Feminist legal scholarship: charting topics and authors, 1978-2002.

• Author: Rosenbury, Laura A.
• Position: Why a Feminist Law Journal?

In their call for papers, the organizers of this symposium posed several questions, including: "Are feminist law journals a victim of their own success? Have they outlived their usefulness?" and "What is the state of feminist legal scholarship today? What constitutes feminist scholarship?" As a new member of the legal academy, my answers to their questions depend on answers to two more basic questions: What has been published in feminist law journals? And, how do those articles relate to feminist articles published in non-specialty, or flagship, law journals? After searching the legal literature and finding no easy answers to my questions, I decided to do the work myself. The following essay describes what I found and proposes some tentative answers to the symposium organizers' questions.

1. METHODOLOGY

   To develop a sense of what feminist scholarship has been published in feminist law journals and non-feminist law journals, I collected data about two sets of law journal articles that are arguably feminist in nature. First, I assumed that all articles published in w omen's law journals were feminist. Therefore, I looked at virtually every article punished in the eighteen women's law journals that have come into existence since Harvard began to publish the first academic women's law journal in 1978, (1) as set forth in Chart below. The only articles published in these journals that I excluded from my analysis were book reviews, case comments, and pieces written by students currently attending the school publishing the journal. (2) Through this method, I collected information about 1,448 feminist articles, including information about the subject matter and authorship of the articles.

   Second, for the same time period, 1978 to 2002, I looked at all feminist articles published in seven of the top flagship law journals: California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. (3) I adopted an expansive definition of feminism and included in this data set all articles that explicitly considered women or gender; I excluded articles that discussed an area of the law that could have concerned women--such as family law or employment discrimination--but which did not specifically discuss those issues as they related to women or gender. Using this method, I collected information about 189 feminist articles.

2. FINDINGS

   These two sets of feminist articles by no means provide a comprehensive overview of all the feminist legal scholarship that has been published. (4) However, the data sets do reveal much about the topics considered by feminists in the legal academy over the past twenty-five years, and about who has been participating in the debates.

   1. Subject Matter

      After collecting the two pools of articles described above, I looked at the primary topics covered by each article. Although the topics were diverse and nuanced, there eventually appeared to be a critical mass of articles discussing certain general topics. (5) I focused on those general topics found in at least five percent of the articles in both the women's law journal and flagship article pools, first during the entire twenty-five-year period and second, during four subsets of that period: 1978 to 1987; 1988 to 1992; 1993 to 1997; and 1998 to 2002.

      Throughout the entire twenty-five-year period, five topics were discussed in at least five percent of the women's law journal and flagship articles: (1) employment, in which I included all articles discussing workplace issues affecting women, including sexual harassment; (2) family, in which I included all articles concerning adult intimate relationships, child rearing, and legal formations of the family, such as adoption; (3) feminist legal theory in general; (4) reproduction, in which I included all articles discussing child bearing (as opposed to child rearing) issues, including abortion; and (5) violence against women, in which I included all articles concerning domestic violence, rape, and other forms of abuse. Looking at the data over the four subsets of the twenty-five-year period illustrates how the focus on these five topics shifted over time, and how new topics came to be found in at least five percent of the articles published in the periods after 1987.

      1. 1978-1987

         Chart 2 below illustrates the distribution of the five topics in the ninety-two articles (6) published by the four women's law journals that came into existence from 1978 to 1987, (7) and the thirty-five feminist articles published by the seven flagship law journals during this same time period. The results are not surprising. The women's law journal articles focused primarily on work, family, and feminist legal theory, topics at the core of the feminist movement during this time period. (8) The flagship articles also focused on these topics but more so. In addition, a higher percentage of the flagship articles discussed reproduction and violence. Given this concentration of flagship articles discussing the five topics, there was little room for diversity of topics in the flagship articles. (9)

         [GRAPHICS OMITTED]

         More surprising is the relative dearth of articles discussing pornography or prostitution. The period from 1978 to 1987 encompassed the height of the sex wars, with Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and others picketing sex shops and working to pass legislation outlawing pornography, (10) while other feminists expressed their discomfort about equating sex with danger. (11) Despite this phenomenon, only five percent of the women's law journal articles--only five out of the ninety-two--discussed pornography and only one article discussed prostitution. (12) The flagship articles contained just one discussion of each topic. And none of the articles in either pool otherwise discussed sex apart from its reproductive implications or apart from its use as a tool of violence.

         The ninety-two women's law journal articles were also virtually silent with respect to how gender intersects with other aspects of women's identity, such as race, sexual orientation, and financial status. The flagship articles were even more silent. These silences are not as surprising, however, because the feminist movement has been frequently criticized for blindly accepting a straight, white, middle-class woman as its norm, particularly during this time period. (13)

      2. 1988-1992

         During the next five years, 1988 to 1992, seven new women's law journals came into existence, including the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 1991. (14) The eleven women's law journals published 180 articles during this time, while the flagship journals published fifty-six feminist articles, considerably more than the number published in the previous decade. Chart 3 below shows that the topics of the previous decade...