This is the first book to provide a comprehensive investigation of gender and the law in the United States. Deborah Rhode describes legal developments over the last two centuries against a background of historical and sociological changes in women’s activities and attitudes toward these new developments. She shows the way cultural perceptions of gender influence and in turn are influenced by legal constructions, and what this complicated interaction implies about the possibility―or impossibility―of using law as a tool of social change.
Usually people do not stop to reflect if the law has been inequitable, especially in the western - developed or rich - nations, especially past the slavery era. It is assumed that once slavery was dispensed with equality was a given as was liberty and opportunity. Far from true, and it is rarely either obvious or noticed if the law is dealing with all citizens as equal.
Across the gender gap this is all the more so, and this book for one is a good beginning to acquaint oneself with facts as they are, as they have been.