Keeping Our Legacy Alive: "A Crucial Element of Feminist History Is at Danger of Being Lost"
Title
IX first completely allowed women admission to American law schools fifty years
ago. Women made up less than 5% of law students in 1968, but by 1974 they had
increased to 20%, and by 1978 they had reached 30%. Women made up more than 40%
of all law students in 1985. After graduating, several of these women went on
to become law professors, where they started to raise new issues and criticize
the legal system's male-dominated structures and legislation.
One
of these women was Martha Albertson Fineman, who at the University of Wisconsin
Law School in the early 1980s started the Feminism and Legal Theory Project.
The project has brought together academics and activists from the United States
and overseas for decades to examine the most important legal issues now facing
women. Feminists delivered working papers and discussed women's legal rights
during multi-day sessions structured around distinct, developing sets of
topics. These revolutionary discussions, as well as the working documents and
other textual materials created during these meetings, were all captured and
saved by Fineman.
Currently,
Fineman is having difficulty persuading librarians who are more accustomed to
compiling the papers of specific people or groups of people of the significance
of this historical collection of written, visual, and audible materials tracing
the evolution of feminist concepts, aspirations, and theory.
An
oasis of feminism in a hostile environment
In
the same year that Title IX outlawed sex discrimination in law schools, Fineman
started law school. In her class, she was one of just 18 women.
According
to Fineman, "the number of admitted women increased significantly over the
decade." It was a time when establishing gender equality was a goal.
She
introduced a feminist approach to the law when she started teaching at a law
school in 1976, which made her stand out from the crowd.
Early
feminist legal theorists frequently had solitary academic lives, according to
Fineman. I started the Feminism and Legal Theory Project in 1984 out of sheer
desperation.
The
Project developed into a haven for feminist teachers across the nation,
providing them with a lifeline in an environment that was otherwise unfriendly
to their cause.
According
to Fineman, "I nearly didn't gain tenure at the University of Wisconsin
because of my feminist work." Feminists and 'leftists' in general were
being kept out of the academy at the time. Many people were not given tenure
even after being employed. The project supported the critical theory work of
dozens of women and men. We established a secure environment for the growth of
concepts that were being overlooked, rejected, or attacked elsewhere in
academia.
In
1990, Fineman transferred to Columbia Law School, afterward attended Cornell,
and is currently a student at Emory Law School. She has traveled every step of
the way carrying the Feminism and Legal Theory Project.
Participants
in the project workshops include naming just a few, Patricia J. Williams,
Eileen Boris, Robin L. West, Claudia Card, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Dorothy
Roberts, and Victoria Nourse. Participants come from a wide range of academic
fields, many from universities around the world, including historians,
political scientists, philosophers, gender researchers, and others.
"The
initiative is far more than just a group of people giving separate papers,'
According to Fineman, it created and maintained an organic community centered around
a common set of challenges that supported and fostered transformative ideas. It
was crucial in the growth of feminist legal theory as a shared, cooperative
endeavor, in addition to being significant to those people and their work.
Patricia
J. Williams, a renowned expert in critical race theory, refers to Fineman as
her "godmother" in the legal community. Williams wrote the seminal
article "On Being the Object of Property," which explores slavery,
race, gender, and rights.
I
had just finished writing 'On Being the Object of Property' when I decided
that I was going to stop my legal studies. I actually wrote down what I was
most concerned about as a result of discussions with the feminist legal theory
summer seminars. In a very ironic way, that article actually initiated a
conversation that led me back to the legal academy in a very different capacity
when it became viral in those days.
The
Fineman's Feminism and Legal Theory Project has sponsored hundreds of
discussions where feminist thinkers from all over the world and the United
States have formed and examined a wide range of ideas about women's position
within the law and society for nearly four decades. The "public nature of
private violence," motherhood's legal regulation, feminism's media reception,
the relevance of economics to feminist thought, the complexities of sexuality,
conflicting parental and children's rights, the causes and ramifications of
dependency and vulnerability, and the scope and nature of social responsibility
were all topics covered in those discussions.
The
best ideas are developed through collaboration in welcoming, encouraging
communities, as feminist theory teaches us, according to Fineman.
"Consciousness-raising and experience-sharing have helped feminism
advance. The best politics and ideas come from group interactions and
procedures.
These
discussions first centered on sex discrimination against and exclusion of women
as well as how women may get legal equality of treatment and opportunity. By
pushing for the inclusion and accommodation of women's gendered lives in all of
society's institutions, including the professional, political, and economic
structures, as well as the home, the conversation eventually evolved to
question the structures and values of society.
According
to Fineman, "this move from an emphasis on discrimination to a criticism
of social structures and arrangements, even if they are legally inclusive or
gender neutral, constituted the theoretical and political passage from a
"women in law" paradigm to a feminist model for social reform. It
called for institutions to change to reflect and consider the
realities of women's lives and acknowledged the constructive role law may play
in such change.
The Boundaries of Law, which was released in 1991, was the first anthology of
feminist legal theory to come out of these discussions. Numerous special issues
of law reviews, over a dozen collections, and hundreds of individual papers
developing an interdisciplinary approach to the feminist legal theory were
among the many that came after.
In
the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, we organized what Fineman referred to as
"uncomfortable conversations"—events where people who held similar
values but disagreed on tactics and implementation could converse. "If
there were points of contention regarding the group's goals, you might discuss
them and, ideally, resolve them amicably. That is the only practical way to
advance.
All
of these discussions were captured by Fineman, providing a rich archive of
nearly four decades of feminist intellectual history. But she is now having
trouble finding a place for this priceless collection of pioneering feminist
legal philosophers.
"History
can teach us valuable lessons. If we don't preserve and collect history, it
won't be able to instruct us, according to Fineman.
One
of the few institutions with the capacity to care for the Fineman collection is
the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, but they informed her that
despite realizing the importance of her collection, they would not accept her
archives because of their other priorities. "We do understand the genuine
relevance of the conferences, the ideas created, and know it is an important
resource for researchers," a Harvard representative allegedly said to
Fineman. Sadly, it is inconsistent with our present strategic initiatives,
which include a stronger emphasis on the lives of women of color. We wouldn't
be able to devote the funds the archives require to their upkeep.
Other
archives have indicated they have other priorities (for example, Smith is
prioritizing papers related to sex workers' rights while Duke "does not
focus on the papers of legal scholars") or they lack the resources or
technical capability to house the collection. These archives include the Sophia
Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College, the Sallie Bingham Center
for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Pembroke Center
Archives at Brown University.
The
magnitude of the collection, according to some, is prohibitive, said Fineman.
They initially discuss the need to digitize everything, but they go on to
explain that this will increase costs and require continual technology updates,
which will reduce the amount of data they can really get.
Fineman
is concerned about how decisions are made to preserve women's history after
speaking with individuals at women's history archives. "Who decides what
and who from the past is significant? What constitutes women's or feminist
history is ultimately shaped by how and why these individuals arrive at such
judgments, according to Fineman. "A significant chapter in feminist
history is in danger of being forgotten, marginalized, or lost."
What
purpose does a feminist archive or a women's history archive serve? Is it
"either-or" to choose to preserve the histories of particular women
or the histories of a social movement, complete with all the debates,
conflicts, and dead ends? The crucial question is whether or not doing both is
necessary to portray feminist reality from a political and ethical standpoint.
The
recently inducted member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
award-winning feminist scholar Fineman is planning a series of
"uncomfortable conversations" for the fall to discuss how we
currently understand and preserve feminist history and how we might consider
doing things differently. Fineman believes that in addition to feminist legal
scholars and activists, the discussions will also involve librarians and
historians.
"I
want people to start considering what is lost if we see history in a very
constrained and selfish manner. What significance do the arguments and
controversies from the past have in terms of current issues? What is lost if we
fail to see how certain contemporary concerns are the continuation of
earlier feminist battles and insights?
The
necessity of keeping the archives of feminist efforts for women's rights has
increased as we approach the 50th anniversary of Title IX and as women's
hard-won rights are endangered more than ever. I hope this history is
preserved.