vii, [3], 252, [2] pages. Some highlighting to the text noted. DJ has some

vii, [3], 252, [2] pages. Some highlighting to the text noted. DJ has some wear and soiling. Some edge wear. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction: The Recasting of Family Law; Part 1: Equality Rhetoric and the Economics of Divorce; Part II: Equality Rhetoric and Child Custody Decision Making; Part III: Abdicating Equality; Alternative Visions from Discarded Discourses. Also contains Notes and Index. Martha Albertson Fineman (born 1943) is an American jurist, legal theorist and political philosopher. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Fineman was previously the first holder of the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. She held the Maurice T. Moore Professorship at Columbia Law School. Fineman works in the areas of feminist legal theory and critical legal theory and directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which she founded in 1984. Much of her early scholarship focuses on the legal regulation of family and intimacy, and she has been called "the preeminent feminist family theorist of our time." She has since broadened her scope to focus on the legal implications of universal dependency, vulnerability and justice. Her recent work formulates a theory of vulnerability. She is a progressive liberal thinker; she has been an affiliated scholar of John Podesta's Center for American Progress. The almost universal implementation of no-fault divorce in a gender-neutral paradigm of equality has often been heralded as a victory for that ideal. But Martha Albertson Fineman contends that this was no victory at all. In this book, she incisively shows that while reforms may have succeeded on a symbolic level, this success has been at the expense of the women and children they were supposed to help. Focusing on the language and symbols of reform and the reformers, Fineman argues that by advocating measures based on equality of treatment rather than of outcome, liberal feminists disregarded the socioeconomic factors that simultaneously place women at a disadvantage in the market, and favor their taking on primary domestic responsibilities. Put simply, women and men may be equals, but they are not starting from the same place. This book traces the detrimental effects of equality rhetoric in shaping divorce law--such as the legal separation of parents' and childrens' interests; equality replacing need as the prime criterion for settlements; and the increase of state intervention into family life. Fineman also explains how men's control within the family has actually been strengthened--both before and after divorce, both economically and in regard to child custody. More than a critique, this book presents Fineman's own incisive arguments for adopting outcome oriented measures, and offers a valuable overview of the pitfalls of uncritically implementing any rhetoric as social policy. How do "no-fault, " "gender-neutral" divorce reforms actually harm the lives of women and children they are designed to protect? Focusing on the language and symbols of reform, Martha Fineman argues that by advocating measures based on equality of treatment rather than of outcome, liberal feminists disregarded the socioeconomic factors that simultaneously place women at a disadvantage in the market and favor their taking on primary domestic responsibilities. She traces in persuasive detail the detrimental effects of equality rhetoric in shaping divorce law, such as the legal separation of parents' and children's interests; equality replacing need as the prime criterion for settlements; and the increase of state intervention into family life. More than a critique, this book is an incisive argument for adopting outcome-oriented measures and a valuable overview of the pitfalls of uncritically implementing any rhetoric as social policy.