Word: law
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Feminist legal theory is highly controversial, but it is the most dynamic area of law today. Feminist scholars have pioneered the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace as a violation of civil rights, catalyzed passage of rape shield laws that forbid courtroom inquiries into victims' sexual experience, and expanded the principle of self-defense to cover battered women accused of killing abusive mates...
Feminist scholars are also questioning long-held assumptions in other areas. Catharine MacKinnon, who championed legal redress for sexual harassment on the job, is reframing the debate on pornography. MacKinnon, a visiting professor at Yale Law School, maintains that the central concern is not obscenity but sexual discrimination, because pornography hurts women and violates their civil rights. In a controversial stance that has pitted her against many feminists and civil libertarians, she favors granting injunctions against pornographers who "traffic in materials that can be proven to subordinate women...
Even one of the most sacrosanct areas of jurisprudence, contract law, is under attack. Feminists charge that the law tends to uphold agreements concerning the things men produce but ignores the contributions women make. Says Professor Mary Becker of the University of Chicago Law School: "Courts have traditionally refused to enforce bargains between spouses in which one partner agrees to pay the other for women's work -- child rearing, caretaking and other domestic responsibilities...
Young scholars on the tenure track have found feminist theory a risky field of concentration. Despite her prominence, Catharine MacKinnon has been an academic nomad, journeying through seven law schools in the past decade. Last month she accepted her first offer of a tenured professorship, at the University of Michigan. Some feminists advise junior colleagues to nurture a reputation in safer areas of law before turning to their real interest. Increasing numbers of women, though, are ignoring this counsel. Declares Professor Martha Minow of Harvard Law School: "The lively response to feminist legal work confirms its power and its indelible...
...writer and who presumably stands in for the author, is almost devoid of particularity: his only trait is drunkenness. On the plus side were pungent dialogue, believable family conflict and forgiveness, and deft performances by Anne Pitoniak as a mouthy matriarch and Bob Burrus as her sly brother-in-law. The other play of promise, Charlene Redick's slight but touching Autumn Elegy, depicts a man long withdrawn from the world and his protective wife, now fatally...