After reviewing the courses I listed over the past two weeks, one of the most memorable works I encountered is still Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for multiple reasons. The first was that I have loved the Brontë sisters’ works since I was around 12 years old and first read Jane Eyre but to realize in that course – ENG 216 Criminals, Idiots & Minors: Victorian Women and the Law – that I could read something that I love and make new connections to my passion surrounding the inequities of the law was monumental. I still remember the whiteboard from one of our class discussions on The Tenant where we analyzed and compared the two varying uses and meanings of the word justice and mercy in the novel versus in the accompanying case law. The structure of that course had four units – divorce & child custody, morality & disease, marriage & property, and education & the new woman – and a novel to accompany each, along with applicable statutes and case law for each legal idea. What I notice now about that specific unit of Anne Brontë and child custody and divorce is how many new connections I can make, drawing from my internship at the York County Judicial Center, where I worked with Judge Duddy, whose specialty is family law and child custody. Witnessing the array of parents who are under horrible cycles of abuse and then thinking back to the time when those rights were not afforded to women, I still find something so powerful in appreciating that when the law failed real women like Brontë’s fictional Helen, the novel, literature, and reading set forth a societal shift in laws surrounding child custody and divorce. 

As I’m thinking about questions I still have from courses I would probably look into HIS 276 Women in the Ancient World which was a Human Traditions course – it was the first course in my undergraduate years that I loved and felt so curious about all the avenues it brought up. One string I would love to follow up on was the discussions about the Code of Hammurabi and the significance of it being the first instance of a legalized patriarchal system that literally states women do not deserve to have equality among men and fast forward to the conversations surrounding our patriarchal legal system. That lineage from 1754 BCE to today in 2024 CE is just astounding. I would have loved to have been able to dig deeper into that origin and compare other legal texts, traditions and cultures after this and be able to make an argument on how precedent can act as a dangerous retrograde absorption of the historical subjection of women as far back as this first piece of legitimate law. 

Looking into what sample of work I am most proud of I think I would select an essay that I spent a lot of time thinking about and in part informed some of the work I want to do with my Honors Project for English. For PSC 450 we had to write a paper that took two theorists and raised some interesting similarities, differences, intersections, etc. and come up with a question that frames the argument. For this paper titled, Force v. Magic: The Alluring Magic of Dinnerstein and Ultimate Efficacy of Mackinnon, my question of which theorists offered the most efficacious plan to act upon their ideas and I argued that “The feminist legal state – while not magical – is practical and is willing to harness our society’s ability to enforce development through our political institutions.” Looking back a little less than a year later at this work I wonder what else I might be able to do if I wasn’t limited to also including Dinnerstein’s theories and how I could instead incorporate something like the origins of the patriarchal system (drawing here from HIS 276) and raise another level of MacKinnons solution because just as we blindly followed a patriarchal system from 1754 BCE, why can we not at least dare to legitimately envision a legal system that strives for the opposite? Below is an excerpt from my paper: 

In order to set forth the path to a feminist state, MacKinnon argues that sexuality is various levels of force perpetrated upon women; that force thus translates into our legal framework. For instance, she asserts that “male dominance is sexual”(MacKinnon, 1989, p. 127) and that “allowed/not allowed becomes the ideological axis in which sexuality is experienced when and because sex – gender and sexuality – is about power”(MacKinnon, 1989, p. 133). Logically, the method she then lays out must look to the institutions and powers that allow this rhetoric to remain the status quo and fix them. Regardless of what originated these behaviors, her ultimate concern is their disastrous effects on the immediate behaviors of adult society. 

MacKinnon’s second variable looks at how the law affects women and the current status of the state. More specifically, our ideals of the “liberal” or “neutral” state that presents itself under the assumption of equality. In the same clear and rational argument surrounding sexuality’s inherent masculine domination as accepted within society, she can add that of the law’s inherent masculine domination. For instance, “…the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women”(McKinnon, 1989, pp. 161-2); therefore, we must recognize that “Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimized, and epistemic, it is the regime”(McKinnon, 1989, p. 170). Sexual harassment was once seen as lawful until MacKinnon proved it otherwise. Likewise, the state does not yet recognize that its neutrality is based on the assumption that the conditions of men are the neutral standard. Misguidedly, this assumes those conditions must apply to women and undermines the very real inequalities women face in society. 

As MacKinnon moves into the solution found in a feminist state, she confirms my central contention in Dinnerstein’s solution that “Equality will require change, not reflection” ”(MacKinnon, 1989, p. 249). When the magical shift in childcare versus a systemic legal change comes face to face, MacKinnon’s path of practical and enforceable structures can have immediate and sweeping results. Employing the already revered structure of our legal system, she can envision transforming the legal reality that has been forced upon women by masculine viewpoints. Consistent with the feminist state’s theme of efficacy and precision, MacKinnon foresees that “Where mainstream equality law is abstract, this approach is concrete; where mainstream equality law is falsely universal, this approach remains specific”(MacKinnon, 1989, p. 242).

Especially compelling in turning to the same legal structures that have hindered women’s equality is this reversal of the damaging view that “…gives women legally no more than they already have in society”(MacKinnon, 1989, p. 234). From an efficacy mindset, these methods have been done before with legal instances of racial inequality, as she points out, and provide the opportunity for specific solutions that move past the strictly hypothetical. For example, the feminist state could target: unequal pay, reproductive control, consent in rape law, pornography, and child custody. As the feminist state remains specific to areas of women’s reality, it does not need to rely on our dependent infantile origins to enact lasting change. Rather, harnessing the institutions that force women’s compliance can now create “…a new jurisprudence, a new relation between life and law”(MacKinnon, 1989, p. 249).

A sample of a work that I think I would do differently would be the book jacket assignment that I did in ENG 200 on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (https://eohara.uneportfolio.org/2023/11/29/young-goodman-brown-by-nathaniel-hawthorne-book-jacket/ & https://eohara.uneportfolio.org/2023/11/20/designers-statement/) and instead look into the compelling differences between the two versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. I remember that I had wanted to do that piece for the project but it was nearing the end of the semester and we hadn’t covered the speech in class yet and the due date was approaching. While I did really enjoy the work I did with Hawthrone I feel I would have been able to make a statement I felt more connected to if I had done a little more work with the speech before class and given myself the time to work on the project before we covered it later in class.