ABSTRACT
While feminist perspectives on all areas of life and law are crucial to achieve a just, nuanced and comprehensive understanding of them, some might think that the family and family law are the first, or at least most obvious, places to start. After all, feminism is concerned to ask questions about the lives of women, and the lives of women have traditionally centred upon their families. In fact, feminist perspectives have been offered upon family relations since a recognised feminist movement began centuries ago. From these, its ‘first waves’, the feminist movement was concerned, among other things, to secure not only women’s political equality with men, but also women’s (special) rights to custody of their children; the second wave’s campaigns in the mid-twentieth century to promote women’s financial self-sufficiency and independence from men also aimed to reveal an ideology of the family that inhibited that goal. Family relations and family law have thus always been as important to women, and therefore to feminism, as have claims to civil, political or legal rights. And importantly, in always asking the ‘woman question’ and thus rendering both visible and valuable the concerns of women in law, feminist legal theory has also been able to link family law and family relations to women’s abilities to make those claims.
