BOOK: Victoria BARNES, Nora HONKALA & Sally WHEELER (eds.), Women, Their Lives, and the Law. Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty (London: Routledge, 2023), 230 p. ISBN 9781509962082, 90 GBP

 (image source: Bloomsbury)

Abstract:

This collection of essays honours Rosemary Auchmuty, Professor of Law at the University of Reading, UK. She has fostered the study of women's academic careers and, more politically, advanced progress on gender and equality issues including same-sex marriage and property law. Her research promotes the case of feminist legal history as a way of revealing the place of women and challenging dominant historical narratives that cast them aside. Just as Rosemary's work does, the book seeks to end the marginalisation and exclusion of women in the legal world, by including them. The book begins fittingly with a discussion of Miss Bebb, the woman whose biography Auchmuty deployed to push feminist legal history into the mainstream. It turns then to a discussion of women known and unknown and their struggles within the legal profession offering within those chapters a critical appraisal of the role of history and biography as a methodology. From there it moves to consider feminist perspectives and critiques of the dominant structures of private law. This is followed by chapters that explore those who educate the legal profession within the academy. The chapters, and the collection as a whole, examine areas of law that have a deep significance for women's lives.

Table of contents:

1. The Recovery of a Rising Star: Miss Bebb – Broken Biography, Judith Bourne (St Mary's University, UK)
2. Women Jurists Under the Swastika, Ulrike Schultz (FernUniversität, Germany)
3. Beyond Firsts: Feminist Biography and Early Women Barristers, Caroline Derry (Open University, UK)
4. Anna van Zwanenberg – A Life History, Anonymous
5. Gender, Feminism and Unsung Workers: The Early Years of the Law Centres Movement 1970-1980, Marie Burton (University of Oxford, UK) and Linda Mulcahy (University of Oxford, UK)
6. Rosemary Auchmuty – Doing Feminist Legal Biography, Fiona Cownie (University of London, UK)
7. Spinsters, Goblins and Contract, Sally Wheeler (Australian National University, Australia)
8. The Heroines, the Underdogs, and Everything In-between: Injecting a Feminist Approach into Family Law History, Sharon Thompson (Cardiff University, UK)
9. Change, Challenge and Resistance in Family Law, Felicity Diduck (Brunel University, UK) and Alison Diduck (University College London, UK)
10. Relationship Recognition: Feminism, Law, and Transformation, Susan Boyd (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Claire Young (University of British Columbia, Canada)
11. Until Marriage Do Us Part: Women Teachers and the Marriage Bar in the 1920s, Harriet Samuels (University of Westminster, UK)
12. Women and Publishing in Family and Property Law Journals, Victoria Barnes (Queen's University Belfast, UK) and Nora Honkala (University of Reading, UK)
13. Locating Feminist Scholars and Scholarship in the Legal Academy, Rosemary Hunter (University of Kent, UK) 14. Auchmuty, Legal Education and Equality, Lisa Webley (University of Birmingham, UK)

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