A Woman is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice

The law fails women, not because the criminal legal system is broken, but because it was not designed for us. This untold history of women's rights reveals that women's freedom has only ever been won by our willingness to work outside the law.

Telling an alternative history of women's rights-from the 1870s to the present A Woman Is Against the Law offers the story of how a movement concerned with the emancipation of women has also repeatedly done the opposite: winning rights and recognition for some women at the expense of the rest. We encounter unexpected connections, like the ones between the fight for women's suffrage and the fight against alcohol, which became the antecedents of the 1970s anti-rape movement.

Gira Grant shows us how women have used the law in their own way to address major concerns-rape, domestic violence, pornography, gender identity, reproductive rights-with mixed results, revealing the uses and limits of the law as a tool for securing women's freedom. We see that for 150 years, women have been criminalised for who they are, how they parent, what they wear, if and who they have sex with, if and how they work, even where they go. Ultimately, Gira Grant asks: how much freedom can women have under the law? See more