Lisa R. Pruitt (University of California, Davis – School of Law) has posted Of Spaces and Spheres: What Critical Geography Can Teach Law about Rural Women on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Like other legal scholars, feminists often think about social change over time, using history as a lens to reveal disadvantage and injustice. They have demonstrated, for example, that the public/private divide and related separate spheres ideology are socially contingent developments based on evolving perceptions of women and gender roles. Shifts in such perceptions have thus informed legal changes, and vice versa.
This Article argues that a more grounded and more nuanced understanding of women’s lived realities requires legal scholars to engage not only history, but also geography. Because spatial aspects of women’s lives implicate inequality and moral agency, they have direct relevance to an array of legal issues. I thus deploy the tools of critical geographers – space, place, and scale – to inform law and policy-making about an overlooked population for whom spatiality can be a profoundly influential force: rural women.