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Women's
Different Voice(s)
Katharine T. Bartlett and Angela Harris
Gender and Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary 705-706 (1998). |
| In this [unit], concern for women's
equality is filtered through a commitment to preserving and
expanding the benefits of certain characteristics historically
associated with women. Within different voice theory (also
referred to as cultural feminism, or relational justice, or
difference theory), women's valuable resources that might serve
as a better model of social organization and law than existing
"male" characteristics and values. These differences
are said to include a greater sense of interconnectedness, a
priority on relationships over rights, and a preference for more
contextualized, less abstract forms of reasoning. This [unit]
investigates the nature of these claimed differences and their
implications for our legal system.
Many advocates of the theories propounded in previous [unit]s
of this book view different voice theory with suspicion, because
of the risk that the attribution of certain common values to
women will reinforce the ideologies of subordination that those
theories are intended to dispel. At the same time, almost
everyone assumes that the increasing presence of women in law
schools, in law practice, in elected office, on juries, and on
the bench will effect on how law is taught, practiced, applied
and made -- all assumptions most readily identified with
relational theories of justice. Can this apparent contradiction
be reconciled? Does it matter whether the purported differences
between women and men are based in biology or are a result of
social conditioning?
The tension between assertions of sameness and assumptions of
difference present in much feminist theory provides the occasion
for a general exploration in this [unit] of the impact of women
in all roles in the legal system. It also facilitates further
examination of the relationship between theory and practice: Is
the insistence that women are like men a truth upon which theory
should be built or a strategy to achieve a form of justice which
must be justified on other premises?
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