Why a Feminist Law Journal? A call for parity.

• Author: Tiven, Rachel B.
• Position: Why a Feminist Law Journal?

We began at the beginning. The opening talk of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law's Spring 2003 symposium "Why a Feminist Law Journal?" detailed the career of Myra Bradwell, legal publisher and icon of American women lawyers. (1)

Bradwell famously and unsuccessfully appealed to the United States Supreme Court when Illinois refused to admit her to the bar. (2) Undaunted, she pursued a thriving career as the publisher of the Chicago Legal News, a mainstream law journal in which she championed suffrage and equal rights for women. Richard Chused, in concluding his remarks on Bradwell's use of her newspaper to espouse her lifelong feminist commitment, challenged the staff of this journal to make our work count: "Though you stand on Myra Bradwell's shoulders, the purpose of your voice is not as clear as hers." (3)

I would argue that it is. While we are privileged to live in a country where women now have formal equality of opportunity, today we must pursue a goal as tangible and crucial as suffrage was a century ago. I believe that our purpose--as feminists, as lawyers, as scholars, as women--is to work for absolute parity: women as fully half the participants in all spheres of life and in every center of power.

It is a goal so simple and clear it has been all but abandoned by feminist thinkers. (4) Whether we presume that time will eventually get us there, or blame women for turning away from opportunities to lead, or throw up our hands in the face of sexism that feels anachronistic but intractable--whatever our rationale, we are not working hard enough for equal representation.

The numbers are familiar, yet they still shock: in the United States, women hold fourteen percent of the seats in Congress. (5) In this eighty-third year of our enfranchisement, a woman has never been president, vice-president, or Speaker of the House. (6) There are three women in the current cabinet, out of twenty members. (7) In the private sector, women run eight of the 500 largest companies in the United States. (8) In the legal profession, the numbers are just as dismal: generations after women's grudging admission to law school, we are still only sixteen percent of top law firm partners, (9) seventeen percent of federal judges, (10) and twenty-three percent of tenured law professors. (11)

Around the globe, women are vastly underrepresented. Of the world's nearly 200 nations, eleven are headed by women, (12) and eight send a woman to represent them at the United Nations. (13) Internationally, women make up fourteen percent of parliament members on average. (14) Nowhere in the world are women half of the legislature. Nowhere. (15)

Must everything be perfectly equal? Must every firehouse, every boardroom, every legislature be perfectly balanced? Is any level of gender difference acceptable? Without doing an extended review of difference theory, I would simply answer that as long as gender difference is an excuse to exclude women from centers of power and to undervalue and underpay the work that women do--no. As long as women are assistants, associates, and deputies, while men are directors, chiefs, and presidents--no. There are no separate spheres in international politics; there is no mommy track for world peace.

1. PARITY AS TRANSFORMATION

   Every faction of the American suffrage movement believed that winning the vote would change the world dramatically. (16) Through more than seventy years of struggle, some anticipated a more moral society while others sought perfect equality for women. (17) All were disappointed when the world did not change overnight, but gradually it did change. The New Deal, the civil rights movement, women's eventual liberation (18)--none of these could have happened without the enfranchisement of all women.

   But women have learned, bitterly, that the moment of entry does not translate into power. The suffrage amendment, the slow trickle of women law students, Sandra Day O'Connor--these were change, progress, signposts, but they were not power. Power is five women on the Supreme Court and a woman in the White House. Do not say it is...