Apr 25, 2022 Kaiponanea Matsumura
Jeffrey Rachlinski and Andrew Wistrich begin their article, Benevolent Sexism in Judges, with an epigraph that, in its pithiness, cannot be improved upon: “The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.” Perhaps the most infamous proof of this claim can be found in Justice Joseph Bradley’s concurring opinion in Bradwell v. Illinois, which points to “the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex,” as well as her “paramount destiny . . . to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” as reasons to deny Myra Bradwell a license to practice law in Illinois. The stereotypes that women are natural caregivers, more nurturing and attentive to their children than men, persist to this day, undergirding unequal treatment in the workplace, burdening nonconforming individuals, and discounting efforts of men who are excellent parents.
In some instances, however, these same stereotypes may favor women. Rachlinski and Wistrich set out to test this phenomenon, which they term “benevolent sexism.” They study whether judges are affected by gender bias in two contexts where women regularly experience better outcomes than men: child custody disputes and criminal sentencing. Judges are supposed to be impartial in their decisions and are typically forbidden from relying on gender when determining outcomes. The confirmation of gender bias would therefore be an important (albeit unsurprising) finding.
As the authors note, the mere fact that women experience systematically better outcomes in some contexts, like custody disputes, cannot prove the existence of gender bias among judges, as other factors unique to those individual cases might influence outcomes. For instance, women seek sole custody more frequently than men, which partially explains why they get sole custody more of the time. Moreover, any given mother might be better situated to assume custodial responsibilities than the child’s father. Controlling for individual differences between male and female parents in real cases is practically impossible. (Pp. 112, 121.)
To tease out gender bias in the custody context, the authors presented judges with a hypothetical child relocation case. In the hypothetical, a parent with primary custody over two young children (ages four and six) petitions to relocate, with the children, to a city two-hundred miles away to pursue a work opportunity. The other parent, who spends three weekends per month with the children and sees them several times per week, opposes the move. Half of the judges received a version in which the parent seeking to relocate was the mother; the other half received a version in which the parent seeking to relocate was the father. A total of 355 judges in the United States and Canada participated in the study while attending four different judicial education conferences. Because some of the judges were generalists and were coming from different jurisdictions, the authors provided a rough summary of the law governing relocation decisions.
To test gender bias in the sentencing context, the authors provided two groups of judges, 141 trial judges from Ohio and 210 federal judges, a one-page sentencing hypothetical in which the defendant, either “Frank” or “Lisa,” sends a threatening letter to a caseworker who denied the defendant disability benefits. The defendant, who had told the caseworker that he or she could not work and needed the benefits to remain in the home and to keep his or her child from starving, is charged and pleads guilty. The Ohio materials told the judges that the defendant pleaded guilty to the felony of retaliation against a public official, which carries a prison term of one to five years. The federal materials told the judges that the defendant was charged with sending threatening communications through the U.S. mail, and provided the relevant federal sentencing guidelines.
The authors found bias in favor of women in both contexts. Regarding custody, in the combined sample of 355 responses, 56% of the judges allowed the female parent to relocate in contrast to 42% of judges who allowed the male parent to relocate. This difference was statistically significant. Regarding sentencing, the authors found that judges sentenced a male defendant to an average of 14.2 months, whereas judges sentenced a female defendant to 11.3 months, again a statistically significant disparity.
In their discussion of these findings, the authors observe that custody and sentencing law permit the exercise of a significant amount of judicial discretion, which increases the possibility that stereotypes may influence decision making. Rather than proposing to constrain discretion, a solution amply explored in the family law literature, they assume the good faith of judges and propose a series of debiasing techniques. For instances, judges can remind themselves of stereotype-incongruent models “such as esteemed professional women and devoted fathers”; engage in thought experiments in which they change the gender of the litigants; keep themselves honest by tracking of the outcomes of male and female litigants; and implement practices to facilitate deliberate thinking at the expense of intuitive thinking, like adhering to checklists or rubrics. (P. 135.)
These suggestions seem sensible and easy to implement through judicial education programs. What interested me most, however, were several aspects of the authors’ findings that did not merit sustained attention in the article but beg to be studied in greater depth.
When examined more closely, the data show that family court judges exhibit less gender bias than the overall results suggest. Of the overall pool of 355 judges presented with the custody relocation problem, approximately one third were family court judges attending either the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges annual conference in 2015, or the New York State Association of Judges of the Family Court of New York conference in 2019. In other words, one-third of the judges were family court specialists and two thirds were generalists. 70% of the generalists would have allowed the mother to relocate while only 48% would have allowed the father to do so: a significant disparity. However, the specialists were much less likely to be affected by the gender of the relocating spouse: 30% would have granted the mother’s request, compared to the 26% who would have granted the father’s. (P. 125) The parent’s gender did not have a statistically significant effect on the specialists. (P. 126) These findings suggest that family court judges, by virtue of their training, experience, or other factors, may be reassuringly gender egalitarian.
In another interesting wrinkle, female judges exhibited less bias in both the custody and sentencing contexts. When it came to sentencing, male judges imposed an average sentence that was 3.7 months shorter for female defendants. Female judges, however, imposed an average sentence that was only 0.7 months shorter for female defendants. In the custody context, male judges granted a mother’s relocation request 61% of the time, in contrast to 43% of the time for the father. Female judges showed a smaller spread, granting a mother’s request 51% of the time in contrast to 43% for the father.These results indicate that female judges might be less inclined to exhibit bias in favor of women in these contexts. It would be interesting to see whether further studies could confirm this result, and also whether they might reveal the reasons why female judges are less susceptible to unequal rulings.
The law has come a long way in eliminating explicit sex-based classifications in the family context. Yet stereotypes and social norms continue to produce unequal outcomes. Benevolent Sexism in Judges is a reminder that gender bias can be documented, quantified, and better understood.
Mar 23, 2022 Linda C. McClain
In 1960, Mary (“Polly”) Ingraham Bunting, newly-appointed President of Radcliffe College, wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine to encourage applications to the new Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. In the essay, Bunting connected the Institute’s goal of ending the “waste of highly talented, educated womanpower” to helping women as well as to better realizing America’s “heritage” and “aspirations.” The Institute would help “intellectually displaced women”—mothers whose homemaking and childcare responsibilities had interrupted their careers—get back on track through a financial stipend of up to $3,000, access to Harvard’s library resources, a private office, and formal and informal exchange.
As Maggie Doherty recounts in her engaging book, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Bunting, a microbiologist and educator, first conceived this “messy experiment” in “a national war room populated almost entirely by men”: she served on a Cold War-era committee formed by the National Science Foundation after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik to study education in the U.S. and steer more resources and students into science and engineering. (Pp. 58-59.) Publicity for the Institute echoed Cold War rhetoric about the national risk of not utilizing women’s talents, but also stressed the risk to families and marriages: “This sense of stagnation can become a malignant factor even in the best of marriages . . . when the gifted woman must spend her time inventing ways to employ herself mentally and failing, or only half-succeeding, may turn against the marriage itself in sheer frustration.” (P. 68.) If this rhetoric brings to mind Betty Friedan’s famous articulation of “the problem that has no name,” in The Feminine Mystique, it may be because Bunting and Friedan initially planned to collaborate on the book. However, the collaboration ended because Bunting resisted Friedan’s approach of viewing the dynamic “in terms of men against women,” instead of (as Bunting perceived it) a “climate of unexpectation” about women’s roles “in which both men and women were trapped”: that women could not have both family and career so that any pursuit of intellectual goals would be at a cost to their personal lives. (Pp. 63, 65.) Bunting viewed the Institute as a way to change that climate. (P. 63.)
Doherty argues that the Radcliffe Institute’s emergence is a “crucial and yet often overlooked event in the history of American feminism,” which sometimes treats The Feminine Mystique as the launching point of second-wave feminism and the prior decade as a “dead zone for liberation politics.” (P. xviii) Instead, efforts by “women reformers, educators, and artists of the 1950s and early 1960s” helped to lay “the groundwork for feminist revolt”—even though many of those women viewed themselves as neither revolutionaries nor feminists. (P. xix.) Referencing Virginia Woolf’s famous A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Woolf ‘s imagining a world in which generations of generous female benefactors had (similar to their male counterparts) left money “to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex,” Doherty observes: “The Institute made Woolf’s supposition into something real.” (Pp. xix-xx.)
The Institute provided the crucial resource of time away from caring for home and children. Drawing on her own experience of combining motherhood with laboratory research (in a relatively egalitarian marriage to a husband who was the primary earner), Bunting believed both that most women desired to combine family life with professional life and could do so with the right supports. Bunting envisioned that the Institute would provide “a place to work free from the unpredictable distractions of family life, the compulsion to pursue the daily routine at the expense of a half-finished conception or dream, and the guilt over children rebuffed, or questions unanswered.” (P. 70.) Bunting believed that this small group of female scholars could inspire Radcliffe undergraduates, but also inspire other colleges to adopt similar programs. (P. 65.)
To show the Institute’s impact on the women it supported, Doherty focuses on the friendships, artistic creations, and careers of five writers and artists who were “associate scholars” at the Institute during 1961-1963, its first two years: poets and close friends Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen. These five called themselves “the Equivalents” because their applications had to demonstrate that they had the “equivalent” to a doctorate through “success in an artistic field.” (Pp. xvi, 57.) Drawing on archival material, Doherty recreates an otherwise “lost world” that is engaging, illuminating, poignant, and sometimes tragic (in the case of Sexton, who took her life in 1974). Family law and gender law scholars and teachers will find rich nuggets to help convey what marriage, family, and work/family conflict looked like prior to the “gender revolution” spurred on in part by the Supreme Court’s shift to a more skeptical look at laws classifying by sex throughout the 1970s. Feminist and Critical Race scholars will appreciate Doherty’s insights about the initial whiteness of the Institute and the implicit race and class assumptions about its likely applicants.
The vital role the Institute served in providing space and money for the Equivalents and other talented women is made evident from Doherty’s sketch of the “ambient” misogyny in the late 1950’s world of poetry, when Sexton and Kumin, along with Sylvia Plath, sat in the classroom of poet Robert Lowell at Boston University. (Pp. 22-27.) Lowell divided writers into two categories, “major” and “minor;” “almost every female poet was a ‘minor’ writer, with a few exceptions.” (P. 28.) Further, when the Institute opened its doors in 1961, full coeducation at Harvard and other traditionally male-only Ivy League Schools was controversial and years away. The Institute’s woman-centered world, by comparison, provided “the Equivalents” and their colleagues the opportunity to hold seminars to discuss their work.
Among the first class of 24 women, the “vast majority” had children. There was only one single woman, Alma Wittlin, an educational psychologist. Doherty reports: “it was a rare thing to be a single woman in 1960—only 8 percent of women over twenty-five had never been married—and it was not easy,” given “social convention.” (P. 93.) There were no women of color in the Institute’s first class of scholars: they were “white, well-off, and except Sexton, highly educated,” although from diverse disciplines. (P. 92.) As Doherty observes, a program “pitched as part-time employment” did not have in its purview the needs of women who were full-time (underpaid) wage-earners eager for financial assistance or child care. (P. 69.) Doherty suggests that imagery of avoiding “stagnation” and taking “initiative” reflected a “default white perspective” that would have seemed inapt to many Black women. By comparison to White women, in the 1950s, the number of Black professional women was increasing—outpacing Black men, proportionally—and “upwardly mobile” Black women faced different challenges in combining work and performing domesticity. (Pp. 69-70.) The selection committee did not explicitly consider either race or economic circumstances. Nor was there comment on the racial dynamics of the care economy that “facilitate[ed] female creativity”: “stipends . . . often passed from the white women receiving Radcliffe’s largesse to women of color, who provided child care and household help so that scholars could work.” (P. 264.)
Of the five “Equivalents,” Tillie Olsen, the most “politically conscious—and politically active,” was “unnerved” by the Institute’s whiteness. Her time at the Institute helped to germinate her later book Silences, about how the various obstacles women writers experienced contributed to their comparative absence; her working-class background led her to champion neglected working-class female writers as well as women of color. By the second half of the 1960s, as Black female students at Radcliffe protested for “increased racial representation,” the Institute also “diversified its group of associate scholars,” beginning in 1966, with playwright and novelist Alice Childress. (Pp. 264-65.) In 1971-73, while at the Institute, 27-year old Alice Walker worked on her novel Meridian and discovered and began championing Zora Neale Hurston. Olsen and Walker, who became correspondents, shared a commitment to researching and teaching women writers missing from the canon. In what became her essay, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South, Walker turned to Woolf’s A Room of One Own to ask about the “genius” that must have existed among “enslaved people and among the wives and daughters of sharecroppers.” (P. 276.)
By examining the lives of “the Equivalents” before the Institute, Doherty powerfully conveys how the demands of mothering—and, in Olsen’s case, wage-earning—took them away from their art, even as they often made women’s bodies, motherhood, children, and the emotional rhythms of family life the subject of their poetry, painting, and sculpture. (P. 146.) Their time at the Institute would open doors for new opportunities and new funding, as well as greater legitimacy of this artistic focus on the personal.
The Institute ceased to exist as a woman-only program in 1999, when Harvard and Radcliffe merged and Radcliffe’s existence as a separate college ended. The well-funded successor was the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, open to women and men. Doherty ponders whether the need for such women-only spaces had ended by then, noting conflicting reactions, including a recollection of the “magic” and “comfortable community” of the all-female Institute. (P. 310.) Doherty persuasively concludes that the “most important” insight of Bunting, Friedan, Walker, and “the five Equivalents” was that “women’s creative and intellectual lives are shaped by their material conditions and that those conditions must change if women are to be the artists, the writers, the mothers, and the minds that they want to be.” (P. 315.) While “a women-only space like the Institute might not be right for the twenty-first century, a time when the gender binary is increasingly challenged,” Doherty argues for adapting the Institute’s approach to the present day, asking how educational and other institutions could “better support women” and “work to eradicate gender disparities.” (P. 315.) She issues a call for “another messy experiment.” It’s a call worth heeding.
Feb 10, 2022 Josh Gupta-Kagan
Sarah H. Lorr,
Unaccommodated: How the ADA Fails Parents, 110
Calif. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2022), available at
SSRN.
The child protection legal system is supposed to work towards the reunification of parents and children in foster care through individualized services to help parents raise their children safely. But that legal system has long been criticized for frequent and severe invasions into the family integrity rights of parents with disabilities and their children, treating parental disabilities as grounds for permanent separation instead of individual characteristics to be accommodated. Several years ago, it seemed that the law was turning. In 2015, the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Justice issued joint guidance stating that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applied to parents with disabilities in child protection cases. The joint guidance urged states to more effectively help reunify families with a disabled parent and prevent their separation in the first instance. A small number of state courts issued decisions requiring truly individualized accommodations for parents with disabilities. But those cases remain outliers. Sarah H. Lorr has done the child protection legal field an excellent service by outlining just how far it has left to go in her forthcoming article Unaccommodated: How the ADA Fails Parents.
Since the 2015 guidance, state courts have only inconsistently applied ADA protections to parents with foster care cases. Lorr documents how the largest set of reported state appellate decisions since the 2015 guidance “remain completely hostile to parents raising discrimination-based claims under the ADA,” (P. 38), often directly contradicting the federal guidance. (P. 39.) Nor do federal courts provide a meaningful remedy. As Lorr shows, a variety of doctrines – Rooker-Feldman, various abstention doctrines, and collateral estoppel – have made federal court vindication of the rights of parents with disabilities very difficult to obtain. (Pp. 40-49.)
The resulting harms are significant. Families with disabled parents are separated when accommodations could have kept them together. Families are kept separated when accommodations could speed reunification. Lorr identifies one leading case (Pp. 33-34) whose facts illustrate how: A child protection agency demanded that a parent with an intellectual disability attend parenting classes, participate in therapy, earn a GED, and find her own employment and housing. The parent, struggling to take care of herself as her family support system collapsed, could not meet the demands of the child protection agency, which were “geared toward a parent of average cognitive functioning.” Through her lawyer, the parent sought individualized assistance so she could understand and participate in those services, including asking the agency to obtain help from an organization which could provide intensive supports to accommodate her disability. After failing to take those steps, the agency petitioned the family court to terminate her relationship with her children, which the trial court granted.
Those trial-level facts demonstrate what can and does happen when, as Lorr documents, state courts fail to apply the joint guidance. (In one of the few decisions to follow the joint guidance, the termination was reversed on appeal – a decision that, as Lorr demonstrates, remains an outlier). Lorr aptly builds on scholars who have documented how parents with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, are more likely to have their children placed in foster care, remain in state custody, and face the system’s most severe consequence, termination of the parent-child relationship. (Pp. 5, 8.) Moreover, as Lorr points out, parents with disabilities of which child protection agencies are unaware face a catch 22: they must disclose their disabilities if they want an accommodation, but doing so is not likely to lead to meaningful legal protection and may worsen the state’s intervention in their families, discussing a Sixth Circuit case where that result seems to have occurred. (Pp. 50-51, citing Marble v. Tennessee, 767 F. App’x 647 (6th Cir. 2019).)
Lorr points to discrete solutions for lawyers defending parents with disabilities. Consistent with the joint guidance, she urges more assertive family court action to demand accommodations for disabled parents. (Pp. 54-56.) She goes further, urging more access to and meaningful remedies from federal courts. (Pp. 51-54.) Finally, Lorr urges closing of significant gaps in state data reporting about families with disabilities. (The federal government’s primary system for tracking information about children separated from their parents and placed in foster care, known as AFCARS, tracks when children enter foster care, how long they stay, and whether they reunify with their parents or leave foster care to a new family. But it does not track when parents have a disability, and other data systems fail to fill the void.) (P. 18.)
Lorr also invites more transformational steps, seeking to “radically alter” the present system from “a corrective, judgmental force brought upon Black, Brown, poor, and disabled parents” to one providing meaningful supports. (P. 62.) This call identifies a problem at the core of the present child protection system: it makes demands of families in its ambit without adequate or individualized support to help parents raise their children, thus undermining the law’s commitments to respecting family integrity and prioritizing reunification with families of origin. This project is larger, of course, than a single article – but that project needs Lorr’s contribution and analysis to succeed.
Cite as: Josh Gupta-Kagan,
Accommodating Parents, JOTWELL
(February 10, 2022) (reviewing Sarah H. Lorr,
Unaccommodated: How the ADA Fails Parents, 110
Calif. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2022), available at SSRN),
https://family.jotwell.com/accommodating-parents/.
Jan 12, 2022 Brian Bix
Katharine K. Baker,
Equality and Family Opportunity, __
Univ. of Penn. J. of Const. Law __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
As Katharine Baker recounts in her excellent article, Equality and Family Autonomy, functional analysis was once part of a positive progressive narrative within family law: it was through a functional analysis that scholars and courts (and some legislatures) found a way to give legal recognition – and legal protection – to individuals and families whom legal formalities would not protect. As Baker writes: “Contemporary family law scholarship … often assume[s] that a functional approach to family law … is the best way to secure equal treatment for people who live in relationships that have not been recognize legally as familial.” (P. 2.)
However, functional approaches always had their disadvantages, and now that same-sex partners and parents can generally protect their interests through marriage or adoption after Obergefell v. Hodges, Baker shows how those disadvantages – “pluralistic, self-determination and privacy values that can be lost” (p. 4) – often outweigh the benefits for the legal treatment of parenthood. Functional analyses require state evaluation of the family, which is too often “invasive, ineffective, and . . . damaging” (p. 4). Baker argues that “[a]s family forms grow more diverse, judges become ever less qualified and less capable of assessing what constitutes appropriate family behavior.” (P. 5.)
Baker emphasizes the tension within the doctrines of family privacy and family autonomy: The Constitution and the common law give certain protections to families, but do not define “family.” Where once this was defined in terms of legal and traditional family forms, many scholars (and some courts and legislatures) urged a functional understanding of family – “those who act like a family should be treated as family” (p. 3, footnote omitted) – to protect LGBTQ families and the various “kinship structures” (p. 3) found in economically marginalized communities. Functional arguments are effectively equality arguments (if they act like a family they should be treated no different), but equality arguments have “an inevitable comparator problem.” (P. 3.) What do (unconventional) families need to be like, to warrant the special protections the constitution grants to families? The answer tends to be: conventional families (“dyadic, nuclear famil[ies]” (p. 4)).
To conclude under a functional analysis that someone is “acting like a parent,” a couple is “acting like a married couple,” or a household is “acting like a family,” courts need a standard, an express or unstated understanding of what parents, couples, and families, act or look like. And the judiciary, which is often not especially diverse, may bring a fairly conventional (white, wealthy, suburban, middle-class) understanding to such things. So, family forms that may be common in some communities (e.g., BIPOC and LGBTQ communities ), but less conventional according to establishment views, may be rejected by the courts. Baker comments: “To assess whether a group functions as a family in order to decide whether they should be treated as other families invades the liberty families are supposed to enjoy as a unit.” (P. 4.) Functional approaches are intrusive: to gain rights, couples claiming that their relationships were “like marriage” may need to testify in detail about their sexual, financial, and social life, and have all of these evaluated by strangers. (P. 6.) This parallels the way that state benefit rules already authorize the state to intrude on the lives and domestic decision-making of poorer families. (Pp. 23-24, 28-30.)
Under Baker’s analysis, if functional analysis now has a better reputation than it deserves, the idea of family autonomy perhaps has a less good reputation than it deserves. The poor reputation comes in part from its association with the way it has been used to block abuse, neglect, and exploitation from public scrutiny. (P. 23.) As Baker (pp. 7-9), Frances Olsen, and others have argued, it can also be misleading to speak of the government’s “non-intervention” in the family, as the government always sets the rules of engagement (e.g., what counts as abuse, neglect, abandonment, inadequate support, and grounds for divorce; and who controls property during the marriage and how is property divided on divorce and at the death of one spouse; etc.), and “non-intervention” may simply serve the more empowered spouse. (Pp. 22-23.) Still, there remains real value to family members being able to make significant decisions for the family, without those decisions having to be publicly justified or being subject to government overruling, and to have interactions in the family largely shielded from judicial or agency review. Also, Baker adds, “[r]especting family autonomy is a means of respecting diversity.” (P. 26.)
Baker sees the high value of family autonomy reflected in many long-term trends in family law: e.g., the demise of fault divorce (neither the judges nor the parties wanted the judges “interrogat[ing] the behavior in a marriage” (p. 14)), and the move towards less judicial discretion in property division, spousal support, and child support. (Pp. 14-19.)
What then to put in the place of functional analysis? After all, there needs to be some definition of “family” for any doctrine of family autonomy or family privacy. Baker urges greater uses of formalities: “Registration system for both parent-like and marriage-like relationships offer alternatives that can protect relative autonomy while honoring non-traditional families.” (Pp. 6-7, footnote omitted.) Along with license-plus-ceremony for marriage, some states have “opt in” registration to grant rights to nonmarried cohabitants, and there are “Voluntary Acknowledgement of Parentage” and guardianship papers for parental rights. (Pp. 38-39, 47.) These and similar straightforward forms could and should be expanded and (if possible) made more uniform across jurisdictions.
Of course, even granting Baker all the points she raises about the problems of functional approaches, it is far from clear that it would be wise to rid family law of all the functional and equitable principles relating to marriage and parenthood (which include important resources, like the putative spouse doctrine and the in loco parentis doctrine). Baker’s work is best seen as a corrective, showing us the real benefits, both from the perspective of judges and that of affected families, of a significant retreat from functional approaches, and a higher valuation of formalities and family autonomy.
Dec 7, 2021 Rachel Rebouché
Greer Donley,
Early Abortion Exceptionalism, 107
Cornell L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2021), available on
SSRN.
In Early Abortion Exceptionalism, forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review, Professor Greer Donley addresses the regulation of medication abortion by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Almost 40% of abortions are completed by taking two drugs at or before 10 weeks of gestation. Mifepristone is the first drug and, the second drug, misoprostol, is taken 24 to 48 hours after. The FDA issues a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for drugs it deems risky and in need of monitoring. Professor Donley focuses on two requirements this drug safety program imposes on providers seeking to prescribe mifepristone. For one, all providers must be certified to prescribe mifepristone, which requires submitting a form to the drug sponsor attesting that the provider can “assess the duration of pregnancy accurately,” “diagnose ectopic pregnancies,” and “provide surgical intervention” or “have made plans to provide such care through others.” (P. 11.) For another, the FDA requires that patients collect mifepristone at a healthcare facility – in-person at a hospital, clinic, or medical office. The effect of the FDA’s dispensation requirement has been to prohibit retail pharmacies and mail order prescription services from distributing mifepristone.
Professor Donley explains the complexities of the FDA regulation with clarity. But detailing the rules that govern medication abortion is not the point of her novel piece. Rather, Professor Donley assesses these restrictions in light of their ineffectiveness – medication abortion has been subject to strict controls even though it is comparatively safer than less regulated drugs. And she demonstrates why lifting these regulations would greatly expand access to early abortion. To make this case, her article offers three important insights.
First, Professor Donley shows how medication abortion, like other matters important to women’s reproductive health, has been singled out among drugs and subject to an overly politicized process. Professor Donley compares the FDA’s treatment of medication abortion to the agency’s regulation of Plan B (the “morning after” pill), female sex drugs, and medical research in women and female animals. Together, these examples reveal “a troubling history of implicit bias that harms women, especially when considering reproductive health.” (P. 36.)
Second, Professor Donley brings together legal arguments with public health research to demonstrate that medication abortion is safe and effective, highlighting that the FDA’s requirements – certification and in-person dispensation specifically – are unnecessary at best and counterproductive for patient safety at worst. For example, of the 3.7 million women who took mifepristone between 2000 and 2018, the FDA’s website notes that there were 24 deaths. Viagra, by contrast, has a fatality rate of 4 deaths per 100,000, nearly six times higher than that of mifepristone; but unlike mifepristone, Viagra is not subject to the same restrictions.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the mismatch between the safety of medication abortion and the burdensome FDA restrictions. Along with the expansion of telemedicine in numerous other areas, the pandemic has been a catalyst for the wider introduction of telehealth for medication abortion. In July 2020, a federal district court temporarily enjoined, for the course of the pandemic, the FDA restrictions on how patients collect the drug regimen. Professor Donley weaves together the arguments marshalled by the district court in suspending in-person dispensation with the proven benefits of “teleabortion” to urge the FDA to lift or to modify the REMS – an action that the FDA may take by the end of this year.
Third, Professor Donley reflects on the future of abortion care given the emergence of virtual clinics providing medication abortion services. Professor Donley argues that anti-abortion activists would have trouble challenging the FDA’s removal of the REMS in court. More practically, despite clear limitations on the expansion of teleabortion – including state-specific restrictions on the delivery of medication abortion and bans on telemedicine for abortions – more people will receive medication abortions because of remote delivery. Mailing a two-drug regimen opens all manner of possibilities for abortion access, within and outside the law.
Professor Donley provides a fascinating and timely account of the changing legal landscape for medication abortion, blending various perspectives – from empirical research to agency review to litigation strategies – that are not often in conversation with each other. Removing federal restrictions will increase access to medication abortion; yet how big a difference remains to be seen. If pharmacies were to carry mifepristone, for example, Professor Donley suggests that more providers would administer medication abortion because they could avoid the costs of storing it. Professor Donley, however, may underestimate the various impediments to abortion care, which include limited medical training, stigma, or costly impact of state regulations. For instance, 19 states require some in-person component of having a medication abortion (such as in-person counseling or a mandated ultrasound); these state laws will impede the expansion of virtual medication abortion even if federal oversight is relaxed. States also are attempting to regulate mifepristone more strictly than the FDA; these efforts raise questions of federal preemption that are the subject of ongoing litigation. This is all to say that removing FDA restrictions would go a long way in expanding access to medication abortion, but it is only one piece of a complicated puzzle.
To be sure, Professor Donley recognizes the challenges ahead for expanding access to medication abortion. Her work is prescient while staying grounded in the history of the abortion debate at federal and state levels. But her optimism about the capacity of medication abortion to shore up gaps in access is contagious, particularly given the role that portable, inexpensive medication abortion might play in a country where some states double down on anti-abortion legislation. As the country awaits a 2022 Supreme Court decision on whether states may ban abortion before viability – a decision that likely will overturn or further eviscerate constitutional protection for abortion decisions — the legal landscape for abortion promises to shift further in the near future. Early Abortion Exceptionalism invites the federal government, as seems to be its direction, to solve the already-severe problem of how people gain access to abortion services, rather than to continue to exacerbate it.
Nov 9, 2021 Dara E. Purvis
This year, the law journals at the University of Michigan Law School published a collective joint special issue focusing on racism and the law. One essay included in the volume, selected and edited by the Michigan Journal of Race and the Law, was Colleen Campbell’s Medical Violence, Obstetric Racism, and the Limits of Informed Consent for Black Women. Professor Campbell’s essay concisely describes and explains how, as she puts it, “Black women are simultaneously overmedicalized and medically neglected” in obstetrics. Physicians see Black women as innately high-risk, so that they are overmedicalized by disproportionately common surgical interventions during pregnancy and birth. At the same time, racism that continues to devalue Black lives leads medical professionals to disregard Black women’s choices and agency around their reproductive health. In both cases, the ability of Black women to determine or even consent to their medical treatment is undermined.
Professor Campbell’s project is an ambitious one, as she traces treatment of Black women by the medical establishment in the context of obstetrics from the exploitation of enslaved women to higher rates of Black maternal mortality today, and she ably synthesizes the works of a wide range of scholars and literatures to do so. In the earliest days of “professionalized” gynecology, white male physicians took over a practice that had been largely conducted by women such as midwives. One way that the field became professionalized and masculinized was by greater reliance on surgical procedures. And a key, disturbing part of the development of surgical procedures was surgical experimentation on enslaved women, the most extreme example of medical violence in Campbell’s account. Campbell points to the example of James Marion Sims, considered the father of modern gynecology through his surgical treatment of fistulas, who operated on conscious and unanesthetized enslaved women. Adding insult to unfathomable injury, Sims described enslaved women with no choice or control over what happened to their bodies as happily consenting to these procedures, and relied on the racist belief that Black people did not feel pain the way that white people did to justify not using anesthesia.
This blithe assumption of consent is also illustrated in Professor Campbell’s discussion of mass sterilizations performed on Black women and other women of color in the early twentieth century, a more recent example of medical violence that inflicts surgical interventions in the absence of patient consent. Such practices grew from two racist beliefs: first, seeing women of color as hyper-fertile in a way that threatened white dominance, and second, physicians’ willingness to perform life-altering surgery based on the judgment of a state agency or employee, which was deemed more important than the lack of consent of the actual Black woman or girl being operated on.
Demonstrating the weakness of the idea of informed consent anchors the final portion of Professor Campbell’s essay. The concept of informed consent is that physicians must give their patients any information that a reasonable patient would take into account when deciding upon a course of treatment. In practice, however, physicians are seen as objective experts while patients are expected to defer to medical knowledge. This dynamic is magnified in the context of obstetrics, which Campbell points to as one explanation for higher rates of c-sections performed on Black women, a subset of medical violence known as obstetric violence.
The intersection of obstetric violence, which many women experience during birth, is magnified by medical racism: where obstetric violence results from a belief that doctors know best about medical care, medical racism further asserts that Black women are incapable of directing their care so that their consent is even less necessary. As a result, Black women face worse health outcomes and experiences than White women, even if they hold other characteristics such as higher socioeconomic status that would typically correlate with better medical treatment. Professor Campbell bookends her essay with the example of Serena Williams, one of the most famous athletes in the world, who nearly died after giving birth to her daughter. The day after she gave birth, Williams correctly recognized symptoms of embolisms, which she had been treated for in the past. She immediately alerted hospital staff and requested the proper diagnosis and treatment protocol of a CT scan and blood thinner – but instead a nurse simply assumed that she was confused due to pain medication and delayed giving her the proper treatment for what turned out to be pulmonary embolisms, just as Williams had predicted. Williams had given birth by c-section, characteristic of overmedicalization, and then her well-informed medical knowledge and requests for care were ignored, characteristic of medical neglect.
Professor Campbell’s focus is on the obstetric space, and her essay enriches a vein of recent scholarship into obstetric violence. Her broader analysis, however, is also relevant far beyond medical decisions around reproduction, as the tenuousness individual agency undergirding informed consent is pervasive throughout family law. Professor Campbell refers to the sterilization campaigns at the start of the last century, but incarcerated women – themselves disproportionately Black and Brown – are still subjected to sterilization procedures, and long-term birth control methods have been imposed as conditions of supervised release. Yesterday’s enslaved Black women exploited to refine surgical techniques later used to improve the lives of white women are today’s home health care workers deprived of employment and health protections even as they are deemed essential workers who must continue working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of agency that Professor Campbell criticizes in the context of informed consent is the same lack of agency that criminalizes the choices of low-wage Black mothers.
The essay is a welcome reminder, therefore, for family law scholars who focus on the promise of individual choice that not all people experience that choice in the same way. For all of the increased flexibility that family law can offer today – recognition of more relationships, more paths to parenthood, different ways to structure family life – the unequal history of American law means that flexibility is a tool of privilege. And even though some Black women and members of other historically excluded groups attain high economic or educational privilege, Professor Campbell points out that such status does not correlate with even as basic an improvement as better obstetric health outcomes. Meaningful reform of family law must take account of systemic racism and other prejudice that prevents theoretical change from having practical effect in the lives of all Americans.
Oct 11, 2021 Courtney Cahill
Noah Kazis opens his new article Fair Housing for a Non-Sexist City with an ambitious question: “What would a non-sexist city be like?” (P. 1684). America’s “built environment,” Kazis explains, is a stubbornly sexist one. (P. 1687.) Examples abound. Women—as both child-care users and child-care workers—are economically burdened because of land use restrictions on in-home day care in residential areas. (Pp. 1710-20.) Men—as the predominant users of economically-desirable shared housing models—are rendered homeless because of building code and zoning restrictions on single room occupancy units. (Pp. 1720-35.) Women and men—as partners—fall into traditional sex roles (that redound to the financial detriment of both) because of land use restrictions that make it harder for a parent (traditionally the woman) to be at home for children in one area and at work for a high-paying job in another. (Pp. 1735-45.) Kazis uses these examples—among others—to illustrate the problem his article targets: the entrenchment of Victorian America’s separate spheres ideology in today’s material landscape.
Fair Housing is a treasure trove of facts that will interest scholars of family law and of gender relations, including the fact that “[t]en percent of the gender pay gap between husbands and wives without children can be attributed to commute variables” (P. 1739), and the fact that cities historically excluded apartment houses and boarding “hotels” from residential areas in order “to preserve the ‘character and quality of manhood and womanhood.’” (P. 1726.) However, one of the most interesting facts that Fair Housing unearths is that neither litigants nor enforcement agencies have used the Fair Housing Act—a federal law dedicated to ensuring fair housing, after all—to challenge our built environment’s housing and land use practices; nor have scholars dedicated much attention to sexism in our material and architectural ecosystem. Kazis’s aim in Fair Housing is not so much to explain why that is so as to elaborate on what role the FHA might play moving forward. To that end, Fair Housing offers concrete examples and explanations of the ways in which the FHA can facilitate “fair housing for a non-sexist city” through its relatively robust disparate impact theory of liability and its statutorily unique provision requiring state and local governments to “affirmatively further” fair housing (P. 1692.)
Fair Housing is right: sex discrimination in the American-built environment is a huge problem that the law has ignored, either because it is “too big to fail” or too big to apprehend. Complicit in this erasure, I rarely do a deep dive into the FHA in my family law course, using my property course instead to elaborate on the FHA’s meaning and applications. Thanks to Kazis, the FHA will now be required reading in both courses.
Fair Housing provokes as many questions as it answers, but one is whether the FHA could be used to bring more men into the caregiving space, a question that Kazis gestures at but never makes central to his inquiry. Rather than focus on how land use practices keep men outside the domestic sphere, Kazis’s primary focus in Fair Housing is on land use practices that keep women within it—not working. Consider the limits on in-home child care, which burden two classes of women: in-home child care providers, 95% of which are women (P. 1712), and in-home child care consumers, most of whom are mothers, who “still bear the primary responsibility for child care in most American families, even in an era when most mothers work” (P. 1711) and for whom “[a]ccess to good child care … is essential for [their] ability to enter and advance within the workplace.” (P. 1712.) Another is land use limits on urban size and density, whose sexist effects are more complicated but which ultimately keep a certain class of women closer to the domestic sphere (where the kids are) and far from the city center (where more lucrative work opportunities sit). As Kazis says, “[t]here is a deep reservoir of intentional discrimination sitting underneath the design of modern suburbia – an intent to cordon off a female, domestic sphere through physical distance from the city center.” (P. 1741.)
Kazis argues that the FHA is an under-utilized (indeed, unutilized) tool to challenge these restrictions, which disproportionately affect women and which are grounded in a Victorian gender ethos that modern anti-stereotyping jurisprudence—of which the FHA is an essential but unappreciated part—repudiates. I love the idea of applying the anti-stereotyping principle to new terrain, and would argue that the principle is capable of doing more work on this field than Kazis admits.
For example, Kazis maintains that property law has made it harder for women to enter the breadwinning sphere, both by restricting in-home day care (run by women) and by keeping mothers far from lucrative city employment. But if that is right, then property law has also made it harder for men to enter the caregiving space, either as paid caregivers or as fathers. If density restrictions mean that mothers will be the parents who respond to their children’s needs during the school day, then those same restrictions mean that fathers will not be the parents to do so, creating a gendered division of labor in (and outside) the household that “sticks” well after the work day is done. Lifting density restrictions—as Kazis suggests—could therefore have not just one effect but two: encouraging more women to work outside the home (which Kazis enthusiastically supports) and encouraging more men to work within it (which Kazis does not mention).
At the end of Fair Housing, Kazis says that the FHA’s “integrationist intent with respect to race, color, and national origin” does not carry over to “sex discrimination” under the Act because “men and women live in the same neighborhoods—and in the same homes.” “If the Fair Housing Act is read always and only to demand integration, for each protected class,” he continues, “it will not adequately speak to sex discrimination.” (P. 1752.) For that reason, Kazis contends, “[a] specialized theory of fair housing for sex … is needed” (P. 1753), by which I understand a theory that recognizes that “integration” means something different for sex than it does for race.
I respectfully disagree. On a macro level Kazis is of course right: our neighborhoods and external spaces remain woefully segregated by race but not by sex. But on a micro level Kazis is less correct: our homes and internal spaces remain as sex-segregated as ever, as Kazis himself persuasively shows throughout Fair Housing, with women as primary caretakers and men as primary breadwinners. Fair Housing might not say so, but the FHA’s “integrationist intent” has as much application to the segregation inside our walls as it does to the segregation outside of it.
Sep 13, 2021 Aníbal Rosario-Lebrón
Marie-Amelie George,
Exploring Identity, 54 Fam. L. Q. __ (Forthcoming, 2021), available at
SSRN.
I recently came across a pilot podcast series from Scottish Ballet called Scottish Ballet’s Half Hour Call. The premise of the podcast is to discuss how ballet and ballet companies fit the world we currently live in. In the second episode, dedicated to masculinity in ballet, Myles Thatcher (choreographer and dancer at San Francisco Ballet) shared a story that made me think of Professor M.A. George’s captivating latest article, Exploring Identity.
Thatcher relates how exciting it was that while he was choreographing a piece for Ballet22 (two•dos), a body type, gender identity, and race inclusive company that performs dances that break gender normative traditions, he started looking at pointe shoes in a new way. Even though he has been aware that gender exists beyond the binary, that collaboration made him realize that “a pointe shoe is not a gender object.” Transcending ballet’s common binary understanding of gender opened up for Thatcher new avenues of creativity and experimentation in his choreography.
This is precisely what Exploring Identity does. George’s work paves the way for all legal actors and operators (i.e., parties, practicing attorneys, advocates, activists, policymakers, judges, law professors, and law students) to think about gender in the law in new, expansive, and more inclusive ways. The article surveys and discusses custody disputes involving “gender expansive” children. George employs this last term as an umbrella to refer to “transgender, nonbinary, and children exploring non-traditional gender identities.” By analyzing the disputes between parents who disagree on how to address their child’s expansive gender identity, George makes us realize that often, much like ballet, the law does not transcend the gender binary.
After comprehensively surveying the available custody cases in which parents dispute how to manage the child’s gender identity (which in itself is a great contribution), George concludes that judges, no matter the result of the case, frame the issue incorrectly. Judges erroneously understand gender identity as fixed and binary. Consequently, even when they try to address a child’s evolving and/or non-binary gender identity, they mistakenly focus in the custody battles on determining which parent is correct about the child’s (future) identity or best suited to support such gender identity.
Instead, George argues that courts should be focusing on determining which parent is best suited to support their child’s exploration of their gender identity. George arrives at this conclusion by examining our current understanding of gender identity, the arguments parents make in the custody cases, and courts’ rationales in such cases.
Regarding the first aspect, the article explains our developing understanding that gender is a spectrum in which identities may range from woman to man, including nonbinary, agender, and individuals with other types of gender expansive identities. However, as George points out, nonbinary identities are almost invisible in today’s society, even if they represent a sizeable group of individuals. This erasure, the article explains, could be due in part to the mismatch narrative (about being born in the wrong body) from early transgender rights advocacy, which accepts rather than challenges the binary view. In addition to explaining how we have moved away from binarism, the article recounts the emerging insights from recent scientific studies that show that gender identity in pre-adolescent children, contrary to teenagers, is not stable.
These two explanations about gender help contextualize parental arguments and legal rationales in custody cases. On the one hand, George points out that, in parental disputes about their child’s gender, parents opposing the new identity, surprisingly, do not typically make anti-transgender arguments. Rather, most parents cannot escape their binary understanding of gender or the inner workings of their own transitioning process into accepting their child’s gender. For that reason, they typically argue either that their gender non-conforming children are not transgender or gender expansive because they do not embrace all the characteristics of their opposite natal gender or that the child’s gender expansive identity was created by external pressures.
On the other hand, what drives the misguided response of the courts is their lack of awareness that gender in preadolescent children is not stable. George explains that the three approaches that courts follow in awarding custody correspond to the imprecise approaches thus far developed to work with gender expansive pre-adolescents: reparative, affirmative, and watchful waiting. Although only one of these approaches pathologizes gender expansiveness (i.e., reparative), courts’ application of all three is predicated on the wrong premise that the current gender of the child will be their future one. As gender is not fixed nor stable at that stage, George argues that the determination of custody should be based instead on the best interest of the child to explore their gender identity. It should not be based in a determination of what is (or will be) the gender of the child.
This proposed approach would remove the binarism as well the idea of gender stability from the legal determinations. As such, the law could open new spaces for experimentation to children and parents by conveying that gender is much more diverse than the traditional categories and its final form could be unknown.
George posits that this proposal is not foreign to what courts have been long doing in custody cases in which the decision of awarding custody hinges on the race, religion, or sexual orientation of the children. By a comprehensive review of the case law in these three areas, the article shows that courts across the United States have recognized as basic to children’s well-being their capacity to explore their racial, religious, and sexual identities irrespective of their final definition and with independence of their parents’ preferences. This is just a new iteration of an old principle, like men and non-binary individuals on pointe.
Perhaps there lies the greatest impact of the article for me. It forced me to examine if, like the judges awarding custody to a gender affirmative parent, I, like Thatcher, have been reverting to traditional understandings of gender instead of ungendering the law. As such, George’s piece, like Ballet 22 for Thatcher, has opened new opportunities for me and my work.
I am sure reading George’s article will invite similar and more profound reflections from legal actors and operators. I cannot wait to read some of those reflections when I assign the article in my classes to discuss gender but also to serve as a primer to discuss custody cases and children’s identity in general. But most importantly, I hope the article reaches judges, advocates, lawmakers, and attorneys so that the much needed revamping of gender binarism in the law takes place.
Editor’s note: for another review of Exploring Identity, please see Erez Aloni, Judging Gender, JOTWELL (September 13, 2021).
Jul 27, 2021 Naomi R. Cahn
In the early days of the pandemic, the unemployment rate reached close to 15% , and the number of families that had at least one unemployed person doubled, to almost 10%. Those unemployment rates vary by race and gender: Black and Hispanic families were more likely to have one unemployed person than white or Asian families, and, several months into the pandemic, the US Census reported that women were more than twice as likely as men not to be working because of child care issues.
These statistics suggest profound impacts on the family. Enter sociologist Sarah Damaske’s new book, The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America (2021). The Tolls of Uncertainty explores the intersections between unemployment and family obligation through interviews with 100 people in urban and rural Pennsylvania. Damaske debunks various myths about the unemployed, such as that they are lazy or clearly differ from the employed, and shows that although men may face expectations to be the breadwinners, ”women appear to bear much higher levels of guilt and shame for losing their jobs.” (P. 14.) And the book proposes policies that support not just the unemployed but also their families.
The story of unemployment unfolds in the book’s three major sections, the first on losing a job, the second on the consequences, and the final section on the struggles people face in returning to work. Damaske began her research in 2012, just after the Great Recession, but during a time of economic growth. Although situated during a particular time period, the book offers enduring lessons about unemployment and the family, regardless of the national economic picture – and, as Damaske explained in a May 2021 New York Times article, the pandemic provides yet another example of how job loss affects men and women differently.
As a sociological account, the book provides rich detail on what it means to be unemployed in America. As she has described in other research, the patterns Damaske found were that: “Middle-class women were most likely to begin an immediate and deliberate job search, middle-class men were most likely to take time to attempt to return to work, working-class men were most likely to report an urgent search characterized by their willingness to take “any job,” and working-class women were most likely to report a diverted search, in which their job search was either delayed or stopped.”
Although the book focuses on the effect of unemployment, family and gender role responsibilities pervade every chapter. Here’s just one of the stories Damaske tells. Although Tamara did not finish high school, she later earned a GED and then – understanding that fast-food jobs would lead to a dead end – enrolled in a program to earn her nursing degree. Her son’s father provided the necessary childcare so she could pursue her studies. During the second semester, however, her son’s father left them, and she was unable to find childcare, so she was forced to quit the program. After finishing a certificate program relating to medical records and finding jobs that paid scarcely above the minimum wage, and following even more efforts at education, Tamara and Damaske spoke after Tamara’s most recent job loss, when she had been fired because she’d had to leave work to take care of her son’s medical emergency. (Pp. 53-54.)
And that story is not even in the chapter on The Guilt Gap and the Second Shift (P.126), the sole chapter explicitly focused on the home. (By “guilt gap,” she means that women had higher amounts of “self-blame” for their unemployment and compensated for that guilt (P. 10) by privileging their family’s needs over their own (P. 109)). In that chapter, Damaske contrasts how men and women handle household responsibilities when they become unemployed. Damaske distinguishes between “routine” jobs, such as cooking, and “nonroutine” chores, such as car maintenance. The pattern she found is not surprising: virtually all of the women and “about half of the men increased the number of routine chores they did at home. But men’s routine chores increased just a bit; they were now ‘helping out’ a little more.” (P. 118) Such an unequal division is not, Damaske notes, what most people claim they want, but women who were unemployed compensated for not working by doing significantly more routine household work – men did “a bit” more. (Pp. 128, 131.)
The major class difference she found was that, notwithstanding unemployment, middle-class women kept their children in day care, while working-class women could not; consequently, upon unemployment, working-class women additionally “shouldered almost all the childcare in their households.” (P. 149.) Damaske provides additional class lessons, showing that unemployment offers a microcosm of how disadvantages accumulate; the white, middle-class men in her study were more likely to receive severance pay, have savings, and take advantage of “their gendered ability to prioritize their job search over tasks at home” as well as in their supportive networks. (P. 213.)
Beyond portraying the effects of unemployment, the book proposes changes to how the government approaches unemployment. The class and gender lessons provide critical guideposts. The first policy change is transparency, ensuring that those who lose a job know the benefits for which they qualify. Damaske also recommends complete wage replacement for those who earned the minimum wage, noting the importance of those wages to the former worker’s family, as well as to the former worker, who is not, then, forced back to work too quickly.
The two proposals explicitly focused on the family are expanded health care and childcare credits. In arguing for increased government support, she recommends that high quality childcare – that is also affordable – be expanded and provided even after a job loss; indeed, such child care along with parental leave results in women earning more when they are able to work. (P. 222.) That recommendation is, of course, in line with President Biden’s national care infrastructure plan; the child care tax credit is expected to cut child poverty almost in half and will have the other benefits that Damaske identifies.
While the book provides significant insights into families, gender, and unemployment, it does have limitations. Damaske recruited participants through the Pennsylvania CareerLink Center (anyone deemed eligible for unemployment must attend a meeting at the Center that focuses on how to get a new job (Pp. 21-22)): this is not a national sample. Moreover, as she notes, her sample is less racially diverse than the national population. (P. 244.) And, of course, it is difficult to generalize based on 100 participants; Damaske supplements her research with that of other scholars ranging from Aliya Rao to Daniel Carlson to Amanda Miller to Kathryn Edin, all of whom have engaged in important and complementary work on the family.
Ultimately, Damaske shows that unemployment’s impact on the family is shaped by a person’s gender and class, and that changing how we approach unemployment will have a profound impact on the family and gender roles.
Jun 29, 2021 Albertina Antognini
The Nineteenth Amendment promised to transform the Constitution as it did the content of equal citizenship. It has, however, done neither. Instead, as Reva Siegel explains in The Nineteenth Amendment and the Democratization of the Family, we narrowly understand “the Nineteenth Amendment as a rule prohibiting government from discriminating on the basis of sex in determining who can vote.” (P. 451.) This, Siegel compellingly argues, is an impoverishment of what the Nineteenth Amendment was meant to accomplish, and a depletion in how we define equality. The Nineteenth Amendment wrought change to the Constitution “not simply by adding voters, but by democratizing the family so that women could represent themselves in government.” (P. 451.) The quest for the vote, according to Siegel, was fundamentally a quest to restructure women’s role within the family.
It may come as no surprise that women’s participation in the polity – by eliminating the concept of virtual representation by the husband and head of the household – directly challenged traditional family roles. But lost to history is how the right to vote further implicated structural questions about voluntary motherhood, equal remuneration, and the valuation of work performed both within and outside of the household. We no longer recognize access to contraceptives, or joint property in marriage, as essential to the franchise. Nor do we incorporate the family into the constitutional framework of the Nineteenth Amendment. As such, “the history this Essay explores,” Siegel writes, “has played little role in shaping our law.” (P. 454.) Siegel addresses this erasure by reconstructing the debate over equal citizenship that the suffrage campaign began and examining the various ways recovering this forgotten history can impact our interpretation of the Constitution. In revealing exactly how the Nineteenth Amendment failed to resolve the problem of women’s access to full citizenship, Siegel shows us that it still could.
Siegel details various examples of arguments raised by suffragists in the era immediately following the Nineteenth Amendment’s passage to establish how diminished our conversations surrounding equality have become. Take Crystal Eastman, a graduate of New York University Law School, a companion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Greenwich Village’s radical feminist Heterodoxy Club, and a leader of the women’s movement post-ratification. Eastman’s goal was, simply, “[t]o bend gender outside and inside the family.” (P. 468.) To those ends, she proposed challenging not only sex-based exclusions from professional life, but also distending gender roles so that “‘[i]t must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living’” as “‘it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself.’” (P. 469.) Eastman lamented the reality that “‘breadwinning wives had not yet developed home-making husbands.’” (P. 469.)
Eastman understood that a woman’s position as a mother was central to her plea for equality, as it was to her ability to participate at work. In particular, she argued that women should have the ability to elect motherhood and to control the size of their families, conditions which were “‘as elementary and essential as ‘equal pay.’’” (P. 469.) If a woman decided to raise children, then she should receive remuneration from the government, in recognition of the public service she was providing. (P. 470.) Eastman conceptualized the family as a public institution that warranted public support. Distributing the responsibilities of being a wife and a mother beyond the figure of a single individual was the only way to guarantee economic independence and gender equality.
The vision of the family that triumphed was, however, strictly private, with the wife and mother at its helm; it would remain divorced from the polity, the public, and any constitutional understandings of equality. This was so despite the continuation of the debates into the 1970s, which took shape in the Strike for Equality, organized fifty years after the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification. The strikers believed that the quest for equal citizenship went beyond votes and “required transformation of the conditions in which women bear and rear children.” (P. 475.) In addition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and equal opportunities in jobs and education, they sought full access to abortion and free around-the-clock daycare centers. (P. 475.) Siegel reminds us that there was national consensus on this final point, and childcare legislation in the form of the Comprehensive Child Development Act was enacted by Congress – not once, but twice. It was, however, vetoed by the President – first by Nixon in 1971 and then by Ford in 1976. (P. 477.) The government’s refusal to provide childcare ensured that support would remain housed within existing family structures.
The standard narrative surrounding the passage of Nineteenth Amendment is currently stuck in the tenor of “an attitudinal account,” which tells the story of having successfully overcome prejudice. (P. 456.) Siegel argues that the Amendment’s passage should also be understood as a tale of “institutional design.” (P. 456.) In opening the franchise, the government authorized individuals to represent themselves, “emancipating some persons from the control of others, as it recognized slaves, servants, and wives as independent in the eyes of the law.” (P. 456.) Siegel turns to the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Reconstruction Amendments more generally, to both guide and implement this institutional interpretation. If we were to read the Nineteenth Amendment’s political history into its text the way we read the history of slavery and segregation into the Fifteenth Amendment, then the family would clearly emerge as “a locus of law, struggle, and power, having a constitutional history like all other important institutions of our constitutional republic.” (P. 457.) On a more granular level, cases involving pregnancy, contraception, and employment would be refracted through an analysis of whether the legal rule “preserve[s] the principle of men’s household headship” or instead “reorganize[s] family relations on the principles of women’s co-headship, equality, and independence.” (P. 485.) Reframing the Nineteenth Amendment as a question of institutional design would create dynamic synergies that could reorient the whole of equal protection law.
Siegel’s proposed reading continues the analogy between race and sex that was successfully adopted by Pauli Murray, Dorothy Kenyon, and, eventually, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Just as the constitutional disestablishment of slavery and segregation orients race-discrimination law, so too can disestablishment of male household headship—intersectionally understood – orient sex-discrimination law.” (P. 484.) The institutional dimension of the Nineteenth Amendment ensures that race and sex also intersect. Rather than paper over existing distinctions, Siegel notes that suffragists split, both along and within racial lines, on whether to support a Fifteenth Amendment that did not include the right to vote for women. (P. 461-62.) Most egregiously, the Nineteenth Amendment failed to enfranchise all women. (P. 457.) Addressing such intersectional differences reveals the varied barriers to even forming a family in the first instance: “while controlling the timing of conception promises independence for many, there are many who focus on freedom from coercive sterilization, and yet others who focus on equal parental recognition and access to the means of family formation.” (P. 487.) Ultimately, paying heed to intersecting inequalities is the only way for all women to participate fully in public life.
The staying power of the piece, what makes it veritably haunting, is showing exactly how what we exclude, what we fail to see, has the capacity to constrain and truncate discourse in ways that prevent any critical analysis from taking place. Family law scholars are accustomed to statements about what is obvious, natural, or otherwise self-evident. We must therefore be carefully attuned to where assertions about the way things are disguise contested opinions about how they should be. The specific danger Siegel alerts us to lies in not seeing what they once were, so that we remain blind to what they could yet become.
