Has Liberalism Failed Women? Assuring Equal Representation in Europe and the U.S.; Debating Women's Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective by Ute Gerhard

Despite great variation in execution (for instance, the British investment in gender parity encompasses only the Labour Party's adoption of a women's shortlist for parliamentary candidates, whereas in Germany, parity entails supplementary constitutional guarantees to "promote the realization" of women's rights), all of the parity experiments presume that the absence of women in governing bodies is a democratic deficit warranting affirmative action (8). They share three additional premises: 1) the state is gendered in ways that disadvantage women, 2) sex is a separable and unique identity, and 3) sex already exists as a juridic category. (Here the lack of an equal rights amendment for women in the United States is a crucial difference.) Simply put, political parity presumes that gendered bodies matter. Women's difference is left untheorized. Implementation relies on gender (or sex) solely as a descriptive identity. "Parity in representation," as the French parité activist and contributor Françoise Gaspard puts it, "is quite simply an application of the principle of equality among the people who make up the human race" (175). [Gerhard]'s study moves in several directions. She begins by exploring the historical foundations of contemporary understandings of equality. The review of thinkers such as Rousseau, Fitche, and Kant provides a good contrast to her presentation of Olympe deGourges's 1791 "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen," although the male bias in these works is fairly well-charted territory. In deGourges's subtle but significant revisions, Gerhard unearths a manifesto asserting women's difference while simultaneously demanding their equality. However, Gerhard finds her most important precursors in the arguments of radical women's rights activists from Germany's first women's movement. Her investigation encompasses both struggles against women's exclusion from public rights, such as suffrage, as well as efforts to expose injustices allowed by private law, for example through the legal doctrine of gender tutelage.