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Medicalizing Gender: How The Legal And Medical Professions Shaped Women’S Experiences As Lawyers, Kathleen Darcy

Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice

Despite significant progress, women in the legal profession still

have not advanced into positions of power at near the rate in which

they saturate the legal market. Scholars agree that simply waiting for

parity is not sufficient, and, thus, they have identified many of the

barriers that contribute to women’s difficulties. To date, however, the

role that scientific and medical understandings play on the evolution of

law, and on women as lawyers, has not received examination until

now. To this end, I posit that medicine played a significant role in

shaping societal expectations and assumptions about gender, and was

similarly …