Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women, With a New Preface

Sometimes ideas change the world. This astonishing, miraculous, shattering, inspiring book captures the origins and the arc of the movement for sex equality. Its a book whose time has comealways, but perhaps now more than ever.
Cass Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge

Under certain conditions, small simple actions can produce large and complex butterfly effects. Butterfly Politics shows how Catharine A. MacKinnon turned discrimination law into an effective tool against sexual abusegrounding and predicting the worldwide #MeToo movementand proposes concrete steps that could have further butterfly effects on womens rights. Thirty years after she won the U.S. Supreme Court case establishing sexual harassment as illegal, this timely collection of her previously unpublished interventions on consent, rape, and the politics of gender equality captures in action the creative and transformative activism of an icon.

MacKinnon adapts a concept from chaos theory in which the tiny motion of a butterflys wings can trigger a tornado half a world away. Under the right conditions, she posits, small actions can produce major social transformations.
New York Times

MacKinnon [is] radical, passionate, incorruptible and a beautiful literary stylist Butterfly Politics is a devastating salvo fired in the gender wars This book has a single overriding aim: to effect global change in the pursuit of equality.
The Australian

Sexual Harassment of Working Women was a revelation. It showed how this anti-discrimination lawTitle VIIcould be used as a tool It was the beginning of a field that didnt exist until then.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg