Feminist Jurisprudence: Grounding the Theories [1990]

Recent feminist legal scholarship emphasizes the importance of feminist method. Feminist method led Gilligan to suggest new theories regarding women's moral development. Carol Gilligan's method was to listen to female experience as female experience— and not merely as other-than-male experience. Once women began to be treated like men, people began to notice that women really are not like men. Women are most noticeably not like men when they are pregnant. Clare Dalton describes present aspirations to feminist jurisprudence as falling within two camps: "woman as mother" theories and "woman as sexual subordinate" theories. And although "woman as sexual subordinate" theorists are more likely to acknowledge the fact of lesbian existence, they focus on a critique of male dominance rather than on lesbian bonding as a possible alternative to male dominance. The problem with current feminist theory is that the more abstract and universal it is, the more it fails to relate to the lived reality of many women.