Book Review: Decreeing Women\u27s Equality: Using Women\u27s History to Create Legal Parity

This article critiques the feminist view Ute Gerhard offers in “Debating Women\u27s Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective”. Throughout Debating Women\u27s Equality, Gerhard appears to have three ambitious objectives in mind: (1) to decry the paucity of research into women\u27s legal history while beginning to do the needed work, focusing primarily on Germany but also broadly exploring European trends, (2) to demonstrate that German/European women\u27s legal history ultimately vindicates reliance on “equal rights” as a political strategy for women, and (3) to develop an understanding of legal equality that can serve as a meaningful tool in the struggle for women\u27s self-determination. Gerhard succeeds admirably at the first objective. But in our view, she falls short on the second objective: we found ourselves depressed rather than encouraged by her recitation of German women\u27s struggle for civil rights. As a work of history, however, her book will be valuable both to those in the know about women\u27s legal history in the United States and are interested in comparing the German/European experience, and to those who have not yet studied any kind of women\u27s legal history. But as a philosophical treatise or a blueprint for pragmatic action in the struggle for women\u27s self-determination, the book can be overlooked in favor of other more extensive, future-looking and specific treatments