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What the law defines woman to be
As part of my research I am going over old law textbooks and dictionaries to see what definitions were given to specific terms over time under English law, with the primary intent of seeing how Woman and women’s rights changed semantically over time. Yes, much of the legal framework around women’s rights is documented, but most of this work was written by men or framed through the male gaze, so engaging with the primary sources matters. As a 2020s scholar it is easy for me to look back and see the world through my eyes, yet how the law defines womanhood during that period matters because it directly informs the feminism we use to explore womanhood today. Laws are not some natural phenomena which emerge over time to produce equity, nor are they stable and everlasting; laws are a mirror to the society as is, designed in the moment in the hope of building a better future, not a prison from which the future can ever escape. How the law defines a concept, an idea, is as important as the actual application of that law. Woman has always been something lesser, and how we got from married women being chattel to varying degrees of emancipation is vital in understanding how we move forward.
I write this as a British woman in 2020s England, a country where being a woman still means I earn less and have lower expectations than my male colleagues. To the north we have Iceland, a country where the…
