“Why does the law remain indifferent to women’s deaths, disappearances, and rape a generation after most constitutional democracies officially ended legal patriarchy and guaranteed women equal protection of the laws? Why does misogyny remain palpable within legal orders that have proclaimed gender equality? And what can feminists do to overcome these failures of law?”
These are the central questions Professor Julie Suk looks to answer in her new book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women & What to Do About It (University of California Press, April 2023). Via a tour of constitutional change around the world (including in Chile, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Sweden), the book examines the strategies, successes, failures, and challenges of feminist lawmaking after the repeal of patriarchal laws and shows how constitutional democracy can be remade.
To celebrate its publication, Professor Suk discussed the inspiration behind the book, ways in which the law enables misogyny without misogynists, and why she believes feminism is essential to constitutional democracy.
Your first book, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment (Skyhorse, 2020), was the first book to chronicle and assess the 21st century revival of the Equal Rights Amendment, including its ratification by the Virginia’s state legislature in 2020. After Misogyny centers around women’s struggles towards inclusive constitutional democracy around the world. How does After Misogyny build off of We the Women?
In some ways, After Misogyny comes before We the Women. It builds on 20 years of research on women as changemakers of constitutional democracies, which I was conducting before I wrote We the Women. This [subject]is something I became interested in, even before I went to law school, because I noticed that, by the 1990s, many European countries had constitutional amendments that were about women’s equality. Those successful efforts in France, Germany, Italy, and other European countries made it clear that achieving gender balance was a constitutionally- permitted and constitutionally- encouraged goal in those countries. We the Women is about why the struggle to amend the U.S. Constitution to include equal rights for women has been going on for 100 years and has not succeeded, and what it is about our constitutional law in our democracy that has made women’s rights so hard [to achieve].
So, in that sense, the vantage point that I bring to the study of gender equality—taking this much larger global perspective about constitutionalism and some of the things that have been possible in other countries that have not been possible here in the U.S.—really informs all the work that I do. I felt After Misogyny was an opportunity to really engage with some of the different models and approaches [implemented around the world]in dismantling patriarchy in the law, bringing feminism into constitutional democracy, and achieving an inclusive and equal democracy for all.
What were some of the topics that were most important to you when writing this book?
While the book is driven by interesting, relatively recent examples from the 1990s in Europe to authorize gender balance in positions of political and economic power, a major part of After Misogyny is exploring women’s role in supporting the Eighteenth Amendment [ratified in 1919 and later repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933]. Prohibition is something that we, as Americans, generally view as a shameful mistake of constitutional law. I see it differently, as the culmination of many generations of women trying to make change to improve their lives, under conditions where they had no rights. A respectable way for women at that time to get involved in politics was to embrace Christian temperance and protest against saloons, even if it meant going out into the streets. Saloons were male spaces, and drunk husbands raised women’s exposure to domestic violence and economic insecurity. Instead of blaming men, the Prohibition movement tried to reduce the power of the corporate liquor industry, which benefited from the male drunkenness that worsened women’s lives. So I traced that development to show that even things that we regard as failed amendments—including Prohibition and the ERA—have important feminist silver linings that we should try to isolate and appreciate.
Another important part of the book is Chapter 3, “Misogyny and Maternity: Abortion Bans as Overentitlement,” because the main theoretical contribution of the book is to broaden the definition of misogyny to encompass what I call overentitlement. We often think of misogyny as hatred of women and violence against women. But that’s only a small piece of misogyny, related to the broader problem of the overentitlement of society to women’s sacrifices and forbearance. Society benefits from all the unpaid labor and pain that women literally go through to birth and raise the next generation of citizens and workers.
For example, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that, if you ban abortion, it’s a privacy violation because childbearing is private. I’m saying the opposite: if you ban abortion, you’re denying the public value of childbearing and child-rearing. The state forces women to bear and raise children, to become mothers without properly compensating them or valuing their contributions to the public good. Once it is understood in that way, there is a different perspective on what’s wrong with banning abortion than the one that we’re accustomed to in U.S. constitutional law. We can see these different approaches to recognizing the public value of motherhood and women’s reproductive labor in the constitutional law of our peer constitutional democracies, including Germany, France, and Ireland.
What do you hope readers take away from After Misogyny?
I hope that they leave with hope and new ideas. If we take a global perspective, there are many approaches to gender equality and many things that look like failure—but that there are seeds that we can plant so that people can build a better future.
Read an excerpt from After Misogyny.
RSVP to attend Fordham Law’s Law Day Event on May 1, featuring Professor Suk in conversation with Michele Goodwin, Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and Abraham Pinansku Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law.
