1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910149205103321

Autore

Thomas Tracy A.

Titolo

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law / / Tracy A. Thomas

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

1-4798-7681-X

1-4798-5389-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (237 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

346.73015

Soggetti

Domestic relations - United States - History - 19th century

Feminist jurisprudence - United States - History - 19th century

Women's rights - United States - History - 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Preface -- Letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- Introduction -- 1. “What Do You Women Want?” -- 2. “The Pivot of the Marriage Relation” -- 3. “Divorce Is Not the Foe of Marriage” -- 4. The “Incidental Relation” of Mother -- 5. Raising “Our Girls” -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

Thomas Byers Memorial Outstanding Publication Award from the University of Akron Law Alumni AssociationMuch has been written about women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Historians have written her biography, detailed her campaign for woman’s suffrage, documented her partnership with Susan B. Anthony, and compiled all of her extensive writings and papers. Stanton herself was a prolific author; her autobiography, History of Woman Suffrage, and Woman’s Bible are classics. Despite this body of work, scholars and feminists continue to find new and insightful ways to re-examine Stanton and her impact on women’s rights and history. Law scholar Tracy A. Thomas extends this discussion of Stanton’s impact on modern-day feminism by analyzing her intellectual contributions to—and personal experiences with—family law. Stanton’s work on family issues has been overshadowed by



her work (especially with Susan B. Anthony) on woman’s suffrage. But throughout her fifty-year career, Stanton emphasized reform of the private sphere of the family as central to achieving women’s equality. By weaving together law, feminist theory, and history, Thomas explores Stanton’s little-examined philosophies on and proposals for women’s equality in marriage, divorce, and family, and reveals that the campaigns for equal gender roles in the family that came to the fore in the 1960s and ’70s had nineteenth-century roots. Using feminist legal theory as a lens to interpret Stanton’s political, legal, and personal work on the family, Thomas argues that Stanton’s positions on divorce, working mothers, domestic violence, childcare, and many other topics were strikingly progressive for her time, providing significant parallels from which to gauge the social and legal policy issues confronting women in marriage and the family today.