CLP - The ‘Inconspicuous Impact’ of Feminist Pressure Through Law

Speaker: Dr Sharon Thompson (Cardiff University)

Chair: Prof Rosemary Auchmuty

Law reformers tend to be remembered as those responsible for transforming the law; but for their involvement, the law may not have changed as it has. As academic lawyers, we are trained to look for evidence of direct links between conduct and effect. But when this evidence is not apparent, we might discard as remote campaigns which were in fact very important. These campaigns may have been neither immediately nor directly successful, but had, what I have termed, ‘inconspicuous impact’.

Inconspicuous impact is an effect upon the law that did ultimately lead to change, but not in a linear or short-term fashion. The effect is inconspicuous because it relates to efforts to change the law that are not typically viewed or credited as having contributed to reform, perhaps because those efforts were initially or ostensibly unsuccessful. The inconspicuousness of impact is especially characteristic of feminist efforts to reform the law through legal channels since historically, feminists have struggled to gain a sympathetic ear among members of the executive or judiciary. This has often left feminist pressure groups outside of formal law-making processes, but they have nevertheless been lawmakers in an indirect sense.

This lecture is about why, and how, we should pay attention to the more subtle ways in which feminists have contributed to law’s development. Using examples from the attempts of one feminist pressure group to use law as a tool for change – the Married Women’s Association – I identify reasons why impact can be inconspicuous and why this should lead to revisionist accounts of legal change. Where the norm is for women’s impact upon law to be washed from gender neutral law reports, statutes and government reports, this over time builds into a cumulative tide, whereby feminist contributions are written out of legal history and replaced by dominant, androcentric narratives. Understanding and elevating the enduring importance of such contributions means ensuring that inconspicuous impact counts in our assessment of how law came to be as we know it. As this lecture will explore, this compels us to look in different places, to widen our intellectual bandwidth, and to rethink what constitutes law reform, and impact on law reform.

Dr Sharon Thompson is Professor in Law at Cardiff University. Her research specialises in adult relationships, with particular focus on power, inequality and the gender of money. She has published widely on family law and feminist legal history, including two monographs: Prenuptial Agreements and the Presumption of Free Choice (Bloomsbury 2015) and Quiet Revolutionaries (Bloomsbury 2022). Sharon is recipient of the SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Book Prize, the SLS Peter Birks Second Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, the Learned Society of Wales’s Dillwyn Medal for Humanities and the Creative Arts, and the Philip Leverhulme Prize.

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