We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for ＂We the People,＂ too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

Jill Elaine Hasday’s We the Men is the first book to explore how forgetting women’s struggles for equality--and forgetting the work America still has to do--perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Hasday argues that remembering women’s stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women’s inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.

America needs more conflict over women’s status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men’s spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America’s dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women’s progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

Jill Elaine Hasday is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She teaches and writes about antidiscrimination law, constitutional law, family law, and legal history.