Hours and Wages:

My generation, in its quest for feminist change, has faced many of the same struggles and obstacles in the American legal process as our historical predecessors. We have both become enamored of law as an agent of change, and in the process we have been shaped by the law's existing categories. The limiting effect of legal discourse, which demands social problems be put into legal language plagues feminists today. And there is a tendency to reject as “antifeminist” proposals that attempt to include equality-in-difference because they might fail in court. ¹ While feminists of different stripes disagree, all feminists must face a changing Supreme Court and an increasingly antifeminist conservatism. On the one hand, the lesson of gendered labor laws seems clear: difference can mean inequality at law. On the other hand, these claims on the law have been a feminist attempt to change society.