Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
Feminist legal theory has both embraced and rejected contract. While contract-based conceptual and doctrinal tools have improved women’s economic and social status, feminists also critique contract-based reforms for colluding with hierarchies of gender, race and class. This chapter charts influential work on both sides of the contract debate and identifies a third approach that sees contract as a mechanism for law to move away from a hierarchal regime by stopping at a contractual way station en route to a more equal system of public ordering. It concludes by identifying ways that feminist legal theorists have injected feminist insights into traditional contract law via doctrines such as good faith in employment contracts, debtor rights in lending relationships, and defenses including unconscionability and duress.
Publication Citation
The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Debora Brake, Martha Chamallas, and Verna Williams eds., 2022).
Disciplines
Contracts | Law | Law and Gender | Law and Society | Sexuality and the Law
Digital Commons Citation
Ertman, Martha M., "Contract's Influence on Feminism and Vice Versa" (2021). Faculty Scholarship. 1653.
https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/fac_pubs/1653
Included in
Contracts Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons
Comments
This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Debora Brake, Martha Chamallas and Verna Williams eds., 2022).