Rosemary Auchmuty

Same-Sex Marriage Revived: Feminist Critique and Legal Strategy

In June 2003 the UK government published proposals for a civil partnership registration scheme for same-sex couples that would confer almost all the legal rights and responsibilities of marriage. The paper discusses its provisions in the context of the debates on same-sex marriage over the past decade and argues that they hardly represent any advance on existing rights and that same-sex marriage will inevitably be won in the UK. The author herself is unenthusiastic about marriage, and concludes that lesbians and gay men should not let themselves be assimilated into a heterosexual model, but should draw attention to the potential for our relationships to act as better models for all relationships, inside or outside marriage.

The image of women's studies

Abstract We are three feminists, one Australian, one American and one English, who surveyed the image of Womens Studies in the sphere of Adult Education. This article gives the results of our survey; it illustrates both the problems and the potential of the image of Womens Studies in Adult Education in London—and by implication throughout the UK. Each of us is involved in teaching several Adult Education classes in a variety of subjects, not all of them within the sphere of Womens Studies. We polled our classes to assess their image of Womens Studies, finding it largely negative except in those classes specifically titled ‘Womens Studies’. More depressing, however, was our poll of administrators and staff in Adult Education and of non-feminist community groups of women, the ‘average’ women in the UK. Finally we query whether the problem is one of image or name or whether it is more deeply rooted in English misogyny, a heritage of patriarchy.

Lesbian history and gay studies: keeping a feminist perspective

Abstract The radical potential of gay studies to challenge the prevailing heterosexist academic vision will only be realised if a lesbian feminist viewpoint is incorporated. At present in gay scholarship the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘gay’ do not always include women, and sexuality is often defined in essentialist terms. Lesbian experience is frequently presented as a ‘pale version of the male’. Gay male history-writing reflects the concerns of the gay male rights movement, which do not challenge patriarchy. Lesbian history, on the other hand, focuses critically on the institutions of patriarchy which serve to keep women in subjection to men. It is argued that lesbians should not be subsumed into the dominant male culture but must seek to transform it through making their voices heard in gay studies as well as in womens studies and in separate lesbian history courses and writings

Men Behaving Badly: An Analysis of English Undue Influence Cases

Undue influence in mortgage cases is a major issue for women in turn-of-the-century English Land Law. The case reports reveal a catalogue of bad behaviour by men - not simply the perpetrators but also solicitors and bank officials - which courts allow to go unchecked, indeed almost unnoticed. This is because men’s bad behaviour in this area (as in others) is taken for granted in our society. Law uses a number of mechanisms to obscure and condone men’s bad behaviour: claiming the neutrality of doctrine and the ‘special tenderness’ of equity towards women, pretending ‘balance’ where in reality there is none, using language in clever and manipulative ways, and managing to ignore women’s pain by shifting the focus of the law from the wrong itself to the ways in which creditors can avoid being affected by it. The undue influence test is manifestly unsuitable for the protection of women; equity’s role appears to be the defence of business interests, not the weak and vulnerable. While there are some recent and welcome signs of legal engagement with the problems of masculinity, the solutions to women’s problems lie largely outside law, in women’s greater financial independence and a realignment of the relationship of men and women to what Joan Williams calls ‘domesticity’.

Early Women Law Students at Cambridge and Oxford

This article examines the hitherto neglected history of the twelve women who studied law at Cambridge and Oxford in the years up to 1900. It concludes that the reason why so little has been written about them is, first, because womens experience has been routinely ignored in accounts of legal education (and in history generally) and, second, because their entry to the university law schools was accomplished with very little fuss or opposition. This in turn was due not only to the fact that the law professors were generally sympathetic to higher education for women but also because the women themselves did not challenge university traditions or the mens curriculum.

The experience of civil partnership dissolution: not ‘just like divorce’

Abstract Between 2012 and 2014 I interviewed some of the earliest civil partners to dissolve their partnerships about their experience of dissolution. When I presented my findings, most family lawyers responded that dissolution was ‘pretty much like divorce’. And so it was, in many respects; but I thought that such comments missed an important difference. This article focuses on the legal understandings of gays and lesbians who have undergone dissolution of their civil partnerships, and on their experiences of it. This seemed to me significant for three reasons. First, the experiences of lesbians and gay men have historically been marginalised, pathologised or absent from legal accounts and the dominant legal consciousness. In this research they would be put centre-stage. Second, the institution of civil partnership – transient though it may turn out to be – deserves study as the point of entry into legal recognition and regulation of same-sex couples’ relationships in the UK. And, third, it is this precise history that makes it different from marriage, and dissolution different from divorce, whatever the similarities in legal treatment.

The Women's Legal Landmarks Project: Celebrating 100 Years of Women in the Law in the UK and Ireland

This article by Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley introduces the Womens Legal Landmarks Project. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving feminist scholars from law and other disciplines engaging in the process of identifying, researching and producing critical accounts of the key legal events, cases and statutes which represent significant turning points for women in the UK and Ireland. In creating the first scholarly anthology of legal landmarks for women spanning four jurisdictions and spanning eleven centuries, it seeks to contribute both to the development of the discipline of feminist legal history as well as societal understandings of the contribution women have made to public life and, more specifically, their involvement in the production of law, law reform and justice.

Book Review: Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective

Holland, J., Ramazanoglu, C., Sharpe, S. and Thomson, R. (1998) The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power. London: Tufnell Press. Jackson, B. and Marsden, D. (1966) Education and the Working Class. London: Pelican. Lawler, S. (2000) Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects. London: Routledge. Reay, D. (2004) ‘Cultural Capitalists and Academic Habitus: Classed and Gendered Labour in UK Higher Education’, Women’s Studies International Forum 27(1): 31–9. Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, B. (2004) Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge.

Feminist approaches to sexuality and law scholarship

Sexuality and Law scholarship is a new and developing field but, like most legal scholarship, it is dominated by masculine concerns and methodologies. This article explains why research that ignores feminist concerns and methodologies will be incomplete and inaccurate, and suggests questions that should be asked of resources to ensure a complete and accurate coverage of the topic. Rosemary Auchmuty is Professor of Law at the University of Reading. She writes on gender and sexuality issues, property law, legal history and girls’ fiction.

Researching Women in Legal History: the Case of Miss Bebb

The goal of this workshop was to think about how we write legal biography. Drawing on the research I undertook into the life of Gwyneth Bebb, who in 1913 challenged the Law Society of England and Wales for their refusal to admit women to the solicitors’ profession, I focused on the range of sources one might use to explore the lives of women in law, about whom there might be a few public records but little else, and on the ways in which sources, even official ones, might be imaginatively used. I was keen to indicate the significance of asking questions that mattered, not simply to in order to re-create a life, but to demonstrate its full significance. My argument was not just that these sources and techniques are useful for adding colour and context to otherwise bare accounts but that they are necessary, because a focus on public achievements will miss significant aspects of a woman’s life – even, perhaps, its very essence.