Guest Blogger: Rebecca Wright

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Rebecca Wright (right) as today's guest blogger.
Rebecca is the Legal Advisor for the North African Litigation Initiative (NALI) at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). NALI aims to raise awareness of the African human rights system in six target countries: Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. It assists human rights defenders from these countries to bring cases before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights by holding training workshops and hosting potential litigants at the Ordinary Sessions of the Commission. In her guest post below, Rebecca discusses this work and further describes a recent human rights defenders workshop that NALI hosted in Tunisia.
Rebecca joined EIPR in 2007 after receiving a Harvard Law School Heningson Fellowship. She worked in Egypt for a year before traveling to Afghanistan to conduct research on the cost of conflict for civilians for CIVIC, a Washington, D.C.-based nongovernmental organization. She returned to Afghanistan on two other occasions to work for the Afghan NGO Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium on workers’ rights, provincial governance, and women’s leadership. After also working in Qatar and Lebanon, Rebecca returned to EIPR in April 2010 in order to help establish NALI.
Rebecca earned her J.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation analysed the concept of female heroism in the autobiographies of British suffragists, and today she honors one of those women:

I would like my transnational foremother to be Sylvia Pankhurst [left]. I wrote one of the chapters of my PhD on her. She and the other suffragettes I studied inspired me to become a woman of action and to pursue causes that are just, including those outside the UK.

Pankhurst (1882-1960) joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers -- including her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst (prior posts) -- in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

On March 24

On this day in ...
... 1921 (90 years ago today), Mary Ellen Spear Smith (right), an English-born onetime schoolteacher who'd immigrated to Canada 30 years earlier, was sworn in as Minister without Portfolio in the government of British Columbia. She thus became the 1st woman cabinet minister in the British Empire. Three years earlier, Smith had become the 1st woman Member of the Legislative Assembly by winning a by-election to replace her husband, who'd been Finance Minister in the Liberal government. (photo credit) A suffrage leader and executive in the Canadian Red Cross, she'd run on the slogan "Women and children first." Spear Smith was re-elected in 1920 and again in 1924, was a proponent of first Mothers' Pensions and Female Minimum Wage Acts, and became the 1st woman Speaker in the British Empire. In 1929, she served as Canada's delegate to an International Labour Organization conference in Geneva. She served as President of the Liberal Party of British Columbia until she died in 1933.

(Prior March 24 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On March 23

On this day in ...
... 1910, according to Spanish WikiPedia (my very loose translation), feminists in the Canary Islands announced they were running for public office. Although they knew there was no hope that they would be elected, they did so as an act in denunciation of the exclusion of women from the political sphere in the islands, an archipelago (in red on map) off the coast of Africa and held to this day by Spain.

(Prior March 23 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On March 18

On this day in ...
... 1890, Kate Kennedy (left), a pioneer Californian, died in Oakland. (photo credit) Born in Gaskinstown, County Meath, Ireland in 1827, she'd arrived in San Francisco in 1856. Largely self-educated, she worked for 3 decades as a public-schools teacher and principal, becoming, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, "a distinguished educator ... of national repute." The Board of Education nonetheless demoted her; she objected, eventually winning $5,000 in back pay. She was a suffragist, labor activist, and "ardent feminist" who fought successfully for equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation.

(Prior March 18 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On March 8

On this day in ...
... 1884, Susan B. Anthony testified before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives in support of a constitutional amendment that would extend the right to vote to women. She began:

We appear before you this morning…to ask that you will, at your earliest convenience, report to the House in favor of the submission of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Legislatures of the several States, that shall prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.

As detailed in posts available here, such an amendment -- the 19th -- would not be ratified until 1920. (credit for photo of Anthony, an IntLawGrrls foremother, circa 1880-1906) Food for thought this 100th anniversary International Women's Day.

(Prior March 8 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Sue Westwood

It is IntLawGrrls great pleasure to welcome Dr. Sue Westwood (pictured left) as today's guest blogger. Sue is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Law, Keele University, England, where she also teaches tort law to undergraduates. She has a prior career in health and social care provision, with associated academic and professional qualifications, and has recently re-trained in both gerontology and law. Sue is also a freelance equality and diversity researcher and trainer, specialising in the needs and rights of older people with minority identities.
Sue’s doctoral thesis is on aging lesbian, gay and bisexual identities and experiences of harassment in housing, health and social care provision for older people, within the context of new UK anti-discrimination legislation which has specific exclusions from protection from harassment on the grounds of sexual orientation. Sue's guest post below discusses the very well-received talk she gave at the Aging As A Feminist Concern conference last month at Emory Law School, about which IntLawGrrl Naomi Cahn posted here.
Sue has selected Emmeline Pankhurst (pictured below right) as her transnational foremother. Born in 1858, Pankhurst was the leader of the UK suffrage movement. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts.) After initially pursuing political lobbying to get women the vote without success, she later advocated more militant activism, particularly after her husband died. Her militant attitude caused a split with other women activists, including her daughters, and Emmeline went on to form the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).
The suffragists in the WSPU chained themselves to railings, smashed windows and committed acts of arson to call attention to their campaign for women to be given the vote. Many, including Emmeline herself, were imprisoned, and then went on hunger strike. The women were subjected to brutal force-feeding on a routine basis, and Emmeline said she would never forget the sound of the women’s screams from her times in prison. Many of the women, including Emmeline, had long-term health problems associated with both the self-starvation and forced-feeding.
Emmeline was a controversial figure. She became involved in Conservative politics in later life, saying her life experiences had caused her to revise her political stance, although she always remained deeply committed to equality between men and women. In 1918 some women over 30 were given the vote in the UK, but it was not until 1928, the same year that Emmeline died, that all women were given the same right to vote as men in the UK. In Sue's words:

Emmeline was a major driving force in women first getting the vote in the UK.

Today Pankhurst joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers in the list at right just below our "visiting from..." map.
Heartfelt welcome!

On February 11

On this day in ...
... 1802, Lydia Maria Child (right) was born in Medford, Massachusetts. Raised in an educated family, she'd published 2 novels and founded annual publication, Juvenile Miscellany, by age 25. Married a year later, she and her husband became active in the slavery abolition cause; she "startled conventional circles with her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833)," and later became the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. She was a vocal opponent of capital punishment. A women's rights activist as well, another notable publication of hers was History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835). Child "also helped Harriet Jacobs publish her compelling autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)." Child died in 1880. (photo credit) Perhaps the creation of hers that's best known today is the Thanksgiving ditty, "Over the River and through the Woods."

(Prior February 11 posts are here, here, and here.)

How 'bout a women's legal history trial?

A prince is about to stand trial for murder.

He's Hamlet, fatal assailant of the meddlesome man destined (if Ophelia had her way) to become his father-in-law.

At issue: given the welter of woe in which Shakespeare situated the troubled Dane, is the prince mentally competent to face judgment?

"The Trial of Hamlet" will take place January 31 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (here for tickets & image credit) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who created the play, will preside. A jury including celebs like Helen Hunt will decide.

Karen Wada of the Los Angeles Times properly places the staging in a Court tradition, writing that "[i]n 1987, for instance, three high court jurists heard arguments over who really wrote Shakespeare's plays." (On continuing high court furor over the question, see this article by Jess Bravin.)

Blog readers no doubt also are familiar with the many trials of this sort staged by the American Bar Association.

So here's a thought:

How 'bout retrying some signature event of women's legal history? (And see here and here.)

Jumping to mind are 2, both involving IntLawGrrls foremothers:

► The 1873 conviction of Susan B. Anthony (by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice) for the offense of illegal voting.

► Any number of 1917 jailings -- at times brutal -- of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns (left), and their National Woman's Party colleagues for the "direct action campaign" against U.S. entry into World War I. As IntLawGrrls alumna Catherine Lanctot has posted, they took that campaign to "the very doorstep of the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson."

Additional nominations welcome.

Florence Kelley and the Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism

(Many thanks to IntLawGrrls for allowing me to guest post and stretch my cyberspace abilities.)

About two years ago, I was asked to contribute an essay to a book in honor of Harvard legal historian Morton Horwitz. Long ago, I had been a student of Morty’s, and his scholarship has influenced me enormously. I am always, however, struck by the absence of women as historical actors in his works, and I wanted to use my essay to demonstrate the crucial importance of women legal progressives to sociological jurisprudence, legal progressivism, and constitutional change.
I chose Florence Kelley (right) to begin this project, in part because of the rich scholarship which already existed on this social reformer and lawyer. (photo credit) As my work on Kelley continued, I became more and more convinced that women social reformers were very much part of the story of legal progressivism and constitutional change. Moreover, some women deemed social workers or social reformers were actually functioning as astute legal actors and, at times, as lawyers. Below is an excerpt from my Florence Kelley essay, available in full here. I am currently working on writing Sophonisba Breckinridge (prior IntLawGrrls posts) into this story.
We all know the story of the demise of substantive due process in the 1930s. Our story usually features heroes such as Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter and the great male legal progressives of the day who rose up from academia, the bench, and the bar, to put an end to what historians label “legal orthodoxy.” In this essay, I demonstrate that Florence Kelley was a crucially important legal progressive who was at the front lines of drafting and defending new legislation that courts were striking down as violating the Fourteenth Amendment and state constitutions.
Looking at who was drafting and lobbying for pathbreaking progressive legislation and how such legislation was being defended accomplishes a number of things. It uncovers how male legal actors at times worked closely and collaborated with women reformers. Furthermore, thinking about women reformers as central legal actors demands that we examine our own categorical thinking. Placing progressive-era women reformers in a non-porous women’s sphere -- while imagining that elite male legal thinkers were sealed within an all-male world of academics, lawyers and jurists -- distorts late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal culture and leads to what we might call “intellectual segregation.” This essay is thus a work of bricolage that brings together the scholarship on women’s leading roles in progressive-era reform with mainstream narratives of legal history.
Situating Florence Kelley as a legal reformer further allows us to explore some of the significant differences between how men and women legal reformers approached the law:
► In part, male legal thinkers deeply struggled with questions involving legal rights, the common law, the role of judges, the redistribution of wealth, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the growth of an administrative state.
► Many women reformers did not have similar struggles and qualms. These women legal reformers had come to realize that custom, the common law, and courts had consistently thwarted women’s rights. Courts had: failed to grant women the right to vote; found that the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect women from discrimination; and often negated the Married Women’s Property Acts.
By the turn of the century, elite women reformers had few illusions about law.
Where men like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. posited that custom and the common law served as a buffer between the state and the individual, many women legal reformers understood that custom and the common law blocked women’s struggles, for rights and, more generally, for social reform. Having a stake in the system, many progressive male legal thinkers reached such critical assessments regarding courts, the Constitution, and the common law more slowly.
In contrast, Florence Kelley radically reinterpreted the Constitution as placing affirmative duties on the state. These duties required the state to provide for those material conditions which would foster true democracy. This radical vision, which Kelley had already set forth by 1905, is exceedingly modern; it defined the ways in which she would defend legislation from constitutional challenge and marry the philosophy of pragmatism, social science, on-the-ground reality, and law.
Recognizing and incorporating women as legal reformers allows us to reexamine, reinterpret, and expand traditional narratives of legal history.
For example, the sociological jurisprudence that Roscoe Pound called for was well under way in the work that women reformers and others were doing. By the late 1890s, Kelley had developed a methodology that united law and facts. We can see this in:
► Kelley's numerous efforts to draft and lobby for new laws that drastically expanded state power; and
► How Kelley connected such laws to on-the-ground facts.
From the mid-1890s on, she identified “liberty of contract” as an empty phrase for workers without bargaining power, and she sought to restructure a system of rights based upon the needs of a democratic industrial society. She further recognized that the key to legal reform was presenting facts of industrial life to judges.
In part, we might understand the work of Brandeis, Pound, and Frankfurter as bringing to the more conservative bar and legal academy the legal progressivism that already existed within more radical circles of legal reform, in which women comprised a significant component. Rutgers-Camden Law Professor N. E. H. Hull (above left) writes of Roscoe Pound (p. 75):

'As committed as he was to reform, it was a muted commitment, muted by his legalism, by his native caution, and by his ambition for a prize beyond the Midwest.'

Women legal progressives such as Kelley, who stood outside legal academia and who devoted their lives to legal reform, functioned without such constraints, for they were already outsiders.

(credits here and here for above Library of Congress photo, made in 1914 in New Orleans,"from the National Child Labor Committee's collection," of current and former "female factory inspectors ... employed by various states and cities"; left to right, "Miss Ella Haas, State Factory Inspector, Dayton, O."; "Miss Mary Malone, State Inspector Ten-Hour Law, Delaware"; "Mrs. Florence Kelley, Chief State Factory Inspector of Illinois, 1893-97"; "Miss Jean Gordon, Factories Inspector, Parish of New Orleans"; "Miss Madge Nave, Factory Inspector, Louisville, Kentucky"; and "Mrs. Martha D. Gould, Factories Inspector, Parish of New Orleans")

Guest Blogger: Yaël Ronen

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Yaël Ronen (left) as today's guest blogger.
Yaël is an Assistant Professor of Public International law at Sha’arei Mishpat College in Hod HaSharon, Israel. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2006, and the revised and updated version of her dissertation, Transition from Illegal Regimes under International Law, will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2011.
In a 2-part guest series that begins today, Yaël recaps the history of international negotiations over Iran's nuclear program (here), then evaluates proposals for reform of the treaty regime under which they've been conducted (here). Her analysis derives from her just-published book, The Iran Nuclear Issue.
Yaël 's areas of expertise also include statehood and territorial status, humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law. Topics of particular interest, as evident from Yaël's publication list, include the intersection between these areas of law, arising in issues such as whether the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over acts committed in the Gaza Strip.
Yaël was recently invited as an expert contributor to the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project at UCLA School of Law, Human Rights and International Criminal Law Online Forum.
Prior to embarking on an academic career, Yaël served in the Israeli foreign service, both as a lawyer, representing Israel in the United Nations' Sixth Committee and before various human rights treaty bodies, and as a political officer, including a 2-year post in New Delhi, India.
She's also the academic editor of the Israel Law Review, which focuses on scholarship in the fields of human rights, public law and international law and examines the application of legal norms under conditions of conflict and political uncertainty. She welcomes submissions!
She dedicates her contribution to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1812–1893). Of Garrett Anderson (below right), sister of Millicent Garrett Fawcett (prior IntLawGrrls post), Yaël writes:

She was the first woman to successfully complete the medical qualifying exams in Great Britain, the first woman physician in Great Britain, an advocate of women's suffrage and women's opportunities in higher education, and first woman mayor in England.
Garrett Anderson’s life is an inspiration not only because she repeatedly broke through gendered glass ceilings; but because she seemed to have managed to be not only ‘anything’, but ‘everything’: she was a professional, an activist, and a dedicated family-person. How did she do it all?

Garrett Anderson joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below the "visiting from..." map in our righthand column.
Heartfelt welcome!

On November 18

On this day in ....
... 1870 (140 years ago today), Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer was born near Woodstock, a small town northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. (photo credit) She grew up without much schooling, married at 18, and lost her husband when mental illness required his hospitalization. The stress led her to a "nervous collapse"; while recovering she began writing, and became a noted journalist of her time. She wrote: for the New Orleans Daily Picayune under the pseudonym Dorothy Dix, where she wrote about women's issues; for the New York Journal, where she covered Carrie Nation's temperance movement and became active in women's suffrage campaigns; and as a syndicated advice columnist based in New Orleans. She died in that city in 1951. Among her more notable quotes:

Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as much money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel.

(Prior November 18 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 23

On this day in ...
... 1915 (95 years ago), "armies of suffrage from all the five boroughs" marched down New York's 5th Avenue in support of granting U.S. women the right to vote. (photo credit) The tens of thousands of demonstrators at the hours-long parade, The New York Times reported, "included men and women of all ages, from veterans in their seventies to babies pushed along in gocarts." Another 8,000 women and men marched in Philadelphia. It would be another 5 years before the marchers' wishes were granted by dint of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

(Prior October 23 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 11

On this day in ...
... 1915 (95 years ago today), "the pioneer Woman Suffragist of the great Northwest," Abigail Scott Duniway (left) died in Oregon 80 years after her birth on a farm in central Illinois. Her family moved West when she was a teenager; her mother and a brother died on the wagon trail journey. (photo credit) She married; when her husband became disabled, she began supporting the family, 1st through schoolteaching, then as a storekeeper. Eventually she moved to Portland and founded a weekly newspaper devoted to women's rights. She also published books, and was a vice president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. In part because of her efforts, in 1912 Oregon became the 7th state in the Union to extend suffrage to women; she became the 1st to register to vote in her county.

(Prior October 11 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 6

On this day in ...
... 1921, International PEN was founded in London by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott (right), a writer of poems and novels who hailed from Cornwall in England, whom many sources call "Mrs. C.A. Dawson Scott," and who herself aspired in her Victorian era to be "'The Sappho of this age.'" Decades earlier Dawson Scott had hosted women's suffrage and women writers' events. Operating from its beginning as a "voice in opposing political censorship and speaking for writers harassed, imprisoned, sometimes murdered for the expression of their views," today International PEN, a nongovernmental organization, includes "144 Centres in 102 countries."

(Prior October 6 posts are here, here, and here.)

Look On! Suffragists

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

Just finished watching Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony. The several-years-old documentary is available on Netflix as well as in DVD.

It's worth watching, though best watched in several segments. By filmmaker Ken Burns, it 1st aired as a documentary series on PBS, which maintains an informational website. As is common in works of the kind, the repetition of static photos (necessary given how little motion picture footage there was back in the day), coupled with folksy-Americana music, can make one a bit drowsy at times.

But stick with it. The story's a good one -- one of which this 'Grrl knew precious little.

Told well are the life journeys of 2 very different persons, at one in their passion for changing the role of women in the United States:

► Elizabeth Cady Stanton (near right), a mother, wife, and writer, loved good food and took care to keep her hair curled.

► Susan B. Anthony (far right) was an austere, cerebral woman who never married.

They met in 1851 in Seneca Falls, New York, where 3 years earlier Stanton had convened the 1st-ever women's rights convention. From then on, the 2 (both IntLawGrrls foremothers) worked tirelessly together for women's rights -- especially, for the enfranchisement of women.

Particularly interesting in Not for Ourselves are the moments when that last, singular goal conflicted with others. The conflict saw the women, who'd been staunch activists on behalf of abolition, oppose post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments because they kept from women what they granted to former slaves. And as the goal of women's suffrage grew nearer, they distanced themselves from African American women in an effort to shore up support in the South. Conflict also arose between the 2 women themselves. The 1890s publication, by an ever-more-radical Stanton, of The Woman's Bible drew censure from the movement she'd started -- a movement that Anthony chose to continue to lead notwithstanding its ouster of her longtime friend and ally. As a result Anthony, alone, appears on the 1st U.S. coin depicting a woman.

Both women would pass away more than a decade before their work took form in the 19th Amendment. This film serves as a reminder of their legacy.

On August 18

On this day in ...
... 1920 (90 years ago today), in Nashville, a so-called War of the Roses came to an end; that is, ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was completed when the legislature of Tennessee ratified the national women's suffrage amendment. During "weeks of intense lobbying," advocates on either side had identified themselves by the wearing of roses: red for anti-suffrage, yellow for pro-suffrage. The measure passed by 1 vote. Among the yellow-rose wearers was Anne Dallas Dudley (left), aka Mrs. Guilford Dudley, Sr., a statewide leader in pro-suffrage groups.

(Prior August 18 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 3

On this day in ...
... 1860 (150 years ago today), a daughter was born to a couple in Hartford, Connecticut. The husband left when the girl was an infant, and she and her mother and brother, impoverished, often found themselves living with paternal aunts, among them the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. At 18 the girl, who'd received a combination of formal and self-education, enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. A few years later she married, gave birth to her only child, and suffered post-partum, an event that led to her writing of The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a short story constructed as journal entries by a "hysterical" woman locked away by her husband. The author later separated from and eventually divorced her husband. She remarried, to a 1st cousin, in 1900, and took the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (above left). (photo credit) An author, human rights advocate, social reformer, suffragist, and feminist, she died by suicide in 1935, a few years after learning she had terminal breast cancer.

(Prior July 3 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 14

On this day in ...
... 1920 (90 years ago today), Anna Maria Mozzoni (left) died in Rome, Italy, 83 years after her birth in Milan. Through formal and self-education, she studied the works of writers ranging from the ancient historian Plutarch to the 19th C. Frenchwoman whose novels appeared under the pseudonym George Sand. In 1864, Mozzoni herself published a feminist critique of Italian family law. In subsequent years she wrote or cowrote other works, submitted petitions for women's suffrage to her country's parliament, represented her country at international women's meetings, and founded a Milan-based women's organization, Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili. She's "known as the founder of the Women's movement in Italy."

(Prior June 14 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 12

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), began, in Toronto, Canada, the 1st-ever convention of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association. During the 2-day meeting, members of the association, whose forerunners included the Toronto Women's Literary Club founded in 1876, re-elected Dr. Emily Stowe (left), Canada's 1st woman physician, as President. Among those in attendance were suffragists like Susan B. Anthony (an IntLawGrrls foremother), Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, and Stowe's sister, Dr. Hannah Kimball.

(Prior June 12 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 4

On this day in ...
... 1917, the 1st Pulitzers were awarded, and the all-male board gave a prize to women won in 1 of the 4 categories. The winning book in the Biography or Autobiography category was Julia Ward Howe (1916), written by Laura E. Richards (left) (credit) and Maude Howe Elliott assisted by Florence Howe Hall. All 3 were daughters of the subject of the 2-volume work, the slavery abolitionist and women's suffragist at right (credit) who, as we've posted: in 1862, wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," an anthem that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said precipitated the Civil War, then 8 years later wrote an antiwar poem that launched Mother's Day. Ward Howe died at age 91 about 5 years before her daughters earned the prize.

(Prior June 4 posts are here, here, and here.)