Research Guides : Gender and Law: An Interdisciplinary Research Guide: Current Awareness

Current Awareness

Women in the Profession The mission of the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession is to secure full and equal participation of women in the ABA, the profession and the justice system.
thequardian- Gender
UN gender equality news feed
Gender Jurisprudence and International Criminal Law Project

Internet Projects

American Women - A Library of Congress Resource The site contains a slightly expanded and fully searchable version of the print publication American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2001).
Discovering American Women's History Online This database provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. It's maintained by the Middle Tennessee State University's Walker Library.
National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921 The NAWSA Collection consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign. It's maintained by the Library of Congress.
Women's Legal History The website is the home of a searchable database of articles and papers on pioneering women lawyers in the United States.

International Labour Organization

Resource guide on Gender issues in employment and labour market policies The objective of this resource guide is to strengthen the capacities of ILO constituents and development policy makers in the formulation of employment policies.
Decent work and Gender Responsive Labour Inspection
Gender equality and decent work
Gender Equality

Gender Law Cases

List of Gender Law Cases from Wikipedia

SSRN - Topics

Women and Wills: An Empirical Analysis of the Married Women's Property Act and its Remarkable Resonance Today “The oft repeated rule of the common law is that marriage is an absolute gift to the husband of all the personal estate of the wife which she had at the time of the marriage, or which accrues to her in her own right, during coverture….”. By 1900, Missouri had a quarter century’s experience with its version of the Married Women’s Property Act, enacted in 1875 to reverse the common law and decree that personal property acquired by a married woman was her own, and later in 1889 a similar statute for real property. While the new statutes did not affect any property a wife had acquired before its passage, they specifically provided that the husband had no right to anything she obtained after the law went into effect. Still, a married woman in 1900 Missouri was constrained in other ways. She could not serve as executrix or administratrix of an estate, and if she had been appointed as such, her letters were revoked as soon as her marriage was suggested to the probate court. The will of a single woman who later married was automatically revoked, on the theory that the marriage took away her ability to execute a will, even though Missouri allowed married women to write wills. And her options to change the law were limited: no woman in Missouri, married or single, could serve as an executive officer of the state or on a jury, or be a judge of a circuit court, and the Missouri constitution expressly prohibited her from voting until the 1919 presidential primaries. Today, a married woman faces none of these constraints, and so one might expect an empirical analysis of women’s wills in 1900, compared with those a century later, would produce major differences. And yet… whether a woman wrote a will at all, whether she left her estate to her husband or to someone else, whether she served as executrix, whether her will was challenged, among other points, is remarkably consistent in study after study. This examination of every probate file from 1900 St Louis, 805 files in all, looks all these questions and more.
Power in the Age of In/Equality: Economic Abuse, Masculinities, and the Long Road to Marriage Equality In an era when women have achieved formal legal equality, patriarchal power endures. In this article I take on a largely neglected subject: Economic Abuse. While this phenomenon has recently begun to generate awareness as a form of intimate partner violence, it currently lacks a theory and history with which to deeply understand it. A failure to recognize the profound roots enabling economic abuse contributes to its perpetuation, trivialization, and marginalization in legal thought. Such a failure has broad implications for gender equality. This article offers both a history and a theory with which to understand the phenomenon’s deep roots. It sheds light on the historical modification of coverture through familial and market-based breadwinning roles, and points to new insights from masculinities theory to explain how economic abuse is enabled. It illustrates how economic abuse is socio-legally made possible, demonstrating how it is embedded in a historical, socio-legal structure of the market and the family. It thus brings domestic violence gender-based analysis into a broader conversation about the law, the market, and the family. It contends that economic abuse is not merely an individual matter requiring individual-oriented solutions, but rather a social one, based on a particular, historically-based construction of relationships between gender, law, the market, and the family. More generally, it offers a way to think about power in the family in this new, seemingly more egalitarian era. It concludes by suggesting guiding principles for mitigating economic abuse and for destabilizing gendered power dynamics in the family more broadly.
Single Motherhood and the Abolition of Coverture in the United States Under the common-law system of coverture in the United States, a married woman relinquished control of property and wages to her husband. Many U.S. states passed acts between 1850 and 1920 that expanded a married woman’s right to keep her market earnings and to own separate property. The former were called married women’s earnings acts (MWEAs) and the latter married women’s property acts (MWPAs). Scholarly interest in the acts’ effects is growing. Researchers have examined how the acts affected outcomes such as women’s wealth-holding and educational attainment. The acts’ impact on women’s non-marital birth decisions remains unexamined, however. We postulate that the acts caused women to anticipate greater benefits from having children within rather than outside of marriage. We thus expect passage of MWPAs and MWEAs to reduce the likelihood that single women become mothers of young children. We use probit regression to analyze individual data from the U.S. Census for the years 1860 to 1920. We find that the property acts in fact reduced the likelihood that single women have young children. We also find that the “de-coverture” acts’ effects were stronger for literate women, U.S.-born women, in states with higher female labor-force participation, and in more rural states, consistent with predictions.
On Race, Gender, and Radical Tort Reform: A Review of Martha Chamallas & Jennifer B. Wriggins, The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender, and Tort Law The Measure of Injury is an intellectual tour de force of gender and race-based jurisprudence applied to critical issues in the law of torts. In this volume, Martha Chamallas and Jennifer B. Wriggins shed light on numerous issues related to law governing accidents and intentional injuries, while offering insights into the American tort system and the challenges it faces. Chamallas and Wriggins draw upon the feminist theory, critical race theory, and general critical theory in analyzing tort doctrines and evaluating potential reforms. The authors explore how racial perceptions can distort even seemingly neutral inquiries, such as those related to factual causation. In their review of tort precedent related to race and gender, the authors explore a number of important historical topics: the doctrine of coverture, the “nervous-shock” cases, wrongful-death cases, and wrongful-birth cases. Viewed in all of its complexity, the authors’ argument seems to be that matters of race should be taken into account by tort law when cognizance will benefit persons who are members of classes that have historically suffered from discrimination, but not otherwise. To the extent that the author’s arguments are found to be persuasive, The Measure of Inquiry may play a key role in revolutionizing the compensation of intentional injuries and accidents.

FloridaBarNews.TV

This week, FloridaBarNews.TV highlights the trend of pursuing diversity in making appointments to Florida Bar committees and leadership positions on those committees, and how it is continuing with incoming Florida Bar President Michelle Suskauer.