ABSTRACT
This paper has arisen from my interest in questions of subjectivity of primary concern to contemporary feminist jurisprudence. Rather than side with any particular view represented in the debates surrounding these questions, I have used Foucault’s concept of episteme to explore the tradition of feminist legal thought. By focusing upon seventeenth-century women’s writings in which the earliest statements linking law to women’s oppression are to be found, the paper argues that knowledge claims about law’s association with women’s oppression are predicated not upon the positing of a sovereign feminist consciousness, but upon the specific positivities of knowledge which existed at the time. The understanding of the birth of the feminist legal discourse in terms of the specific conditions of its possibility, although historically contextualised, raises questions about the hitherto seemingly unassailable adherence to subjectivist epistemology which the current feminist engagement with law maintains.
