Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The legal history of women and gender is a crucial and radical project that seeks to rewrite the dominant legal narratives that we tell about the development of law and the role that law has played. It is in part about how law shapes culture and society and how society and culture shape law. Crucial to any understanding of law, culture, and society is how gender functions. Yet gender is a slippery term that is at once historically contingent, malleable, shifting, and unstable. This indeterminacy makes gender such a rich mode of analysis.' Creating a women's or gendered legal history …

Since the 1970s, feminism has helped transform the university and the production of knowledge. Not only have increasing numbers of female students, professors, and administrators entered universities, they have also created women's studies programs and courses, which have been slowly integrated into the various disciplines and university curricula. Further, feminism has spurred scholars to question traditional ways of knowing and teaching, academic disciplines, categorizations of knowledge, scholarly methodologies, and the university's separation from the broader community. One component in this production and distribution of new knowledge has been the establishment of feminist academic journals such as Feminist Studies (1972), Women's …