ABSTRACT
Feminist legal theory has approached the law of contracts from two directions: exclusion and inclusion. The exclusionary is the more familiar mode, portraying women and the family as historically multiply disbarred from all that the world of contracts empowers and is prepared to remedy. Approached from this angle, the question of inclusion can be addressed only as a possible prescription for the future: should the family become more like the market (or vice versa)? Olsen and O’Donovan ask this question.1 Inclusionist analyses, by contrast, tend to argue I say ‘tend’ as this is a far less established approach that there is a feminine, ‘familial’, presence already installed, comfortably or uncomfortably, within the gates of contract law, even as its commercial norm. Why focus on the foothills when the fortress is already invaded? This is the polarity around which this essay is arranged.
