The conventional idea is that feminist legal theory began in the 1970s, in the second-wave feminist movement. However, the foundations of feminist legal theory were first conceptualized much earlier, in 1848, and developed over the next century and a half through distinct periods of thought. That development began with the establishment of the core theoretical precepts of gender and equality grounded in the comprehensive philosophy of the nineteenth-century’s first women’s rights movement ignited at Seneca Falls. Feminist legal theory was popularized and advanced by the political activism of the women’s suffrage movement, even as suffragists limited the feminist consensus to one based on women’s maternalism. Progressive feminism then expanded the theoretical framework of feminist theory in the early twentieth century, encapsulating ideas of global peace, market work, and sex rights of birth control. In the modern era, legal feminists gravitated back to pragmatic and concrete ideas of formal equality and the associated legalisms of equal rights and equal protection. Yet through each of these periods, the two common imperatives were to place women at the center of analysis and to recognize law as a fundamental agent of change.
Los feminismos jurídicos en Argentina. Notas para pensar un campo emergente a partir de la década de 1990
