Are disposable menstrual products liberating?

I have written on here before about how great menstrual cups are and my thoughts haven't changed.

I was really excited to be able to do a course on feminist theory this semester (POLS/PHIL 362 - do it if you ever get the chance) and even more excited to be able to write my final essay on any topic at all... Unsurprisingly I chose the topic of disposable menstrual products. It was really cool to be able to read and write about them in an academic setting. My essay explored various tensions in feminist thought relating to disposable products. Are the really liberating or are they a form of patriarchal regulation of our bodies? Can we talk about consumption only in terms of the end product or do we need to look more deeply at how our consumption fits into a global system of exploitation? Should menstrual activists reclaim menstruation as an essential feminine experience or seek to deconstruct gender categories altogether? (SPOILER: my answer to all these questions was the latter in each pair).

Anyway I'm not gonna post my whole essay on here but what follows is the speech I presented at the mini-conference we did the other night. It was a great way to end the semester, and super exciting to rant about this stuff to the 50 or so people who were there.

“Are disposable menstrual products liberating?” 

I have posed this as a question, because I think that the narrative that menstrual products are liberating is something that feminists really need to challenge.

By disposable menstrual products I mean pads and tampons. They seem totally normal to us today, but are actually a fairly recent invention. Cloth pads were the norm in Western countries until about the mid 20^th century. Washing them was time consuming and stigmatised work. Disposable pads and tampons were a luxury, which women had increased access to as they entered paid employment. The marketing of these products was heavily linked with ideals of freedom, hygiene and modernity.

Second-wave feminists generally accepted and even embraced this narrative. Judith Lorber explains this in her foreword to Chris Bobel’s book (more about this book below). She says, “for a second-wave feminist like me, whose early goal in life was to have a full-time career and a family at the same time, menstruation was to be minimized, managed and made invisible…. My generation gratefully seized on tampons and “the Pill” to accomplish the goal of making menstruation and birth control less of a bother.”

I think feminists need to interrogate this idea of liberation through consumption of disposable menstrual products. I don’t want to say that pads and tampons are always bad for everyone. But I do think that their monopoly on both the market and the discourse of menstruation creates and perpetuates patriarchal oppression of our bodies and is part of a fundamentally exploitative global capitalist system.

Let me explain. Menstruation is highly stigmatised. Studies have shown that periods are the thing that women hate the most about their bodies. It is even more stigmatised among menstruators who aren’t women, such as intersex people, genderqueer people, and transmen. This is because menstruation is coded as feminine and we live in a patriarchal society.

We live in a world where women’s bodies are problematic. We have a culture of concealment, secrecy, stigma, shame and objectification, so that menstrual products can be marketed as the solution to the problem. This meant that disposable sanitary products became, and are still, markers of modernity, class privilege and respectability. And menstruators have internalised this, self-surveilling and self-policing, spending money every month on disposable products so they can discretely “manage” their periods. Most of us don’t stop to ask why menstruation is a “problem” in the first place.

I love talking about menstrual cups to anyone who’ll listen and writing my essay was great cos it gave me an excuse to. For the uninitiated, they are reusable cups that last for up to 10 years. They are inserted like a tampon, and they collect menstrual fluid rather than absorbing it. I was explaining them to my dad a few weeks ago. He said, they sound great, why have I never heard of these before?

My answer was basically capitalism. There is a lot more profit to be made from something which needs to be bought every single month than something which can be used for 10 years.  As consumers, we think we have choice. Libra has 47 different products. But when the choice is between 47 different types of pads, liners and tampons, this choice is not actually a choice. It is constrained by the messages from these companies that disposable products are the only option. They do this through advertising, obviously. They also do it in more subtle ways. Menstrual product companies sponsor the educational materials that schools use, so only pads and tampons are mentioned. This severely constrains our choice.

We also have to question the global impacts of our consumption. Few of us stop to think where and how our pads and tampons are made. What ecosystems are being destroyed in order to produce the cotton they are made from? What workers are being exploited? Are they liberated by these disposable products? What about the toxic chemicals used to bleach them? Where do they come from? At what cost? What about the landfills, clogged up with the waste of 11,000 pads and tampons that the average menstruator uses in their lifetime?

Chris Bobel talks about radical menstruators in her book: New Blood: third wave feminism and the politics of menstruation (which is pretty much the best book on feminism I've ever read so have a look at it if you get the chance). These activists advance a third wave feminist critique of menstrual products which incorporates queer theory, anti-essentialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, de-colonisation and environmentalism. They reject the not only the narrative of menstruation as shameful, but also the narrative of menstruation as an essentially feminine, spiritual experience which unites all women. They see menstruation neither as a curse nor a gift, but rather a healthy bodily process which some people experience. They see menstruators not as a unified group of women, but as a diverse group of women and people who aren’t women, with diverse race, class, sexuality and gender identities.

Radical menstruators employ tactics like zines, radical cheerleading, humour, art, and workshops to spread their message. These activists use individual actions not just as self-empowerment, but as a way of challenging and dismantling these multiple and intersecting oppressions on a global scale.

What are the alternatives to disposable products? There are a few. Personally, I think menstrual cups are amazing, and I’m gonna shamelessly plug my friend’s business, green girl stuff. I realise though, the irony and the limitations of spending money on a product as a stance against capitalism. On the other hand, they are a massive improvement on disposable products since they are a one-off investment and not clogging landfills. Other options include making your own reusable pads, or buying them. Some people also use sea sponges as an alternative to tampons.

What does this mean for feminism as a whole? I think menstruation is one of the most under analysed topics in feminist theory, and this needs to change. We need to start writing about it, thinking about it, talking about it, and challenging the norms that have been constructed by patriarchy and capitalism.  I think taking back control over our periods is an important step in liberating our bodies, and I think refusing to hand money over to multi-national companies who are exploiting our insecurities and destroying the environment is an important stance against our broken economic system. Seeking to dismantle systems of oppression through individual actions of resistance makes the personal political which gets to the heart of what feminist theory and practice is about.

Speech from the other night

This is the text of a speech I did a few nights ago as part of a panel on intergenerational feminism - where I was asked to share some of my experiences. I was really honoured to be part of a panel with three amazing women, and humbled that so many people showed up to listen to us!! Also stoked that intergenerational dialogue is happening, given some of the stuff I say in this speech and in previous posts :)

Kia ora koutou katoa.

Thank you to Ana, the Women’s Studies Association and my fellow panellists for the opportunity to be here tonight.

I want to acknowledge Te Ati Awa as the tangata whenua of this colonised land.

I also want to honour the generations of women who have gone before us. As we are all aware, we have just celebrated the 120^th anniversary of women’s suffrage. I was born in 1993, so 1893 is a date that has always been etched in my mind. The fact that it took the suffragettes 24 years, 31 petitions, and 7 unsuccessful bills, shows that simple things we take for granted today are the product of long years of struggle in the past. I am inspired by the courage, determination and persistence of the suffragettes and also of the subsequent generations who have continued their work, including of course my fellow panellists here tonight. To be part of an ongoing historical struggle across generations is for me a source of grounding and strength.

I think it is important to recognise that I have benefitted significantly more than a lot of women have, from the massive social changes that feminists have achieved. I am Pākehā, I am heterosexual, I am cisgendered (meaning that I identify with the gender than society assumes I am), I am able bodied, and I am a middle class university student. I am confronted by patriarchy when my lecturers make sexist jokes, when they use entirely male authors, when the people we study are men, and when feminist critiques are non-existent. This is very different to the everyday manifestations of patriarchy that a lot of women have to deal with.

My engagement with feminism has largely played out in a university context, but as a friend pointed out to me, that doesn’t mean that I can only make academic or theoretical arguments. I also have experienced, felt, and lived. So I’m going to talk about my experiences with feminism both as a young woman engaging with the feminist movement, and also as a young feminist engaging with the world.

During my first two years at uni I became politically aware in a lot of ways: I joined the Green Party and campaigned for the election, became vegan, went to lots of protests and opposed University cuts. I was also becoming more aware of feminism. I wrote an essay about it for my first year POLS paper, and read the occasional blog on the topic. But it was only around the end of last year (which was my second year at uni) that I really made the connection between feminism as a really interesting academic idea and feminism as a political struggle that directly affected me.

And I think one of the turning points was a women’s weekend for an activist group I’m involved in [for the purposes of putting things on this internet I don’t think its helpful to name names]. I’d always thought this group was pretty good at gender equality. So I was really surprised to hear stories from the women there about the ways in which they were overlooked, ignored and silenced, how they had to fight harder, how they had to look better, how they did more work and got less credit – at every level of the organisation. Individual instances could be put down to chance, or bad luck, or a few sexist men. But hearing very similar stories from so many of these women alerted me for the first time that sexism still permeates deeply in spaces which are doing their best to overcome it.

In addition, my mind was opened by the sessions we had on disability, where we were asked “who isn’t here? Why? What can we do about it?”; racism, where we were told to put our hand up if we’d ever been followed in a shop, and gender diversity, which involved choosing between arbitrary binaries, such as “tea or coffee” to highlight that the categories of “man” and “woman” that society imposes do not fit reality.

The next engagement with feminism that I wanted to highlight is my experience at two very different feminist gatherings this year.

The first was the WSA conference. There were lots of interesting discussions and inspiring people, and I’m really glad I went. But it also opened my eyes to the very different approaches of older and younger feminists. I hadn’t realised that it was a women’s only space until another young woman told me that her feminist boyfriend was not allowed to attend. This was totally news to me – and I couldn’t understand it. I have thought about it a lot since then, and now I do realise the value of these spaces. And that’s because universities were, and are still, deeply patriarchal and women, and especially feminist women, struggle to be heard and to be taken seriously. Whether this continues to justify excluding a really important group of allies, I am not entirely sure.

But there was a more fundamental problem. Women’s only spaces also exclude some of the most oppressed groups. They exclude transwomen, unless they are specially made safe and welcoming (which this conference wasn’t), and they also exclude people with non-binary gender identity. These people are also oppressed by patriarchy, often more so than cis-gender women. When several young women, including myself, tried to raise this on the last day, we felt silenced and ignored. To be fair, talking at each other, across a massive lecture theatre was obviously not the right forum for that discussion to happen, so I am stoked that we are having this panel here today in a slightly more relaxed setting, to continue that conversation.

The other gathering was ClitFEST. Clit stands for combatting latent inequalities together, and it was described as a “trans and cis women centred, DIY feminist festival which is open to people of all genders”. It included panels such as “indigenous feminisms and social movements”, “takataapui, pasifika ways and beyond queer theory”, “intimate partner violence in queer and gender diverse relationships” and “body politics: food, health, fat, disability, class and moral virtue” just to name a few. The speakers were incredibly diverse: in terms of gender identity, sexuality, class, and race – and hardly any were academics. There were still of course issues with the way it was organised and run, and I know people that didn’t attend because they didn’t feel welcome. But overall, it gave me a huge sense of optimism about the potential for marginalised groups to come together, listen, and build resistance.

The final thing I wanted to touch on is feminism in the university. As most of you know, Gender and Women’s Studies was a thriving department at Vic until it was disestablished in 2010. One of the justifications was that feminist stuff was already included in other courses so it was no longer necessary. Well, as an example, the international relations course I did last semester had one token lecture on feminism, most of which focussed on a male author’s analysis of the gender wage gap. I sent the lecturer a very politely worded email explaining why this was totally inadequate – and never heard back.

Down at law school, the situation is even bleaker, and the feminist legal theory paper hasn’t been offered for about a decade. Because 60% of law graduates are now women, it is assumed that we are all equal and everything is fine. In fact, I went to see a panel of female lawyers last week, and while they acknowledged that there are still barriers for women, their solutions were basically to work harder, assert yourself, take all opportunities, look after yourself, and, alarmingly, cull your friends. The only thing that came close to calls for structural change was a mention of how things would be easier if men took more responsibility for childcare. There was no hint of discussion about the legal system as a whole being built by and for an elite group of men and therefore requiring total deconstruction. The discussion was entirely about individual success within a pre-defined system – which I found really disheartening and depressing.

But I’m going to end on a positive note, which is that in the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved in starting up a feminist law students group. I realised that while I’m not marginalised as a woman at law school, I am definitely marginalised as a feminist – and the fact that there is so much energy for this group to exist tells me that many others feel the same. We have heaps of exciting plans to build up our own law school culture by carving out our own social space. Eventually we’d like to smash the patriarchal foundations of the entire legal system – which we’re going to start doing by lobbying for more diverse and critical perspectives to be taught.

So to conclude, there is hope for the feminist movement, resistance is happening, and a young people are engaging with feminist struggle. Young feminists can learn so much from the struggles of the past, and draw inspiration from those who have gone before us. But to remain relevant, feminists need to understand the intersectionality of oppressions and the power dynamics within feminism. We need to stand in solidarity with other social movements and fight for the rights and freedoms of all people. If this was easy we would have already done it already – but that does not make it impossible.

Thank you.

The legal system and law school: patriarchy, intersecting oppressions and the neoliberal erosion of resistance

This is the essay I wrote for the Wellington Women Lawyers Association competition, "Who's Harriette?" which invited participants to discuss the challenges facing women law graduates today. I didn't win but that's ok - I'm really glad to have had the opportunity to develop and articulate my thoughts on this, read lots of interesting stuff and have heaps of wonderful conversations with people about these issues. AND have a constructive outlet to vent my constant frustration, which was nice! Best of all it has made me deeply aware of the need for feminist resistance at law school and inspired me to get a feminist group happening, which is incredibly exciting.

I had thought about editing this before posting on here but actually I can't be bothered, so this is the version I submitted. Feedback welcome, of course - I am keen to keep this discussion going :)

Harriette’s challenges one hundred years on: patriarchy persists, neoliberalism rules, and feminism embraces intersectionality?

I. Introduction

Harriette Vine and countless other women have broken down many of the barriers in the legal profession over the last one hundred years, yet female lawyers continue to face significant challenges. Some suggest that the solution to this is to wait for the increasing numbers of female lawyers to self-correct the imbalances.[1] Other more serious approaches include lobbying for more flexibility in working hours and parental leave to accommodate women having children;[2] better mentoring programmes for women;[3] and working with large law firms to encourage women’s promotion.[4] While these approaches are commendable, they generally presuppose that women can be slotted into the legal profession, roughly as it currently stands.

My argument is that genuine equality for female lawyers will only be made possible by attacking the patriarchal foundations of both the profession and the legal system it serves. The law’s claims to objectivity and universality fail to take into account not just gender but also many other power imbalances in society. Women are never going to be equal as lawyers while the legal system ignores their experiences, both as practitioners of the law and as its subjects.

This essay focuses on law school, because the challenges that women lawyers face do not begin on graduation. Institutional barriers in the profession are both reflected in, and constructed by, legal education. The assumptions, attitudes and behaviours taught at law school are likely to remain with legal practitioners throughout their careers. To question, challenge, and uproot them is becoming increasingly difficult as universities move away from theoretical projects and embrace market imperatives, but this remains a critically important task.

II. What are the Barriers?

Harriette Vine lived in a society where there were clear, overt barriers to the participation of women in the legal profession and many of these have been overcome.[5] In her time, and up to the 1950s, female law graduates were a rarity;[6] now they are a majority. In 2012, 61% of those admitted to the bar were women, up from 23.2% in 1980, 42% in 1990, and 58.5% in 2000.[7] The sharp rise of women in the legal profession at the end of the 20^th century coincided with the height of second-wave feminism, which fought for the inclusion of women in all spheres of public life. Many women have made it to the top of the profession, and New Zealand’s Supreme, High, and District Courts are all currently headed by women.

Despite this, women are still far from equal. 45% of practicing lawyers are women,[8] yet only 22.3% of partners are women,[9] and only 14% of Queen’s Counsel.[10] Women make up only 28% of the judiciary.[11] In addition, they earn less,[12] get promoted less,[13] and quit the profession in greater numbers.[14] Society still expects women to take the primary responsibility for raising children, and the culture, long hours and inflexibility of many law firms are still a barrier for women with families.[15] In addition, women with children (but not men with children) are seen as less committed to their careers.[16] Other barriers for women include male-dominated networks,[17] and gendered stereotypes about leadership ability.[18]

These stereotypes are visible at law school too, often through the use of humour. One of my lecturers earlier this year said "As a woman, when you get married you promise to do all the cooking and ironing." Of course, as he explained, it was a joke, because no-one holds that view any more. As another example, in a seminar that a few of my friends attended, the man taking it said: “Here’s one for the ladies – how do you spell ‘dishes’?” He then pointed at the women in the room until someone answered, and, to make matters worse, repeated the same ‘joke’ in several seminars, showing that it was clearly rehearsed. ‘Jokes’ like these although they are subtle, collectively reinforce gender norms.

The few times that I have confronted my lecturers on issues of inappropriate humour, the response has been to acknowledge my concern without acting on it, and I have been left feeling isolated and confused. On countless other occasions, I have remained silent in my anger and frustration.

Sexism permeates law school on a more structural level too. Several of my female peers have commented that they don’t feel disadvantaged at all, although the research suggests otherwise. Caroline Morris’s 2004 survey of nearly half of all 200 and 300 level law students at Victoria University found that law school continues to be a gendered experience, despite women being the majority. It concluded:[19]

Academically, women law students at VUW found the place more competitive than men, were more dissatisfied with the performance, spoke up less frequently in class and were less happy about it.

This survey is now nearly ten years old, but I suspect that not much has changed. A friend of mine has commented to me that in 300 level papers, male students speak up more than females, while in her first year, the reverse was true. I notice this in my own papers too. My lecturers call on people fairly evenly, and questions are answered equally well by both genders. However, men seem to be more willing to put their hands up when the lecturer asks for volunteers, especially in papers taught by men. This might suggest that the style of teaching at law school, and especially the Socratic method is more empowering for men than women.[20]

Morris suggests a range of potential reasons for women’s silence in class. It could be the method, a general fear of public speaking and humiliation, or perhaps:[21]

a conscious strategy, not so much a fear based inability to rise to the challenge of the lecturer's question, but a "deliberate expression of resistance" by "outsider" students, unwilling to submit their alternative viewpoints to a value system which is unresponsive to, and even dismissive of, their ideas.

III. Law School is Part of the Patriarchal Legal System

The legal system has been constructed by educated, powerful white men to reflect their own values and experiences. Because this group has remained privileged, they have had the power to overlook, ignore and marginalise the reality of other people, and therefore claim their own situation as universal.[22] This is problematic as it totally overlooks the dynamics of power, as Lucinda Finley explains:[23]

[L]aw is conceptualized as a rule-bound system for adjudicating the competing rights of self-interested, autonomous, essentially equal individuals capable of making unconstrained choices. […] An individualistic focus on choice does not perceive constraints as coming from history, from the operation of power and domination, from socialization, or from class, race and gender.

As an example of this, some male lecturers relate cases to their own experience when this is clearly inappropriate. One of the cases we studied recently was about a young woman studying law in England in the 1960s. In the judgment, one of the judges makes a comment about her obligations to continue her studies “whatever attractive alternatives might appear, such as possible marriage or well-paid employment”.[24] The lecturer totally dismissed the suggestion that marriage would have been an “alternative” to study, pointing out that when he got married and his wife had kids, it was actually great for his career, because he was motivated to work harder and get promoted in order to provide for them.

It was only when I thought about this afterwards that I realised how shocking this comment was, and not only because of its gendered assumptions about child raising. This comment was an assertion that this lecturer’s male experience was universal. Even while implicitly acknowledging that his own wife was doing most of the caregiving work in his own situation, he failed to realise that the young women in question would be facing similar assumptions, and especially in her historical context. Of course it was possible at the time to combine a legal career with motherhood, but this was not the norm.[25] Of course, this could have been a really interesting point of discussion for the class.

Feminist legal theory developed to challenge the supposed neutrality and universality of the legal system, to highlight its masculine bias, and to demand reform. Margaret Thornton argues that Feminist legal theory’s high point was in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was taught in both specialist and mainstream courses. Even then, it was never really taken seriously by mainstream academics, because it threatened to “destabilise the epistemological foundations of [legal] orthodoxy”.[26] Thornton argues that its minimal impact has been because:[27]

so much has been at stake in the corrosion of legal positivism’s claims to truth, including the unmasking of the masculinised character of legal personhood, which continues to present itself as neutral and depersonalised.

Most feminist legal theorists have rejected earlier feminist claims to equality based on sameness to men an instead argued that women are fundamentally different.[28] Both of these approaches are useful, but neither is entirely convincing. I prefer the approach of what can be called intersectional, or third-wave, feminism. This perspective rejects the gender binary, recognising that while there are differences between men and women, these are socially constructed rather than inherent. It also rejects the essentialism that has previously dominated the most visible forms of feminism, and instead takes into account multiple identities and oppressions.[29]

IV. Multiple Axes of Oppression

The legal system in New Zealand is not just patriarchal; it is also colonising. In New Zealand we have imported a colonial legal system built on Western values. In only two of the eight law courses I have taken has it been acknowledged that Māori legal systems existed in Aotearoa prior to colonisation.[30] In one of them, it was barely touched on; in the other we spent maybe two lectures on Māori legal theory. Even though the entire rest of the course was Pākehā law, many of my peers complained that we were wasting time on the “Māori stuff”, because it was not “relevant”.

It is no wonder then, that several Māori people who I have talked to feel that the Law School is not necessarily a comfortable environment for Māori students. A Māori friend commented to me:[31]

 Having grown up in with a predominantly Pakeha lifestyle, I get to Law School and feel even more Pakeha. Which is actually fine with me, because I've felt more Pakeha than I do Maori. But Law School is a very Pakeha place. To those Maori who are truly connected to their whakapapa, a place like Law School would feel very alienating.

In New Zealand, one in five people are disabled, yet they are one of the most invisible groups, and are frequently overlooked. Dr Huhana Hickey is a lawyer with a PhD, who identifies as whanau hauā.[32] She is female, Māori, and uses a wheelchair.[33]  She was at the Koru Lounge one day when she started talking to two young women, who she guessed to be lawyers. She asked them, “Why is it is that law firms don’t hire disabled people?” They said, “Do you really want to know?” She answered that she did. The response was “Well, you’re just not beautiful people.” Apparently, the first mark of a successful lawyer is not legal knowledge, experience or expertise, but physical attractiveness – especially if you are female. The fact that these women had the audacity to say this really highlights the way that disabled people are stigmatised and made invisible in our society.

In addition to experiences of individual prejudice, disabled lawyers experience institutional barriers. For example, on completing her PhD, Huhana was told that she lacked the mental capacity to be a successful lawyer. This completely overlooked the fact that her qualifications were much higher than those of many young lawyers entering the profession. She also took the Law Society to the Human Rights Commission, and won, in order to get adequate support for sitting the bar exam. Even then, rather than celebrating her success, some members of the Law Society continued to hold a grudge. This meant that she had to move to a different city in order to find work. Many workplaces remain inaccessible for wheelchair users, and rather than adapt, they continue to exclude disabled people.

Feminist legal theory can also be oppressive. It is important to constantly question what kinds of feminism are being taught, whose voices are being heard, and who is being marginalised. Leah Whiu offers a confronting account of her experience studying Feminist Legal Theory at Waikato University in 1994, and of being consistently othered by Pākehā women who refused to acknowledge her experiences, or come to terms with their own privilege:[34]

Being wheeled out, here is our native girl! An exhibit. And a sentence or two is trotted out, mentioning Maori women. For of course not to would be a political no-no. And you write one maybe two paragraphs about us in your paper which your network will publish, buy and use in their writing; while I sit here every day amongst you, invisible it seems.

As feminism has slowly become aware of other oppressions, it has no longer been able to cling to the essentialist (and exclusionary) category of “women” that it relied on in the past. Margaret Thornton argues that this post-modern shift from universalism to diversity has meant a “withdrawal from collective interests in favour of a cynical individualism”.[35] However, she also argues that going back to these universal ideas is not going to save academic legal feminism.[36] I agree. There is nothing inconsistent about embracing diversity and difference, acknowledging the power imbalances both in society and within the feminist movement, and continuing to deconstruct the law’s claims to objectivity. The task becomes more complicated, but with an open mind and a commitment to building alliances, it is definitely possible.

V. Neoliberalism is Corroding Collective Resistance

A more difficult challenge to feminism critique (and therefore, to genuine possibilities for structural change for women in the profession) is the increasing prevalence of neoliberalism, and with it a pervasive belief in individualism which renders identity politics irrelevant. In a fascinating qualitative survey of young women in the UK and Germany, 30 out of 40 participants did not call themselves feminist, 2 did, and the other 8 did, but with provisos.[37] 38 participants recognised that gender inequality existed, but most believed that the solution to overcoming this was more to do with individual empowerment than structural barriers.[38] The author, Christina Scharff suggests that:[39]

The perceived collectivism of feminism runs counter to the fashioning of neoliberal subjectivities that derive moral self-worth from navigating challenges, and opportunities, individually and self-responsibly.

Neoliberalism has also had a profound impact at an institutional level, restricting the possibilities of academic critique. The role of universities has shifted, from valuing knowledge for its own sake, to assessing its worth based on market value.[40] Thornton writes that students (in the UK, Canada and Australia) are unwilling to have feminist subjects on their CV for fear it could jeopardise their career opportunities. At the same time, academics are increasingly expected to produce research which has market value, which means there is less room for theoretical or critical research.[41]  

This seems to be the case at Victoria, where the feminist legal theory course has not been offered for many years, and feminist perspectives are only visible in one of the compulsory papers.[42] In 1993, male academics would insist that University was an academic rather than a technical institution, and this could be used by feminists as a justification for teaching Feminist Legal Theory, which is certainly an “academic” subject.[43] I wonder to what extent those male lecturers would defend that position today, when the number of commercial law course has far overtaken those with a theoretical or critical approach. One of the male lecturers I had would constantly insist he was training us for the “legal services market”, which I think provides a good illustration of this shift.

At Victoria, the “Women in Law” section of LAWS121 emphasises the increasing success of women in the legal profession in line with the liberal narrative of progress. Now that we have had women in high office including Prime Minister and Governor-General and Attorney-General then, it follows that any woman should be able to overcome the challenges and rise to the top of her chosen field. According to neoliberalism, if she fails, it means she did not try hard enough. She lacks merit. The course does dwell on feminist theory, but only very briefly, and even then it is not taken seriously by many students. As one friend commented to me,[44]

Our (female) tutor spent the whole women and law tute snickering about "radical feminism" and ended with "and don't worry if you don't agree with the whole idea of feminism, you just have to memorise the theories".

VI. Conclusions

Early female lawyers like Harriet Vine were marginalised in the legal profession on account of their gender. The subtle acts of sexism I have experienced are minor in comparison to the blatant exclusion of women in the past. I personally do not face any of the additional hurdles faced by Māori women, women of other non-white ethnicities, disabled women, whanau hauā, queer women, or people who don’t conform to the gender binary. Yet, I feel alienated at law school, not so much as a woman, but as a feminist. As I have shown, to speak out as a feminist remains difficult.

As long as neoliberal discourse pervades both academia and society in general, critical perspectives will struggle to be taken seriously either by future lawyers or the legal system as a whole. If lawyers continue to take for granted the gendered assumptions of the law, then being female will remain a disadvantage in the legal profession. At the same time, the gains that women have made in the last one hundred years have largely benefited the most privileged women, and feminists need to create space for the voices of the most marginalised women and embrace an intersectional analysis. To truly overcome the structural barriers of the legal profession, it is necessary to engage with the law at a fundamental theoretical level.

---

[1] See for example Daniel McConnel “Women set to dominate legal profession” (18 March 2007) Independent.ie <www.independent.ie>. Although I couldn’t find any New Zealand arguments from this perspective, I suspect it is a view which remains influential.

[2] For example, Joanne Morris “Balancing or Juggling Our Private and Public Lives?” (1993) 23(2) VUWLR 49 at 55-56.

[3] Justice Susan Glazebrook “Looking through the glass: gender inequality at the senior levels of New Zealand’s legal profession” (Chapman Trip Women in Law event, Victoria University, Wellington, 16 September 2010) at 6-7.

[4] For example “AWLA Research Project” AWLA <http://www.awla.org.nz/wordpress/>.

[5] Although of course the situation then was complex too. For an examination of this time period, see Janet November “‘The Law as a Profession for Women?’ A Century of Progress? A Reply to Mary Jane Mossman” (2010) 33 Aust Femininst LJ 161.

[6] See generally Shirley Smith “My Life in the Law” (1993) 23(2) VUWLR 1.

[7]“A Snapshot of the New Zealand Legal Profession” LawTalk (New Zealand, 28 March 2013).

 at 9.

[8] At 6.

[9] At 9.

[10] At 12.

[11] At 13.

[12] Glazebrook, above n 3 at 5.

[13] Sian Elias “Address to the Australian Women Lawyers’ Conference” (Sofitel Hotel, Melbourne, 13 June 2008), at 4.

[14] Janet November “‘The Law as a Profession for Women?’ A Century of Progress? A Reply to Mary Jane Mossman” (2010) 33 Aust Femininst LJ 161 at 170.

[15] November above n 5 at 169-170; Elias above n 13 at 5.

[16] Glazebrook, above n 3 at 4-5

[17] At 6-7

[18] At 8.

[19] Caroline Morris “A ‘Mean Hard Place’? Law Students Tell It As It Is” (2005) 36 VUWLR 197 at 220.

[20] And this has been argued by feminists. For a particularly vivid account, see Carmel Rogers “How Legal Education Will Assault You as a Woman” (1993) 23(2) VUWLR 167 at 174-175.

[21] Morris, above n 19 at 205.

[22] Lucinda Finley “Breaking Women’s Silence in Law: The Dilemma of the Gendered Nature of Legal Reasoning” (1989) 64 Notre Dame L Rev 886 at 893.

[23] At 896.

[24]  Jones v Padavatton [1969] 1 WLR 328 at 336.

[25] See generally Smith above n 6 on being a law student in New Zealand in the 1950s.

[26] Margaret Thornton “Neoliberal melancholia: The case of feminist legal scholarship” (2004) 20 Austl Feminist LJ 7 at 16.

[27] At 17.

[28] See generally Catharine McKinnon Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1989); Carol Gilligan In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993); and in the New Zealand context, Rogers, above n 20.

[29] See generally Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (eds) Third Wave Agenda: being feminist, doing feminism (University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1997) at 3; and in a New Zealand legal context see Leah Whiu “A Maori Woman’s Experience of Feminist Legal Education in Aotearoa” (1994) 2 Wai L Rev 161.

[30] LAWS121 and LAWS214.

[31] Personal correspondence on Facebook.

[32] A Te Reo Māori term for “disabled person”, which many Māori prefer as it does not have the negative connotations that “disability” does.

[33] This and the following paragraph are sourced from conversations and personal correspondence I have had with Huhana, on Skype and Facebook.

[34] Leah Whiu above n 29 at 165. I am aware of the irony of using this particular quote.

[35] Margaret Thornton “Neoliberal melancholia: The case of feminist legal scholarship” (2004) 20 Austl Feminist LJ 7 at 13.

[36] At 13.

[37] Christina Scharff Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World (Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Surrey, 2012) at 3.

[38] At 10.

[39] At 11.

[40] Thornton above n 35 at 18.

[41] At 19.

[42] LAWS214.

[43] Elisabeth McDonald “The Law of Contract and the Taking of Risks: Feminist Legal Theory and the Way It Is” (1993) 23(2) VUWLR 113 at 118.

[44] Personal correspondance on Facebook