Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979)
“Prohibiting sexual harassment as sex discrimination implicitly defines what has been considered private and personal as another dimension of the public order. Of women by men, it suggests a relationship between individual sexual relations and the edifice of unequal gender status as a whole. If women’s sexuality is a means by which her access to economic rewards is controlled, relations between the sexes in the process of production affect women’s position throughout the society, just as women’s position throughout the society makes her sexuality economically controllable. It also suggests that what has been considered among the most “natural” and “normal” of male urges may, in some forms, be sufficiently culturally contingent as well as onerous to give rise to discrimination against women. Boundaries between personal life and work life, the natural and the cultural, are thereby interpenetrated and confounded in the same way that they have become inseparable in women’s oppression. Implicit here is whether sexuality is, in itself, a source, form, and sphere of social inequality or whether it is merely a sphere onto which other forms of unequal power—for example, physical force or economic clout—are displaced and imposed, a ground on which other battles (including those of gender) are fought. Behind the doctrinal arguments, conceiving of sexual harassment as unequal treatment based on sex raises fundamental questions of the definitions of, and the relations between, gender, sexuality, and power.”
Feminism Unmodified (1987)
"Women have been deprived not only of terms of our own in which to express our lives, but of lives of our own to live. The damage of sexism would be trivial if this were not the case. A feminism that seeks to understand women's situation in order to change it must therefore identify, criticize, and move those forms and forces that have circumscribed women in the world and in the mind. Law, like pornography, inhabits both. To remake society so that women can live here requires a feminism unqualified by preexisting modifiers. Obviously this has not been done, or things would not be as they are. Qualifying feminism by socialism or liberalism, while descriptively accurate to socialist feminism and liberal feminism, signals the limitation of feminism to that province of liberalism where we reason together about women's issues, to that moment on the left when we take up the woman question. Until these theories abandon their gender-neutral absolutes, such as difference and sexuality and speech and the state, they will not only attribute the products of very non-gender-neutral inequality, such as femininity and submission and silence and exclusion, to women as such, as if these are not imposed on us daily, but they will participate in reducing us to them."
Pornography and Civil Rights (with Andrea Dworkin, 1988)
"Because so much of women’s social inequality centers on forced sexual and reproductive compliance, the ways in which women are debased in rights and in personhood center on issues of bodily integrity, physical self-determination, and the social eradication of forced sex or sexual abuse. Systematic violations of women’s rights to safety, dignity, and civil equality take the form of rape, battery, incest, prostitution, sexualized torture, and sexualized murder, all of which are endemic in this society now. These are acts of sex-based hate directed against a population presumed to be inferior in human worth. These are means of keeping women subjugated as a group with a low civil status and a degraded quality of life
The second-class status of women is justified in the conviction that by nature women are sexually submissive, provoke and enjoy sexual aggression from men, and get sexual pleasure from pain. By nature women are servile and the servility itself is sexual. We are below men in a civil and sexual hierarchy that mimics the sex act. It is our sexual nature to want to be used, exploited, or forced. Sex equality is seen to violate the very natures of men and women, presuming a sameness where none exists; and violations of women are seen to be part of normal human nature, not the result of a coercive social system that devalues women.
Women need laws that address the ways in which women are kept second-class: the institutional sanctions for violence and violation, de jure and de facto; the patterns of exploitation and debasement; the systematic injuries to integrity, freedom, equality, and self-esteem."
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)
“Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed , embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality.
Feminism has a theory of power: sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualized. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality.”
Only Words (1993)
“In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. Sex between people and things, human beings and pieces of paper, real men and unreal women, will be a turn-off. Artifacts of these abuses will reside in a glass case next to the dinosaur skeletons in the Smithsonian. When this day comes, silence will be neither an act of power, as it is now for those who hide behind it, nor an experience of imposed powerlessness, as it is now for those who are submerged in it, but a context of repose into which thought can expand, an invitation that gives speech its shape, an opening to a new conversation.”
Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005)
"The cases of my women clients form the spine of this collection. Their lives, what I learned from them, grounded the theory and practice of these past three decades. From statutory law in the 1970s, to constitutional law in the 1980s, to international law in the 1990s and beyond, they were the close context of this work.
Urgency to respond to the injuries in specific women's lives, no preconceived theories, propelled the arc traced here. Their needs and requests, over entrenched, well-funded, at times violent opposition, summoned the combative and contemplative, analytical and argumentative, embattled and elegiac voice you hear in these writings, most of which were spoken first. Looking back, it was the critical location of these women's experiences in fundamental divisions of social power that positioned them, hence out legal initiatives framed in those terms, on a leading edge of change in this period."
Are Women Human? (2006)
“Explaining battering is more controversial than documenting its existence. In the literature, battery of women is attributed to, among other things, alcohol, drugs, stress, underdevelopment, mental illness, and a cycle of violence. These explanations fail to explain why not all men who are so afflicted batter, and why some of those men who are not so afflicted — those developed, sober, sane men—do. Perhaps this is where stress comes in, but it would have to be the stress of privilege. Nothing explains, or attempts to explain, why women—who are poorer than men, lack development resources too, are more stressed, have been brutalized for generations, sometimes drink and take drugs to deal with it, and are often driven crazy by it—do not batter men more.
Consider that battering of women may be about sex in the combined sexual and gender senses: the power of men getting what they want and feel socially entitled to; the thrill of dominance that is both literal and ejaculatory; the desire for domination that is codified as masculine identity and experienced as affirmation and pleasure; violence as an act of power over another that is sexual dominance’s ultimate turn-on and final expression. This might make some sense of the way battering is romanticized, eroticized, exonerated, and encouraged, hence effectively permitted, in many of our cultures. It makes sense of the embedding in law of roles of masculinity and femininity, parallel to the dynamics of battering’s dominance and submission, action and passivity. It makes sense of the rhythms and cycles of battering, which track those of sadomasochism. It makes sense of the tacit and effective legal acceptability of battering, including murder, under rubrics of crimes of honor and passion, configured as expressions of the male role and the intensity of heterosexual love and the honor of the family.”
Butterfly Politics (2017)
"Law can change reality, in other words, not because of its place in a structure of force or even authority, or because it establishes precedents to be applied in future cases. Not because it is backed by the police power or fronted by legions of propagandists for the status quo. These features of law as much work to prevent reality from being changed. It can change reality because of the meaning with which people invest it, including those whom it has not represented. If people did not believe in it, did not believe it could be—against all odds, despite much experience—an instrument of remedy, of healing, of restoration of humanity, of empowerment—it would not work for change, or I suspect actually at all. Because and when they do, it can. This is why even a small percentage of women report their rapes to their legal system. It is why they feel vindicated when the law believes them and shattered when it doesn’t. This is not naïveté or trust or the illusion that one lives in a just world. It is a determination to stand and fight with an inkling that law can be a weapon in their hands, even if it has not been before, and an insistence that law represent them and people like them for a change, as it says it does."