WOMEN AND FAMILY LAW: CONNECTING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE by Patricia McGee Crotty. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997. $29.95. 170pp. ISBN 0-8204-3804-9.

Reviewed by Dierdre L. Wendel-Blunt, Department of Political Science, The University of Iowa. E-mail: DidiGary@worldnet.att.net.

The title of Patricia Crotty’s WOMEN AND FAMILY LAW: CONNECTING THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE is really a misnomer suggesting a book focusing on reproductive rights and how public law regulates activity in the private sphere. Fundamentally, her book is far more than that. While it includes reproductive rights as one aspect in a much larger discussion, Crotty’s real focus is women’s human rights in the international community. Her stated goals are three-fold. Her first goal is to contrast the competing feminist perspectives on women’s position in society and the role the state plays in fostering it. Her second goal is to train readers to evaluate sources of data that reflect women’s status in different nation-states and their role in politics. Finally, her third goal is to compare the gender gap in sixty-four nation-states cross-sectionally and longitudinally (1980 to 1995) and explain it using cultural, economic, and political variables. In so doing, she hopes to expose readers to comparative analysis and the use of the scientific method in the social sciences.

Throughout, Crotty clearly states her argument that governmental policies, finding their expression in public law, affect women’s status in the private sector. This influence has important consequences for women in their level of realization of equality in both the public and private spheres of life. She also argues that it is important to determine what methods are most effective in evoking positive responses from political institutions to promote and achieve women’s equal rights. The standard employed for evaluating the realization of women’s human rights in her book is equality to men’s human rights. Use of equality as a standard reflects a liberal feminist perspective, including not only a concern for individual rights but also an emphasis on the positive role that government can play in achieving equality.

In chapter one, Crotty offers a simple introduction to the layout of the book and to the two basic questions to be addressed: how do women fare relative to men in the world and what should be done to improve women’s status? She includes a brief overview of the possible theoretical divisions within feminism and a brief justification for using empirical analysis to understand women’s human rights. She also summarizes the relationship between the public and private realms, introduces the role that law plays in determining women’s status in society, and offers an overview of suggestions to empower women to fight for equality in their own countries. In short, chapter one is a roadmap for the book.

In chapter two, Crotty discusses the different feminist theories and their competing perspectives on how to improve women’s status in society. She grounds such discussion in theorizing from the field of human rights. She argues that women’s rights to equality are necessarily human rights, and are defined, in many respects, through relative comparisons to the respect given to men’s rights. Hence, placing a discussion of the different feminist theories in such a context is necessary, for it is in such a context that ideas about the meaning of equality can be explored and comparisons can be made. Along with demonstrating the debate within feminist theory concerning the definition of and actual worth of seeking equality as a goal, Crotty compares the different strands of feminist theories for their ideas about how to achieve improvements in women’s status, the role that government via the state plays in this, and what policies should be pursued to achieve justice for women.

For the remainder of the book, Crotty engages in data-driven research reliant on four primary resources: the United Nations, the Population Crisis Committee, World Priorities, and a self-created index of the realization of women’s human rights. In chapter three, Crotty uses these data sources to makes four specific analyses: a comparison of women’s status against men’s within nation-states, a determination of women’s status within nation-states in absolute terms, a comparison of women’s status across time within nation-states, and a comparison of women’s status across nation-states.

In chapter four, Crotty focuses on the codification of human rights for women and how this affects women’s status. Crotty seeks to accomplish three goals: 1) the development of an index measuring the extent of the legal protection awarded women’s rights, 2) a determination of the correlation between the presence of constitutional protections and statutory provisions established to protect women’s human rights, and 3) a determination of the relationship between legal guarantees and the actual status women achieve in society. In so doing, Crotty discusses the interdependent relationship between culture and law and how each can reinforce or change the other. Additionally, she diffuses the validity of cultural relativism and, instead, argues how the law can be used to change cultural practices that violate women’s human rights.

Nonetheless, Crotty’s most important accomplishment in chapter four is the creation of an index to measure the degree of gender bias in the statutory laws pertaining to personal rights in sixty-four nation-states. She includes ten personal rights which can be grouped into property rights, procreative rights, and marital rights. Based on this index and her status index, Crotty finds a strong association between statutory rights protections and the status of women in the 1980s, and the same relationship between the two in the 1990s.

Chapter five compares countries based on their ranks according to women’s status in their societies as well as the changes in their ranks according to women’s status. Crotty’s goal is to discover why changes occurred and if these causal conditions can be replicated in other countries. However, her primary focus for this chapter is on the nation-states that experienced major or unusual changes in these two areas. It is in chapter six where Crotty puts together the possible, general explanations gleaned from such case-study-related analysis into a generalizable model.

The purpose of chapter six is to explain the relationship between women’s status and characteristics of states that influence women’s status. To do so, Crotty constructs a model to explain the gender gap by using cultural, political, and economic characteristics of nation-states. She hypothesizes that the gender gap is largest in societies with traditional political cultures; that the wealthier the nation-state, the smaller the gender gap; and that the gap is smallest in states where women play an active political role. In short, her hypotheses are borne out.

At its most basic, her work simply reasserts what many had already believed. Culturally-traditional societies demonstrate a larger gap between the status of women and men than do more modern societies. Economic development positively impacts women’s status, and the more legal guarantees to equal status in the home and in the political process, the more equal women’s status in society. At a more significant level, Crotty’s work is fundamental not only to understanding the world but in confirming with data that what is believed to be true actually is. It is only from this point that progress towards changing what is unjust can begin.

Crotty’s book offers clear goals, meticulous measurement, comprehensive use of available data, and a solid research design. Despite its many strengths, there seems to be a disjuncture between Crotty’s discussion of the competing feminist perspectives and the rest of the book. Though informative, it does not seem to fit with the purpose of the majority of the book: explaining the gender gap in respect for human rights within and across nation-states. Her analysis is based upon only one of the feminist perspectives discussed, liberal feminism, and the other perspectives only resurface in any real fashion at the book’s end. To unify her discussion of feminist perspectives with her research, her analysis should reflect how choosing one perspective or the other for the foundation of laws addressing women’s human rights or for deciding upon the desired goals would affect the resulting women’s status. Understandably, it would require adjusting the models to reflect the different goals prescribed by the differing feminist perspectives; still, it would make her analysis more reflective of her stated goals. As it is, it does not.

Additionally, Crotty examines laws established by 1980 and the status of women in the 1980s, and the same for the 1990s. She also argues that culture is slow to change but that changes in laws may change the levels of respect cultures give to women’s human rights. If so, it may be worth pursuing a determination of the time lag between the adoption of statutory rights and a culture’s acceptance of these rights as demonstrated by a commensurate rise in the status of women.

Still, these criticisms should not take away from the otherwise significant contribution that Crotty offers through her sound methodological analysis. There is relatively little data available concerning human rights in general; there is even less available concerning women’s human rights in particular. Crotty does an exceptional job utilizing available resources for data concerning women’s human rights and adding to it where it was lacking for the time periods examined. Further, her methodological approach is straightforward and simple. By using simple correlational and ordinary least squares regression analysis, Crotty selects methodological techniques that allow beginning social scientists to understand the basic techniques used in social science analysis and how statistics and data help us understand causal relationships. She also offers "working orders" for those interested in pursuing equality of women’s status by concluding that women’s de facto status and women’s de jure rights are more closely related to political participation rights than to the presence of equal rights amendments. In other words, giving women the right to pursue equal status through the political arena goes much farther than words on paper that say that women have equality. In her own words, because the personal is political, "[w]omen can and should work the state!" (130).

Copyright 1995