Women, Mothers, and the Law of Fright: A History

This article presents a gendered history of the law\u27s treatment of fright-based physical injuries. Our goal is to connect the law of fright to the changing cultural and intellectual forces of the twentieth century. Through a feminist lens, we reexamine the accounts of the legal treatment of fright-based injuries offered by Victorian-erajurists, traditionalist legal scholars of the first two decades of the twentieth century, a legal realist in the 1930s, and a Freudian medical-legal commentator from the 1940s, all of whom helped to shape present-day tort doctrine. We conclude with an account of Dillon v. Legg, in which the California Supreme Court recognized Margery Dillon\u27s right to recover for the harm she suffered from seeing her daughter killed by a negligent driver. This examination of the history of the law of fright shows that gendered thinking has influenced the law, but has remained unexamined. We make three basic observations. First, we claim that the legal categories of physical and emotional harm are not unrelated to the gender of the victims. Women who have suffered fright-induced physical injuries have been disadvantaged by the legal classification of their injuries as emotional harm. Second, we demonstrate how the legal system has placed women\u27s fright-based injuries at the margins of the law by describing women\u27s suffering for the injury and death of their unborn and born children as remote, unforeseeable, and unreasonable. Finally, we raise the possibility that the claims of female plaintiffs in these fright cases - plaintiffs such as Margery Dillon should be viewed as women\u27s rights claims, as attempts to pressure the legal system to recognize and value the interests of women. By constructing a gendered history of this legal claim, we aspire to reclaim Dillon for women and to contribute to a feminist reconstruction of tort law

Gerda Lerner (1920–2013). Pioneering Historian and Feminist

Gerda Lerner was a historian of remarkable eloquence, insight, and courage, an advocate of the importance of history to the pursuit of social justice. She devoted her academic lifetime to showing that women had a history, and that knowing it could alter human consciousness. “Writing history and thinking about women,” she wrote in her collected essays, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), “could lead to transformative politics rooted in both thought and experience.”(xv) She was the si..

Momentos Subversivos: desafiando as tradições da história constitucional

O texto explora os desdobramentos teóricos e metodológicos do curso “Gênero e História Constitucional”, ministrado e criado pelas professoras Patricia A. Cain e Linda K. Kerber. Há dois momentos, um sobre levantamento histórico dos cursos de Gênero e o Direito e similares; o outro, com análise de casos utilizados no próprio curso ministrado, tendo sempre como pano de fundo as interseções entre a história, o Direito Constitucional e as lutas feministas. O primeiro, Coger vs North West Union Packet Co; o segundo, Coggeshall vs Cidade de Des Moin; por fim, Green vs Shama. Ao revisitar a história do movimento feminista, tendo como objeto o Direito e suas matizes, as autoras encontraram achados sobre a ocultação de elementos da história feminista. Além disso, o texto possui um caráter pedagógico acentuado por estar sempre cruzando os achados teóricos com os feedbacks dos alunos e da experiência em sala de aula com o curso. Ele serve, também, como incentivo para que mais cursos nesse estilo sejam ministrados. Uma vez que, explorar a história constitucional do feminismo se mostrou uma forma muito eficaz (e reprodutível) de ser subversivo. O trabalho foi publicado em 2002, mas continua extremamente atual

Communities, birth attendants and health facilities: a continuum of emergency maternal and newborn care (the global network's EmONC trial)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Maternal and newborn mortality rates remain unacceptably high, especially where the majority of births occur in home settings or in facilities with inadequate resources. The introduction of emergency obstetric and newborn care services has been proposed by several organizations in order to improve pregnancy outcomes. However, the effectiveness of emergency obstetric and neonatal care services has never been proven. Also unproven is the effectiveness of community mobilization and community birth attendant training to improve pregnancy outcomes.</p> <p><b>Methods/Design</b></p> <p>We have developed a cluster-randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of a comprehensive intervention of community mobilization, birth attendant training and improvement of quality of care in health facilities on perinatal mortality in low and middle-income countries where the majority of births take place in homes or first level care facilities. This trial will take place in 106 clusters (300-500 deliveries per year each) across 7 sites of the Global Network for Women's and Children's Health Research in Argentina, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Zambia. The trial intervention has three key elements, community mobilization, home-based life saving skills for communities and birth attendants, and training of providers at obstetric facilities to improve quality of care. The primary outcome of the trial is perinatal mortality. Secondary outcomes include rates of stillbirth, 7-day neonatal mortality, maternal death or severe morbidity (including obstetric fistula, eclampsia and obstetrical sepsis) and 28-day neonatal mortality.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>In this trial, we are evaluating a combination of interventions including community mobilization and facility training in an attempt to improve pregnancy outcomes. If successful, the results of this trial will provide important information for policy makers and clinicians as they attempt to improve delivery services for pregnant women and newborns in low-income countries.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01073488</p