against Duke student athletes is such a case in point, but that depends on the point of identification. By identifying so completely with the white male student athletes, Professor Subotnik loses himself in a story that is only a small subset of the many stories that can be told about our justice system and, in so doing, loses his sense of proportion

Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law

Attuned to the social contexts within which laws are created, feminist lawyers, historians, and activists have long recognized the discontinuities and contradictions that lie at the heart of efforts to transform the law in ways that fully serve women’s interests. At its core, the nascent field of feminist legal history is driven by a commitment to uncover women’s legal agency and how women, both historically and currently, use law to obtain individual and societal empowerment. Feminist Legal History represents feminist legal historians’ efforts to define their field, by showcasing historical research and analysis that demonstrates how women were denied legal rights, how women used the law proactively to gain rights, and how, empowered by law, women worked to alter the law to try to change gendered realities. Encompassing two centuries of American history, thirteen original essays expose the many ways in which legal decisions have hinged upon ideas about women or gender as well as the ways women themselves have intervened in the law, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s notion of a legal class of gender to the deeply embedded inequities involved in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a 2007 Supreme Court pay discrimination cas

After Suffrage Comes Equal Rights? ERA as the Next Logical Step

Almost a full century in the making, the campaign for an ERA far exceeded in longevity the campaign for woman suffrage, however much a “logical next step” women\u27s equality seemed to some following the spectacular achievement of the Nineteenth Amendment. The history of the amendment reveals how resistant to the idea of equality between men and women a political system -- even one that includes women as voters -- can be. In this chapter, we re-examine the route taken by the ERA through its many permutations in the century since the passage of woman suffrage. Proposed by Alice Paul in 1923 and immediately opposed by social feminists advocating protective labor laws, the ERA wound itself in and out of feminist, conservative, and public favor before its final defeat in 1982, three states short of adoption. Woven into the Supreme Court\u27s analysis of Lochner and substantive due process, and the later evolution of equal protection law, women\u27s equality -- or difference -- has been the foundation of much of the development of modern constitutional doctrine