Book Selections

It is time, forty years after Roe v. Wade, to finally demystify abortion. One-third of all American women will have an abortion by the time they are forty-five, and most will already be mothers when they do so. Yet the topic remains taboo. With this book, the author, a women's health advocate and writer identified as a leading pro-choice activist by Newsweek magazine, offers an antidote to the usual abortion debate. Involving issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, the abortion debate remains ground zero for the culture wars in America. Yet there is more common ground than meets the eye, when so many American women of all political stripes have already chosen to have abortions and most want that choice protected. This book covers "abortion-recovery counseling," "crisis pregnancy centers," and the infamous anti-choice "black children are an endangered species" billboards; describes health care providers whose lives are threatened in this stigmatized field; outlines the outrageous legislative battles that have popped up all over the country; and takes to task pro-choice activists for allowing the terms of the debate to be controlled by anti-choice rhetoric (such as the term "pro-life"). The author returns the conversation to its rightful place, asserting abortion, unabashedly, as a moral and fundamental human right. -- From back cover.

Reports on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart.;"Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers--a previously unseen trove--and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America." -- Inside front jacket flap.

Thomas Byers Memorial Outstanding Publication Award from the University of Akron Law Alumni Association Much has been written about women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Historians have written her biography, detailed her campaign for woman's suffrage, documented her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, and compiled all of her extensive writings and papers. Stanton herself was a prolific author; her autobiography, History of Woman Suffrage, and Woman's Bible are classics. Despite this body of work, scholars and feminists continue to find new and insightful ways to re-examine Stanton and her impact on women's rights and history. Law scholar Tracy A. Thomas extends this discussion of Stanton's impact on modern-day feminism by analyzing her intellectual contributions to--and personal experiences with--family law. Stanton's work on family issues has been overshadowed by her work (especially with Susan B. Anthony) on woman's suffrage. But throughout her fifty-year career, Stanton emphasized reform of the private sphere of the family as central to achieving women's equality. By weaving together law, feminist theory, and history, Thomas explores Stanton's little-examined philosophies on and proposals for women's equality in marriage, divorce, and family, and reveals that the campaigns for equal gender roles in the family that came to the fore in the 1960s and '70s had nineteenth-century roots. Using feminist legal theory as a lens to interpret Stanton's political, legal, and personal work on the family, Thomas argues that Stanton's positions on divorce, working mothers, domestic violence, childcare, and many other topics were strikingly progressive for her time, providing significant parallels from which to gauge the social and legal policy issues confronting women in marriage and the family today.

"From the shutdown of Planned Parenthood clinics and the rising rates of HIV to anti-marriage equality and bathroom bills, the New South is the epicenter of the new sex wars. Issues of reproductive freedom, HIV/AIDS, partner rights and transgender rights reveal a new and unacknowledged era of southern reconstruction centered on gender and sexuality. In A Dirty South Manifesto, L.H. Stallings confronts us with the roots of this radical sexual resistance in the New South, one that is anti-racist, decolonial, and transnational. For people within these economically disenfranchised segments of society, the sexually and gender marginalized, and the racially oppressed, the south has been a sexual dystopia. Throughout this short book, Stallings offers several hard-hitting manifestos for the new sex wars. With her focus on black, contemporary southern life, Stallings offers a calling for anyone who has ever imagined a way of living beyond white supremacist heteropatriarchy"--Provided by publisher.

How the fear of malpractice affects mothers and reproductive choices Giving birth is a monumental event, not only in the personal life of the woman giving birth, but as a medical process and procedure. In The Business of Birth, Louise Marie Roth explores the process of giving birth, and the ways in which medicine and law interact to shape maternity care. Focusing on the United States, Roth explores how the law creates an environment where medical providers, malpractice attorneys, and others limit women's rights and choices during birth. She shows how a fear of liability risk often drives the decision-making process of medical providers, who prioritize hospital efficiency over patient safety, to the detriment of mothers themselves. Ultimately, Roth advocates for an approach that protects the reproductive rights of mothers. A comprehensive overview, The Business of Birth provides valuable insight into the impact of the law on mothers, medical providers, maternity care practices, and others in the United States.

More than four decades into the culture wars, Roe v. Wade has become shorthand for the American abortion debate. Rights to Privacy: The Forgotten Legacy of Roe v. Wade illuminates an entirely different and unexpected legacy of America's most controversial Supreme Court decision. Drawing on archives and extensive interviews with key participants, Rights to Privacy opens a window onto an intense debate about the right to privacy that continues to this day. In the 1970s and beyond, activists set out bold ideas about government responsibility, sexual consent, consumer rights, digital data, individual identity, and end-of-life care. These unanticipated visions of a right to choose gradually (but never completely) gave way to a more limited freedom from government. Ziegler captures the rise of contemporary ideas about privacy, all the while explaining the continuing hold that this right--and Roe--have on the public imagination.--

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade continues to make headlines. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate cuts through the myths and misunderstandings to present a clear-eyed account of cultural and political responses to the landmark 1973 ruling in the decade that followed. The grassroots activists who shaped the discussion after Roe, Mary Ziegler shows, were far more fluid and diverse than the partisans dominating the debate today. In the early years after the decision, advocates on either side of the abortion battle sought common ground on issues from pregnancy discrimination to fetal research. Drawing on archives and more than 100 interviews with key participants, Ziegler's revelations complicate the view that abortion rights proponents were insensitive to larger questions of racial and class injustice, and expose as caricature the idea that abortion opponents were inherently antifeminist. But over time, "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion" positions hardened into "pro-choice" and "pro-life" categories in response to political pressures and compromises. This increasingly contentious back-and-forth produced the interpretation now taken for granted--that Roe was primarily a ruling on a woman's right to choose. Peering beneath the surface of social-movement struggles in the 1970s, After Roe reveals how actors on the left and the right have today made Roe a symbol for a spectrum of fervently held political beliefs.

One of the most private decisions a woman can make, abortion is also one of the most contentious topics in American civic life. Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women's willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman's desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman's defense against the many harms of disclosure. Laws regulating abortion patients and providers treat abortion not as an acceptable medical decision--let alone a right--but as something disreputable, immoral, and chosen by mistake. Exploiting the emotional power of fetal imagery, laws require women to undergo ultrasound, a practice welcomed in wanted pregnancies but commandeered for use against women with unwanted pregnancies. Sanger takes these prejudicial views of women's abortion decisions into the twenty-first century by uncovering new connections between abortion law and American culture and politics. New medical technologies, women's increasing willingness to talk online and off, and the prospect of tighter judicial reins on state legislatures are shaking up the practice of abortion. As talk becomes more transparent and acceptable, women's decisions about whether or not to become mothers will be treated more like those of other adults making significant personal choices.--

"This book remains the only comprehensive treatment of abortion as a state constitutional right. Since the second edition was published, state challenges to abortion regulations have been considered by multiple state supreme courts, one state amended its constitution to make it "abortion neutral," and three states repealed their pre-Roe v. Wade abortion statutes. In addition to evaluating these developments, this edition discusses case law and statutory changes in other states that may bear on whether a state supreme court would recognize a right to abortion. This edition also includes an appendix of the constitutional provisions cited and a topical index"--

"With the Supreme Court likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision, American debate appears fixated on clashing rights. The first comprehensive legal history of a vital period, Abortion in America illuminates an entirely different and unexpected shift in the terms of debate. Rather than simply championing rights, Mary Ziegler shows, those on opposing sides battled about the policy costs and benefits of abortion and laws restricting it. This mostly unknown turn deepened polarization in ways many have missed. Never abandoning their constitutional demands, pro-choice and pro-life advocates increasingly disagreed about the basic facts. Drawing on unexplored records and interviews with key participants, Ziegler complicates the view that the Supreme Court is responsible for the escalation of the conflict. A gripping account of social-movement divides and crucial legal strategies, this book delivers a definitive recent history of an issue that transforms American law and politics to this day"--Provided by the publisher.

"Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women - Black and white, enslaved and free - gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals"--

Reproductive justice (RJ) is a pivotal movement that supplants the language and limitations of reproductive rights. RJ's tenets are that women have the human rights to decide if or when they'll become pregnant, whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and to parent the children they have in safe and healthy environments. Recognizing the importance of the rights at stake when the law addresses parenting and procreation, the authors in this book re-imagine judicial opinions that address the law's treatment of pregnancy and parenting. The cases cover topics such as forced sterilization, pregnancy discrimination, criminal penalties for women who take illegal drugs while pregnant, and state funding for abortion. Though some of the re-imagined cases come to the same conclusions as the originals, each rewritten opinion analyzes how these cases impact the most vulnerable populations, including people with disabilities, poor women, and women of color.

"This is the first ethnography of American midwives and their clients and advocates. The culmination of more than a decade of participant-observation, interviews, and archival research, this project specifically interrogates the potential and pitfalls of legal and political campaigns for reproductive autonomy"--

Beginning with the introduction of abortion law in the nineteenth century, this reader includes important documents from nearly two hundred years of debate over abortion. These legal briefs, oral arguments, court opinions, newspaper reports, opinion pieces, and contemporary essays are introduced with headnotes that place them in historical context. Chapters cover the birth control movement, changes in abortion law in the 1960s, Roe v. Wade, the Hyde Amendment and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, state and federal regulation of abortion practices, and the freedom of speech cases surrounding anti-abortion clinic protests. The first section of each chapter sets the stage and explains the choice of documents. This rich, balanced collection is an indispensable reference tool for the study of one of the most passionate debates in American history. It brings together the writings of doctors, lawyers, scientists, philosophers, elected officials, judges, and scholars as few other legal readers do, and it is essential reading for those engaged in the ongoing debate about abortion law in the United States.

"Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This Advanced Introduction overviews the ongoing struggle for gender equality since the nineteenth century. It considers how women have looked to law as a means of facilitating entry into the public sphere, including in higher education, work and professional life. The book examines the feminist assertation that 'the personal is political' and addresses issues in the private sphere that have long been on the reform agenda, including marriage, divorce, sexual assault and violence against women. It also considers the current fragmentation of feminism, or 'post feminism' ; while critics argue the aims of feminism have been achieved, data on sexual harassment and violence against women by intimate partners reveals the continuing elusiveness of gender equality. Key Features: An essential exploration of both modern and historical feminism. Focuses on the four key themes of active citizenship, paid work, intimate relations and violence and criminality to clarify how law reform is addressed. Considers the increasing diversity in trends in intimate relationships, such as same sex marriage, the decline in traditional marriage and the consequences of separation. The Advanced Introduction to Feminist Perspectives on Law is highly beneficial to students and scholars of gender law, legal theory, legal philosophy and feminist history"-- Provided by publisher.

"Sex and Privacy in American Law presents empirical analyses of civil and criminal state court decisions applying the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas. After tracing key historical and legal developments leading up to the Lawrence decision's decriminalization of sodomy on substantive due process grounds in 2003, the study employs both quantitative and qualitative content analyses of 307 cases citing Lawrence over the two decades since it was decided. Results indicate that judicial decisions rarely embraced broad readings of Lawrence in criminal cases. In fact, Lawrence's long-term impact on criminal law has largely remained as limited as some commentators predicted shortly after the case was decided. In civil cases, courts tended not to rely on Lawrence significantly in most business and employment law cases. Courts that applied Lawrence in family law disputes - especially those involving same-sex couples - often construed the case narrowly at first, but broadened their interpretations after Obergefell v. Hodges brought marriage equality to the United States. Lawrence also impacted LGBTQ+ civil rights claims. Statistically significant geographic differences were found relating to how courts used Lawrence in those cases, with judges in Northeastern and Pacific coastal states having applied the precedent broadly, while judges in Southern and Midwestern states tending to have applied the case more narrowly. The implications are explored generally and within the specific context of the constriction of substantive due process rights in the wake Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization."--

"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences. America runs on women -- women who are tasked with holding society together at the seams and fixing it when things fall apart. In this tour de force, acclaimed sociologist Jessica Calarco lays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo. Holding It Together draws on five years of research in which Calarco surveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviews with women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic; a daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; a well-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals. Stories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies. Tracing present-day policies back to their roots, Calarco reveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country's social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. She leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long without the support systems that our peer nations take for granted, and how women's work maintains the illusion that we don't need a net. Weaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it"--

"In the U.S., the second-wave feminist fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of men's violence against women leaned heavily on the victim-offender binary, which has since become inscribed in funding schemes, legal remedies, and intervention approaches. In Broken, scholar-practitioner Lisa Young Larance interviews women who participated in antiviolence intervention and draws on her own extensive practice in the field to explain how this binary erases the trauma histories of those who both survive and cause harm. Calling for a more holistic conception of interpersonal violence that makes room for human complexity, Broken illuminates the connections across race, class, and sexual orientation that facilitate women's healing and repair"--

"This book is a collection of voices that persist in a profession that still lags behind in hearing them. We share these stories because the profession is enriched by the stories and the lawyers who tell them. This book is a form of virtual mentoring to build up the next generation of woman advocates so that they, too, may add their stories. In this book, we provide information about the status of women in the legal profession, and stories about identifying and overcoming bias and the hidden hazards in the practice of law, for men and women, while addressing the business of law. The stories in this book then go on to explain the value of being true to ourselves, establishing unique career paths, and finding guideposts and beacons to help enlighten us along the way to success"--

"Decades after liberal constitutional democracies ended the laws of patriarchy and committed to gender equality, misogyny still pervades women's lives. Often expressed as hatred and discrimination against women, misogyny is the legal aftermath of patriarchy, which goes beyond attacking and belittling women. After Misogyny reframes misogyny as society's overentitlement to women's forbearance and sacrifices, which continues to be expressed in the law even after patriarchy has been repudiated. Women's contributions, both inside and outside the home, are radically undercompensated and highly beneficial to society-especially the reproductive work of childbearing and childrearing. From antidiscrimination law to abortion bans, the law fails women by keeping the dynamics of social overentitlement and male overempowerment invisible. In recent years, many constitutional democracies have used new processes of constitution-making and constitutional change to reset entitlements and power. After Misogyny shows how movements to reset these baseline entitlements are necessary for constitutional democracies to overcome misogyny"--

"This edited volume brings together expert legal scholars to identify and critique jurisprudential themes running through Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinions during her tenure as a jurist, including opinions relating to gender equality, voting rights, copyright law, civil and criminal procedure, immigration law, environmental law, bankruptcy, and more"--

"Shaking up New York and national politics by becoming the first African American congresswoman and, later, the first Black major-party presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark as an 'unbought and unbossed' firebrand and a leader in politics for meaningful change. Anastasia C. Curwood interweaves Chisholm's public image, political commitments, and private experiences to create a definitive account of a consequential life"--

More than fifty years of civil rights legislation and movements have not ended employment discrimination. This book reframes the discourse about the "glass ceiling" that women face with respect to workplace inequality. It explores the unspoken, societally held beliefs that underlie and engender workplace behaviour and failures of the law, policy, and human nature that contribute "panes" and ("pains") to the "glass ceiling." Each chapter identifies an "unspoken belief" and connects it with failures of law, policy, and human nature. It then describes the resulting harm and shows how this belief is not imagined or operating in a vacuum, but is pervasive throughout popular culture and society. By giving voice to previously unvoiced - even taboo - beliefs, we can better address and confront them and the problems they cause.

Despite the huge advances women have made in recent decades, their ambitions are still undermined in subtle ways. Parents, teachers, bosses, and institutions all give less encouragement to women than men, and women still grow up believing that they must defer to men in order be seen as feminine. If their ambition does survive into adulthood, too often those ambitions must be downsized or abandoned to accommodate "wifely" duties of household chores and child care. As a result, women--unlike men-continually have to re-shape their goals and expectations. In this groundbreaking work, Anna Fels draws on extensive research and years of her psychiatric practice to offer an original and deeply useful examination of ambition in women's lives. In the process, she illuminates just what is necessary for women to articulate--and fulfill--their dreams.

Women have made impressive strides in college leadership in recent years. They now hold nearly one-third of chief executive positions and represent 48 percent of chief academic officers, according to CUPA-HR's latest data. But women leaders must still contend with the proverbial boys' club and with cultural assumptions about how they should behave -- and look. This Chronicle collection includes must-read articles on the obstacles these women face and the strategies they rely on to advance. Among their essential skills: developing a supportive network,clearly communicating their values, managing conflict, and, as one leader put it, knowing when to focus and when to rely on peripheral vision.

Read examines the labor force activity of Arab-American women, a group whose work experiences provide an exception to accepted theories. The employment rates of Arab immigrant women rank among the lowest of any immigrant group, while the rates of native-born Arab-American women resemble those of U.S.-born white women. These differences cannot be explained by Arab-American women's human capital characteristics or family resources, but are due to traditional cultural norms that prioritize women's family obligations over their economic activity and to ethnic and religious social networks that encourage the maintenance of traditional gender roles. Read's findings challenge assumptions about variations in ethnic women's labor force participation. Arab cultural values play an important role in determining the position of women of Arab descent in American society.

"Traces the struggle for women's equal rights and opportunities in the US-in the political, economic, and social spheres-across more than a century"--

By taking an innovative perspective, Gender Equality in the Mirror aims to advance the debate on gender equalities and to engage with the complexities of their practical implications in everyday life. Through the voice of women who are contributing with their life and work to the pursuit of the collective task of inclusion, the volume develops an original analysis of the socio-economic and political dimension of gender parity to frame implementing pathways of aspirational human rights principles. Gender Equality in the Mirror explores these dimensions with the ultimate aim of raising broad awareness of the need to invest in women's empowerment for the construction of our society.

"The modern American public corporation stands at the center of various forms of inequality in our society-because of its influence on the economy, the environment, and the government as well as its own employees and consumers. But corporate law has long overlooked the feminist perspective, to the detriment of many underrepresented minority populations. In this edited volume, a diverse group of scholars takes up the challenge to rewrite corporate law from a feminist perspective. Applying a feminist perspective to corporate governance and corporate law allows us to see what the world would look like if corporations were governed by different individuals with different priorities. The feminist judgments in this volume take on (1) the foundational principle that corporations are entities that possess a legal identity separate and distinct from their owners and the related concept of limited liability; (2) the appropriate scope of the rights that accompany corporate ownership (such as the "shareholder wealth maximization" norm); (3) the lack of diversity on corporate boards and at top management levels as well as the meaning of fiduciary duties; (4) the effects of interpersonal relationships in close corporations; and (5) the availability of protection for vulnerable investors and potential investors"--

"A collection of essays taking aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women"--