This collection of essays honours Rosemary Auchmuty, Professor of Law at the University of Reading, UK. She has fostered the study of women's academic careers and, more politically, advanced progress on gender and equality issues including same-sex marriage and property law. Her research promotes the case of feminist legal history as a way of revealing the place of women and challenging dominant historical narratives that cast them aside. Just as Rosemary's work does, the book seeks to end the marginalisation and exclusion of women in the legal world, by including them. The book begins fittingly with a discussion of Miss Bebb, the woman whose biography Auchmuty deployed to push feminist legal history into the mainstream. It turns then to a discussion of women known and unknown and their struggles within the legal profession offering within those chapters a critical appraisal of the role of history and biography as a methodology. From there it moves to consider feminist perspectives and critiques of the dominant structures of private law. This is followed by chapters that explore those who educate the legal profession within the academy. The chapters, and the collection as a whole, examine areas of law that have a deep significance for women's lives.

An eye-opening appraisal of how current Hague Child Abduction Convention agreements unintentionally harm abused women and their children

The eighteen essays in this volume cover a wide range of material and reevaluate women's studies and Middle Eastern studies, Muslim women and the Shari'a courts, the Ottoman household, Dhimmi communities, children and family law, morality, and violence.

Without adequate protection and consideration from the state, women were left out of Zimbabwe's Fast Land Reform Programme at the turn of the century. Leaving them to fight for land in a murky, convoluted system will not address women's rights to it. Giving specific ethical and legal attention to women's rights and needs is the only way to guard against land and other resources begin co-opted by the privileged and those with the requisite social, financial and political capital. Some commentators have argued that Zimbabwean women were better off identifying with Zimbabwean men as as blacks in taking land from the former white farmers than to concentrate on their needs as women during the FTLRP. The primary battle was to take the land from the white farmer, after which a secondary battle by women to take land from men would ensue. Twenty years after the commencement of the FTLRP, the question remains whether the secondary battle by black women to take over land from black men has started and whether there are any chances that such a battle will ever be fought and won.

This title was first published in 2002: A collection of articles focused on women within a general study of medicine, ethics and the law. Topics covered include: areas where the institutions of medicine, ethics and the law intersect in women's reproductive and sexual lives; the impact of legal policies and dominant ethical beliefs on many aspects of women's health; and the health practices and policies of bioethics and health law. The editors recognise that it is important not to lose sight of social differences other than gender, such as race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, religion, level of physical and mental ability, and family relationships. In their approach they seek to consider the lives and experiences of women as primary. Hence, they focus on the question of how women's encounters with the health-care system are structured by gender and other socially significant dimensions of their lives (rather than the question of how women differ from the male "norm").

In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.

In Girls in Trouble with the Law, sociologist Laurie Schaffner takes us inside juvenile detention centers and explores the worlds of the young women incarcerated within. Across the nation, girls of color are disproportionately represented in detention facilities, and many report having experienced physical harm and sexual assaults. For girls, the meaning of these and other factors such as the violence they experience remain undertheorized and below the radar of mainstream sociolegal scholarship. When gender is considered as an analytic category, Schaffner shows how gender is often seen through an outmoded lens. Offering a critical assessment of what she describes as a gender-insensitive juvenile legal system, Schaffner makes a compelling argument that current policies do not go far enough to empower disadvantaged girls so that communities can assist them in overcoming the social limitations and gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic discrimination that continue to plague young women growing up in contemporary United States.