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“Prohibiting sexual harassment as sex discrimination implicitly defines what has been considered private and personal as another dimension of the public order. Of women by men, it suggests a relationship between individual sexual relations and the edifice of unequal gender status as a whole. If women’s sexuality is a means by which her access to economic rewards is controlled, relations between the sexes in the process of production affect women’s position throughout the society, just as women’s position throughout the society makes her sexuality economically controllable. It also suggests that what has been considered among the most “natural” and “normal” of male urges may, in some forms, be sufficiently culturally contingent as well as onerous to give rise to discrimination against women. Boundaries between personal life and work life, the natural and the cultural, are thereby interpenetrated and confounded in the same way that they have become inseparable in women’s oppression. Implicit here is whether sexuality is, in itself, a source, form, and sphere of social inequality or whether it is merely a sphere onto which other forms of unequal power—for example, physical force or economic clout—are displaced and imposed, a ground on which other battles (including those of gender) are fought. Behind the doctrinal arguments, conceiving of sexual harassment as unequal treatment based on sex raises fundamental questions of the definitions of, and the relations between, gender, sexuality, and power.”

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"What is the difference between the women’s movement we had and the one we have now, if it can be called a movement? I think the difference is liberalism. Where feminism was collective, liberalism is individualistic. We have been reduced to that. Where feminism is socially based and critical, liberalism is naturalistic, attributing the product of women’s oppression to women’s natural sexuality, making it “ours.” Where feminism criticizes the ways in which women have been socially determined in an attempt to change that determination, liberalism is voluntaristic, meaning it acts like we have choices that we do not have. Where feminism is based on material reality, liberalism is based on some ideal realm in the head. And where feminism is relentlessly political, about power and powerlessness, the best that can be mustered by this nouveau movement is a watered-down form of moralism: this is good, this is bad, no analysis of power or powerlessness at all."

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"Women have been deprived not only of terms of our own in which to express our lives, but of lives of our own to live. The damage of sexism would be trivial if this were not the case. A feminism that seeks to understand women's situation in order to change it must therefore identify, criticize, and move those forms and forces that have circumscribed women in the world and in the mind. Law, like pornography, inhabits both. To remake society so that women can live here requires a feminism unqualified by preexisting modifiers. Obviously this has not been done, or things would not be as they are. Qualifying feminism by socialism or liberalism, while descriptively accurate to socialist feminism and liberal feminism, signals the limitation of feminism to that province of liberalism where we reason together about women's issues, to that moment on the left when we take up the woman question. Until these theories abandon their gender-neutral absolutes, such as difference and sexuality and speech and the state, they will not only attribute the products of very non-gender-neutral inequality, such as femininity and submission and silence and exclusion, to women as such, as if these are not imposed on us daily, but they will participate in reducing us to them."

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"Women were granted the abortion right as a private privilege, not as a public right. Women got control over reproduction which is controlled by "a man or The Man,' an individual man or the doctors or the government. Abortion was not so much decriminalized as it was legalized. In Roe v. Wade, the government set the stage for the conditions under which women got this right. Most of the control that women won out of legalization has gone directly into the hands of men—husbands, doctors, or fathers—and what remains in women's hands is now subject to attempted reclamation through regulation. This, surely, must be what is meant by reform.

To fail to recognize the meaning of the private in the ideology and reality of women's subordination by seeking protection behind a right to that privacy is to cut women off from collective verification and state support in the same act. When women are segregated in private, separated from each other one at a time, a right to that privacy isolates women at once from each other and from public recourse. This right to privacy is a right of men "to be let alone" to oppress women one at a time. It embodies and reflects the private sphere's existing definition of womanhood. This instance of liberalism—applied to women as if they were persons, gender neutral—reinforces the division between public and private which is not gender neutral. It is an ideological division that lies about women's shared experience and mystifies the unity among the spheres of women's violation. It polices the division between public and private, a very material division that keeps the private beyond public redress and depoliticizes women's subjection within it. Privacy law keeps some men out of the bedrooms of other men."

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"Because so much of women’s social inequality centers on forced sexual and reproductive compliance, the ways in which women are debased in rights and in personhood center on issues of bodily integrity, physical self-determination, and the social eradication of forced sex or sexual abuse. Systematic violations of women’s rights to safety, dignity, and civil equality take the form of rape, battery, incest, prostitution, sexualized torture, and sexualized murder, all of which are endemic in this society now. These are acts of sex-based hate directed against a population presumed to be inferior in human worth. These are means of keeping women subjugated as a group with a low civil status and a degraded quality of life

The second-class status of women is justified in the conviction that by nature women are sexually submissive, provoke and enjoy sexual aggression from men, and get sexual pleasure from pain. By nature women are servile and the servility itself is sexual. We are below men in a civil and sexual hierarchy that mimics the sex act. It is our sexual nature to want to be used, exploited, or forced. Sex equality is seen to violate the very natures of men and women, presuming a sameness where none exists; and violations of women are seen to be part of normal human nature, not the result of a coercive social system that devalues women.

Women need laws that address the ways in which women are kept second-class: the institutional sanctions for violence and violation, de jure and de facto; the patterns of exploitation and debasement; the systematic injuries to integrity, freedom, equality, and self-esteem."

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“Yes, society is largely made of peoples’ consciousness of social relations. That doesn’t mean that everyone’s consciousness constitutes social reality equally. As long as social reality is a product of inequality, and postmodernists refuse to contend with social inequality methodologically, postmodernism will go on adopting the methodological position of male power, and the politics of the women’s movement of the 1970s will be dead, in theory. Meantime, women in the world will go on fighting to change the unequal social realities of women’s lives as if postmodernism did not exist.”

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“Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed , embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality.

Feminism has a theory of power: sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualized. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality.” 

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“To promote equality, the violators have to be closed down and the world has to be opened up to the violated. This is what they are asking for. They are under no illusion that prostitution is a job. If the lines between sex and labor can be indistinct, it is not because being sexually violated is work, but because a lot of forced labor also includes sexual exploitation, and many who are trafficked for labor end up in the sex industry. Not one prostituted woman I have ever met wants her children to have that life. What does that say except that prostitution chose her? What she wants, as several put it to me, is “away from this place,” and it is not migration she is imagining. Of labor trafficking, I have never heard anyone say that this, regrettably, is the best job these people are ever going to get, so leave them there. Yet, a recent research report to the South African Law Reform Commission characterized prostitution as “a viable alternative for women coping with poverty, unemployment, failed marriages and family obligations, especially where social welfare programmes are limited.” The conditions mentioned, along with the nasty low-paid jobs in which women predominate, hardly justify the sex industry. They do show how women with no real options in a sex-discriminatory economic setting where they have no human rights are pushed into a shortened desperate life of sexual abuse—to the tune of resigned sighs by some who think and write for a living. Even if other people cannot, prostituted women can imagine a world in which their options are not limited to domestic work versus lap dancing. Some who have the choices women in prostitution are denied cannot seem to envision prostituted women’s lives outside prostitution. The women themselves have no such trouble. They see real work, real love, dignity, and hope.” 

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“In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. Sex between people and things, human beings and pieces of paper, real men and unreal women, will be a turn-off. Artifacts of these abuses will reside in a glass case next to the dinosaur skeletons in the Smithsonian. When this day comes, silence will be neither an act of power, as it is now for those who hide behind it, nor an experience of imposed powerlessness, as it is now for those who are submerged in it, but a context of repose into which thought can expand, an invitation that gives speech its shape, an opening to a new conversation.” 

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“Intersectionality, in other words, is animated by a method in the sense of an operative approach to law, society, and their symbiotic relation, by a distinctive way into reality that captures not just the static outcomes of the problem it brings into view but its dynamics and lines of force as well. It is this that makes it transformative. Moved by the energy of the synergistic interaction of the variables whose relations it exposes, intersectionality pursues an analysis that “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism”.”

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"The cases of my women clients form the spine of this collection. Their lives, what I learned from them, grounded the theory and practice of these past three decades. From statutory law in the 1970s, to constitutional law in the 1980s, to international law in the 1990s and beyond, they were the close context of this work.

Urgency to respond to the injuries in specific women's lives, no preconceived theories, propelled the arc traced here. Their needs and requests, over entrenched, well-funded, at times violent opposition, summoned the combative and contemplative, analytical and argumentative, embattled and elegiac voice you hear in these writings, most of which were spoken first. Looking back, it was the critical location of these women's experiences in fundamental divisions of social power that positioned them, hence out legal initiatives framed in those terms, on a leading edge of change in this period."

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“The presence of consent does not make an interaction equal. It makes it tolerated, or the less costly of alternatives out of the control or beyond the construction of the one who consents. Intrinsic to consent is the actor and the acted-upon, with no guarantee of any kind of equality between them, whether of circumstance or condition or interaction, or typically even any interest in inquiring into whether such equality is present or meaningful, at least in the major definition of the most serious crime. Put another way, the concept is inherently an unequal one, simultaneously silently presupposing that the parties to it are equals whether they are or not. It tacitly relies on a notion of the freedom of the acted-upon, on the meaningfulness of the “voluntary” balancing the initiative of “the other,” under what are, in sex, typically invisible background, sometimes foreground, conditions of sex (meaning gender) inequality. It is as if one can be free without being equal— a proposition never explained or even seen as in need of explanation.”

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“Explaining battering is more controversial than documenting its existence. In the literature, battery of women is attributed to, among other things, alcohol, drugs, stress, underdevelopment, mental illness, and a cycle of violence. These explanations fail to explain why not all men who are so afflicted batter, and why some of those men who are not so afflicted — those developed, sober, sane men—do. Perhaps this is where stress comes in, but it would have to be the stress of privilege. Nothing explains, or attempts to explain, why women—who are poorer than men, lack development resources too, are more stressed, have been brutalized for generations, sometimes drink and take drugs to deal with it, and are often driven crazy by it—do not batter men more.

Consider that battering of women may be about sex in the combined sexual and gender senses: the power of men getting what they want and feel socially entitled to; the thrill of dominance that is both literal and ejaculatory; the desire for domination that is codified as masculine identity and experienced as affirmation and pleasure; violence as an act of power over another that is sexual dominance’s ultimate turn-on and final expression. This might make some sense of the way battering is romanticized, eroticized, exonerated, and encouraged, hence effectively permitted, in many of our cultures. It makes sense of the embedding in law of roles of masculinity and femininity, parallel to the dynamics of battering’s dominance and submission, action and passivity. It makes sense of the rhythms and cycles of battering, which track those of sadomasochism. It makes sense of the tacit and effective legal acceptability of battering, including murder, under rubrics of crimes of honor and passion, configured as expressions of the male role and the intensity of heterosexual love and the honor of the family.” 

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"A new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis aims to rectify the founding U.S. treatment of race and sex and additional hierarchical social inequalities. Historical and doctrinal context and critique show why this step is urgently needed. A draft of the amendment is offered."

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"Law can change reality, in other words, not because of its place in a structure of force or even authority, or because it establishes precedents to be applied in future cases. Not because it is backed by the police power or fronted by legions of propagandists for the status quo. These features of law as much work to prevent reality from being changed. It can change reality because of the meaning with which people invest it, including those whom it has not represented. If people did not believe in it, did not believe it could be—against all odds, despite much experience—an instrument of remedy, of healing, of restoration of humanity, of empowerment—it would not work for change, or I suspect actually at all. Because and when they do, it can. This is why even a small percentage of women report their rapes to their legal system. It is why they feel vindicated when the law believes them and shattered when it doesn’t. This is not naïveté or trust or the illusion that one lives in a just world. It is a determination to stand and fight with an inkling that law can be a weapon in their hands, even if it has not been before, and an insistence that law represent them and people like them for a change, as it says it does."

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"This Article traces how and why the First Amendment has gone from a shield of the powerless to a sword of the powerful in the past hundred years. The central doctrinal role of “content neutrality” and “viewpoint neutrality” in this development is analyzed; the crucial tipping points of anti-Semitism, in Collin v. Smith, and pornography, in Hudnut v. American Booksellers, are identified. The potential for substantive equality to promote freedom of speech is glimpsed."

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"Feminism [...] is a political movement. If some imagine a movement for female body parts, the rest of us are part of some other movement, one to end the subordination of women in all our diversity. In other words, what women “are” does not necessarily define the woman question: our inequality, our resulting oppression. Those of us who do not take our politics from the dictionary want to know: Why are women unequal to men? What keeps women second-class citizens? How are women distinctively subordinated? The important question for a political movement for the liberation of women is thus not what a woman is, I think, but what accounts for the oppression of women: who is oppressed as a woman, in the way women are distinctively oppressed?"

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