All content tagged with: Women’s Rights

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  • Some Women’s Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, and the Limits of Legal Reform

    This Note employs Critical Race, feminist, Marxist, and queer theory to analyze the underlying reasons for the exclusion of domestic workers from legal and regulatory systems. The Note begins with a discussion of the role of legal and regulatory systems in upholding and replicating White supremacy within the employer and domestic worker relationship. The Note then goes on to argue that the White, feminist movement's emphasis on access to wage labor further subjugated Black and immigrant domestic workers. Finally, I end with an in-depth legal analysis of New York's Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the nation's first state law to specifically extend legal protections to domestic workers. The Note discusses many provisions of the bill and draws on the experiences of organizers involved in the passage of the bill to provide critical analysis of the limitations of legal reform. With this Note, I hope to provide organizers, activists, and legal practitioners with additional critical tools crafting solutions, legal reforms, and narratives in the struggle to end the oppression of domestic workers.

  • Seeking Redress for Gender-Based Bias Crimes- Charting New Ground in Familiar Legal Territory

    This Essay will analyze how courts have defined gender-motivation, focusing on the Civil Rights Remedy cases decided before the law was struck down, in an attempt to cull from those cases the standards federal courts have used to assess gender-motivation. The article will first provide an overview of existing and proposed laws that offer some form of redress for gender-motivated crimes. It will then analyze cases decided under the Civil Rights Remedy, focusing on two key issues that have arisen as policymakers struggle with whether and how gender-based bias crimes fit in the rubric of hate crimes legislation. The first of these issues is how courts have assessed whether claims of domestic violence reflect discriminatory motivation, and what type of evidence they have found useful in that context. The second issue is how courts treated VAWA civil rights claims based on allegations of sexual assault, and what, if any, evidence, in addition to allegations of sexual assault, they found to indicate gender-motivation.

  • Striking the Rock: Confronting Gender Equality in South Africa

    This Article analyzes the status of women's rights in the newly democratic South Africa. It examines rights guaranteed in the Constitution and conflicts between the principle of gender equality and the recognition of indigenous law and institutions. The Article focuses on the South African transition to democracy and the influence that feminist agitation at the international level has had on South African women's attempts at political organization. After dissecting the historical position of customary law in South Africa and questioning its place in the new democratic regime. The author argues that, although South African women have benefited from the global feminist endeavor, they have adopted the shape and substance of women's rights to accommodate conditions peculiar to South Africa. The Article concludes that this balancing of respect for indigenous culture and the ultimate goal of eradication of all forms of sexism provides the best means for women in South Africa to make progress in their quest for equal status in that society.