SOURCE: Menkel-Meadow, Carrie. Review of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, by Catharine A. MacKinnon. Signs 16, no. 3 (spring 1991): 603-06.

In the following review, Menkel-Meadow contrasts the feminist legal theory of Deborah L. Rhode's Justice and Gender with MacKinnon's Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.

How has law constructed “woman”? How has feminism changed law? What contributions have legal feminism made to political feminism and to feminist theory? Is a feminist theory of the state or its rules of law possible? The authors of these books on legal feminism take on these important questions, if somewhat obliquely. MacKinnon's answers are crisp, radical, elegant, and eloquent, if also dated, essentialist, and somewhat unsatisfying. Rhode's answers are more textured, socially situated, contingent, measured, and also somewhat unsatisfying. Read as historical documents, these books capture both the exciting new theories (sexual harassment, civil rights approaches to pornography) and the old...