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B(X)K Reviews Women and the Law Constance Backhouse. Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth -Century Canada. Toronto: The Women's Press for the Osgoode Sodety, 1991. xiv + 467 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-88961-161-0 (pb); $24.95. Judith A. Baer. Women in American Law: The Struggle toward Equality from the New Deal to the Present. New York: Hohnes and Meier, 1991. xvi + 350 pp. ISBN 0-8419-0920-2 (d); 0-8419-0921-0 (pb); $39.95 (d); $19.95 (pb). Mary Joe Frug. Women and the Law. Westbury, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1992. xxvii + 865 pp. ISBN 0-88277-977-X (d); $40.95. Joan Hoff. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. New York New York University Press, 1991. 525 pp. ISBN 0-8147-3467-7 (d); $40.00. Patrida J. Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 263 pp. ISBN 0-67401470 -7 (d); 0-674-01471-5 (pb); $24.95 (d); $10.95 (pb). Norma Basch If a single thread runs through the diverse works of ferninist legal sdiolarship under review here, it is the dialectical relationship between law as it is and law as it ought to be. The dilemma these legal scholars face is a little like that of the physician who is compelled to treat a virulent malignancy with a partial and debilitating therapy while simultaneously casting about for a complete and benign cure. What is at issue for the ferninist theorist, the feminist attorney, and even the feminist legal historian , who are very often bound up together in the same person, is not only the long-term theoretical challenge of dismantling the whole web of legal ideology that both sustains and masks the subordination of women, but the immediate and tangible challenge of subverting that ideology by selectively engaging it on its own terms. The tension between these challenges is not without positive results. The emergence of sexual harassment as a legal issue, for example, has depended on a campaign that began by converting theoretical insights about sexual subordination in the workplace into a legally actionable wrong. Formal definition of the wrong provided the groundwork for Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her testimony, in turn, propelled the issue of sexual © 1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol. s No. ι (Spring)_________________ 130 Journal of Women's History Spring harassment into the mainstream of public discourse. That is not to suggest a consensus with regard to a feminist legal agenda; on the contrary, any semblance of the unity once evident in the scholarship of the late sixties and early seventies has entirely evaporated over the last decade. We have only to consider the case of pornography. As Mary Jo Frug notes in Women and the Law, insights about the role of sexual subordination in the construction of women's oppression have also provided Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin with the foundations for their antipornography ordinance campaign, an issue on which feminists are deeply divided. Nevertheless , the pattern of their campaign still illustrates my point; when the impulse to construd an overarching ferninist theory is linked to a drive for specific and incremental legal change, it can transform both public discourse and legal substance. A fine place to explore the whole spectrum of feminist alternatives to the legal order is Mary Jo FrUg7S lively casebook, which is at once an up-to-date overview of women and the law and a comprehensive reader in feminist jurisprudence. Frug, a law professor who developed the materials she uses here in her own courses on women, was senselessly murdered on the streets of Cambridge in 1991 shortly before completing the manuscript. Her intelligent selections, her cogent organization, and her sophisticated essays were almost complete at the time of her death. Twenty-two devoted friends and colleagues contributed the finishing touches for this work which, despite its classic dull blue casebook cover, could serve as a provocative reader in upper-level and graduate women's studies courses. Frug^s essay on the equality versus difference dilemma provides a useful framework for...

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