The language of law and how it restricted remedies for women's concerns

[RethinkingLife]

I've been reading a history of privacy legislation wrt photography (Jessica Lake: The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits). A lot of it is grounded in the actions of courageous women who could only fight the law within its language. And that language did not recognise them as citizens and that, to this day, affects sex-based differences in the notion of privacy.

I very much want to produce 2 pages from the book but it feels over the top so I'll restrict myself to this. (The relevant context is the splendid Abigail Roberson and her NYT open letter to Chief Justice Parker. See https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2011/08/who-owns-your-face.html )

Here was a twenty-two year old woman challenging the former chief justice of New York and possible future president by advancing a premise of twentieth-century feminist legal theory, that gender identification defines the structure of law. Roberson could see that Chief Justice Parker's inability to identify with her meant he could not understand or empathize with her plight, which led to his unwillingness to provide her with a remedy. Her argument supports the proposition that the law privileges the interests of those who create and enforce it. As feminist legal scholar Regina Graycar has noted in "The Gender of Judgments": "Because of the long-standing exclusion of women from law, the substantive legal doctrines we use on a day-to-day basis were developed by men, with their problems and concerns in mind, and reflect men's perspectives on the world." Roberson lost her case due to the inability of the common law to recognize her gendered grievance as legitimate.

... long-standing exclusion of women from law...

Truly long-standing. Women were only legally recognised as actual people in around 1919.

It's like someone somewhere said ..

The law in its great majesty, forbids everyone, rich and poor alike from sleeping under a bridge.

That's interesting.

I'm afraid I don't have a source, but I remember reading that cyclists do badly in court against car drivers, even when objectively the car driver is at fault (and obviously in a position of power on the roads). The reasoning was that juries usually contain more drivers than cyclists and hence empathised with the car driver, and perhaps held grudges against having to share the road with cyclists.

It is awful when men don't listen to women about how threatening low level sexual aggression can feel, because it is clear some males think they might enjoy it if tables were turned. It really highlights the different experience of the two sexes. We inhabit parallel worlds.

It's playing out in the COVID-19 enquiry with the claims that the (mostly) men dealing with it were bothered about hunting, shooting, and allowing attendance at football matches than anything that affected women.

Women were invisible for far too long despite being the most plausible carers and a lot of the workforce most directly affected by it.

Anatole France.

Worse than that, it leads to a string of similar practices, e.g. in criminology. Most street sexual harassment doesn't get recorded and CAN'T be recorded because the threshold has been defined so as to not to include, for example, aggressive cat-calling. The statistics that do exist show more men than women as victims of stranger crime (never mind whether they became victims of an unprovoked attack or as the losing side in a mutual pub brawl.) Hence, all the gaslighting criminologists telling us women are actually quite safe among strangers and any of us feeling otherwise is hysterical and/or xenophobic and/or transphobic.