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Twentieth Century Housewives and The Sexual Contract
No full text“If a wife has a right to the money she can save from her housekeeping allowance, she might let her husband go short of food while she builds up a banking account. She might serve him up corned beef instead of roast beef for dinner.” These are the words of Goddard LJ in Blackwell v Blackwell [1943] 2 All ER 579, where it was held that Mrs Blackwell’s savings of one hundred pounds ten shillings in the Oxford and District Co-operative Society were the property of her husband, from whom Mrs Blackwell had been separated for two years. Protection of the husband’s roast beef might have been secured, but the consequences for Mrs Blackwell were severe. Writing in 1967, Lady Summerskill described her as ‘helpless and hopeless, a victim of a legal system which still in the twentieth century treats the wife as a chattel of her husband’.In this paper, I argue that The Sexual Contract enriches our understanding of the lived experiences of twentieth century housewives like Mrs Blackwell by looking to the root causes of their oppression and finding them in the sexual contract underpinning marriage. The Sexual Contract also highlights the shortcomings of ‘conjectural histories’ and the importance of paying attention to the ‘missing half of the story’. This emphasises the need for a feminist history of family law, to appreciate the forgotten campaigns of pressure groups that sought to change the law affecting married women. Drawing on my forthcoming SLSA funded research, I take the Married Women’s Association as my focus. This group financed Mrs Blackwell’s unsuccessful appeal in 1943 and continued to campaign for legal reform of wives’ right to housekeeping money. Twenty years later, Lady Summerskill’s Married Women’s Property Bill gained Royal Assent (becoming the Married Women’s Property Act 1964), and provided that money given by a husband to his wife for housekeeping was to be held by husband and wife in equal shares.Yet as this paper explores, the story behind this short piece of legislation is often ignored, and Carole Pateman’s work helps us understand why. Paying attention to the role of the sexual contract in family law history requires a rewriting of orthodox history that does not forget women’s struggles for legal equality. Indeed, to properly understand why the law affecting married women is so different now, it is imperative that the Married Women’s Association’s hard-fought campaigns are not overlooked. While their campaigns might not have always led directly to reform, this group was an example of feminist activism in the mid-twentieth century that emphasised the inequity of the current law and created pressure for change
A Feminist Discourse on the Global Indian Surrogacy Bazaar
Get PDFThe transnational Indian surrogacy markets are a classic case of how rampant violations of human and child rights, women’s bodily integrity and medical ethics thrive on global structural inequalities. In the garb of reproductive liberty, the surrogacy practice promotes deeply embedded pronatalist, patriarchal, racial and ableist hegemony. This raises globally relevant questions of geneticisation, alienation of the gestational role, human and child rights violations, trafficking and reproductive injustice. In her book, The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman critiques the fact that patriarchal control prevails in the marriage contract, the prostitution contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. My research, recently also published as a book titled A Transnational Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India, shows the link between the three kinds of sexual contracts elaborated in Carole Pateman’s book. India banned surrogacy on reported deaths of surrogate mothers and egg donors, custody battles for children, abandonment of disabled and undesired children and exploitation of women, apart from trafficking for surrogacy. The illegal chain of networks trafficking young girls from poor localities in India for prostitution and domestic work has also been used for surrogacy. The surrogacy practice maintains patriarchy through familial persuasion and contracts that control and exploit women’s bodies and effect triple-alienation: from the children born, from their own body and physical alienation. Applying the reproductive justice framework, I argue that surrogacy is likely to put the surrogate mother through multiple forms of indignity and injustice along with life risk and hence cannot be considered the intended parent’s reproductive right
#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women (Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale eds)
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Academic Reflection – Gender, Subjectivity and Criminal Responsibility
Get PDFThe topic of gender and criminal responsibility has long attracted critical scholarly attention. Several cohorts of feminist scholars in law, criminology and history have examined various dimensions of women’s responsibility for crime. Nicola Lacey’s work is at the forefront of this critical examination of gender and criminal responsibility. Lacey tackles this topic from both a feminist legal theory perspective and a criminal law theory perspective. This short paper offers some further comments on gender and criminal responsibility, with an examination of what I call the atypical criminal legal forms that govern women’s responsibility for crime in the current era. In so doing, I consider how some of the different dimensions of Lacey’s impressive oeuvre come together
Monsters of Contact: Historical Trauma in Caddoan Oral Traditions (Mark van de Logt)
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Introduction – Speaking Subjects: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lacey’s Unspeakable Subjects
Get PDFIntroduction to the collection of papers celebrating 20 years since the publication of Nicola Lacey's Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (1998)
Sharing is Caring – Care workers’ employment bargain and the National Minimum Wage
Get PDFIt is undoubtingly noticeable that care workers' employment rights are currently prominent in the news and raise important social, market and legal concerns of equality and fairness. They stimulate debates on the consequences of the legal position on the 'wage-work bargain' of care workers and the national minimum wage laws are central to this. It can be said that national minimum wage (NMW) underpayments stem from laws which define social structures and attitudes about care giving. As such, the core substance of NMW regulations will be analysed to define how and why this issue exists and what is the impact. Inevitably, socio-legal issues about the gendered workforce, multi-level control of the industry and economics (the ageing population, social capital and market logics) will serve as perspectives of criticism to the current position of law on care work and the NMW
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