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Women, Differences, and Rights as Practices: An Interpretive Essay and a Proposal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Adelaide H. Villmoare
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Abstract

This essay argues that feminist rights analysis should broaden and diversify its reach to include the rights talk from the everyday lives of all sorts of different women—to look at women's rights at least in part as practices. Women's practices within particular, local contexts become crucial to feminist interpretations of rights because here women articulate the significance of rights (and their denials) for their political and social identities and for their thoughts and acts of resistance and acquiescence to hegemonic forces. In presenting this argument, I offer an interpretation of recent Anglo-American feminist and postmodern, pluralist legal scholarship that together fosters an understanding of rights as practices, as mundane legal claims women make in their day-to-day worlds. I analyze and elaborate these views in order to develop and encourage an interpretation of rights and talk about rights as practices of different women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 385 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

I appreciate the careful and helpful readings of an earlier version of this essay by Miriam J. Cohen, Patricia Ewick, Susan Silbey, and Peter G. Stillman. I also wish to thank Christine B. Harrington and my other colleagues in the Amherst seminar for their comments on my project and three anonymous reviewers and Carrie Menkel-Meadow for their constructive suggestions.

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