ABSTRACT
In this Article, Professor Regina Austin decries the dearth of writings on the legal problems of minority women and urges minority feminist legal scholars to focus their professional energies on filling the gap. She particularly laments the subtle and not-so-subtle pressures on minority female scholars to cast their scholarship in race-and gender-neutral terms. Austin proposes instead a legal jurisprudence grounded in the material conditions of the lives of the black women and their critiques of a society dominated by whites, males and the middle class.
Austin applies her suggested approach to Chambers v. Omaha Girls Club, which dealt with the Girls Club’s discharge of Crystal Chambers, an unmarried black employee who became pregnant. Austin’s discussion is set in an interdisciplinary framework; she looks beyond the facts of the Chambers case to sociological and cultural studies with which to challenge the opinion’s misconceptions regarding black teenage pregnancy, single motherhood and role modeling. Austin concludes by reiterating her plea that black female legal scholars use their positions and their skills to promote the social and political standing of all minority women.
