Breaking Women's Silence in Law: The Dilemma of the Gendered Nature of Legal Reasoning

Such is the dilemma of the woman speaker. That the categories of patriarchal language distort what she might like to say is no longer in question. Whether she is a literary critic or theorist, poet, linguist, philosopher, sociologist, or natural scientist [or lawyer], the formalities of her discipline, the syntax of its proper practice, the canons of its acceptable style have been exposed as carrying the sexist reasoning it is her task to replace .... Once conceptualized in traditional categories, feminist protest may already have capitulated to the political order reflected in disciplinary structures. Concepts such as "utility" and "rights" . . . may not be usable by feminists when it is understood that such terms belong, and have their meaning, within a bourgeois society founded on a view of "man" and "man's place" which is unacceptable. I Law reaches every silent space. It invades the secrecy of women's wombs. It breaks every silence, uttering itself. Law-language, jurisdiction. It defines. It commands. It forces. 2 The starting point of feminist work must be found in women's lives and not in legal definitions. 3