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Legal womanhood
Proving one’s self to the world comes in many forms through legal instruments and self-expression, all of which are socially constructed based on a normative understanding of what ought to be the standard of a given period in history. It is hard to appreciate just how much we socially construct the world around us, that all the assumptions we have about the world are curated by many overlapping influences. Post-modernism has been attacked for pointing this out, especially for highlighting that there is no one absolute natural law from which we can definitively construct the world. When it comes to the legal framing of womanhood it is vital we remember this.
Natural law concepts root their framing of the world in the notion that there is a base law from which we can establish a utopia, and that once we find it we will have a more perfect union. I disagree with that, indeed as an intersectional feminist I argue it is both deeply reductive and reactionary to seek to impose one unilateral conception of womanhood. There is not a singular biological or social conception of womanhood that overlocks all women, and to legally mandate it excludes every woman who is not deemed woman enough.
For those who argue that womanhood is rooted in the biological differences between women and men such as maternity and pregnancy they must square the fact that not every woman can get pregnant, not every woman can…
