SOURCE: Whitman, Christina B. “Law and Sex.” Michigan Law Review 86, no. 6 (May 1988): 1388-403.

In the following review, Whitman outlines MacKinnon's feminist perspective of law, calling Feminism Unmodified a “rough, powerful, important work.”

In Feminism Unmodified, a collection of speeches given between 1981 and 1986, Catharine MacKinnon talks of law from the perspective of feminism. MacKinnon does not approach her topic as a lawyer with a uniquely legal perspective on feminism; she brings, instead, a distinctively feminist approach to law. Nor is the feminism from which she speaks grounded in the standard political theories: MacKinnon disclaims and attacks the Marxist approach to feminism, the socialist approach to feminism, and, most emphatically and repeatedly, the liberal approach to feminism that has been embraced by many lawyers in their effort to use law to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex. MacKinnon's goal is to define feminism on its own terms. That is...