New in Books: Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law

I'm excited to report that my new book is out today, after 12 years (!) in the making.  I will be blogging and tweeting about it this week to provide a preview of the different chapters.

 

The book has several goals.  First, it reveals new information about the legal advocacy of Stanton, the leading feminist of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement,  for reform of the family and gender equality.  We generally think of advances in sex equality in marriage and the family coming in the 1970s.  This book shows that such reform was a major platform of Stanton's holistic feminist philosophy 120 years earlier, and that the private sphere was not divorced from the public sphere in her original feminist theorizing.  The second goal of the book is to integrate women's experience and public advocacy into the mainstream thought of family law.  Family law has been conceptualized as one type of narrative focused much on contract and property, oblivious to the very public advocacy of Stanton and others for rejecting the coverture laws subordinating women and demanding equality of law in marital property, marriage partnership, no-fault divorce, maternal custody, and domestic violence remedies.

The introduction is available here.  This first part introduces Stanton to unfamiliar audiences (though she needed no introduction in her day -- I call her the "Oprah of the 19c"), outlines the framework for the book and the history of family law, and discusses a bit of the theoretical approach and what it means to engage in applied legal history. 

 

Table of Contents

     Introduction: The “Radical Conscience” of Nineteenth-Century Feminism

    1.  “What Do You Women Want?” [on marital property and privileges & immunities]

    2. “The Pivot of the Marriage Relation” [on marital partnership]

    3.  “Divorce Is Not the Foe of Marriage” [on domestic violence and divorce]

    4.  The “Incidental Relation” of Mother [on reproductive rights]

    5.   Raising “Our Girls” [on maternal custody, parenting, and The Woman's Bible]

    Conclusion: “Still Many Obstacles” [on Stanton's legacy in 21st century family law]

 

The book is available from Amazon or the publisher, NYU Press