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The Long History Of Feminist Legal Theory, Tracy Thomas

Con Law Center Articles and Publications

This chapter challenges the conventional idea that feminist legal theory began in the 1970s. The advent of legal feminism is usually placed in the second wave feminist movement, birthed by the political activism of the women’s liberation movement and nurtured by the intellectual leadership of women scholars newly entering legal academia. However, legal feminism has a much longer history, going back more than a century earlier. While the term “feminist” was not used in the United States until the 1910s, the foundations of feminist legal theory were first conceptualized as early as 1848 and developed over the next one hundred …