ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potential and risks of harnessing the local state to promote gender equality, and argue that feminists must work both in and against the state to influence change. It provides the context for our analysis of the Gender Equality Duty (GED) and its potential to support transformative change. The chapter also provides an historical account of how feminist activists in Great Britain have worked in and against the state, in this instance the local state, to achieve public services that benefit women. It is important to note that a concern to bring women normally excluded from local democracy into democratic processes and to assert the social and economic value of care and of womens domestic work has underpinned feminist activism since the 1980s. Although sometimes limited to liberal short term measures, new strategy has sometimes prefigured larger social or governmental shifts.
