Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It, Julie Suk argues that a major cause of ongoing gender inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the systemic “overentitlement and overempowerment” of men compared to women. Suk labels this the problem of “misogyny,” and notes that it long postdates the formal abolition of patriarchy, or even the disappearance of individual misogynists. One might quibble with the labeling.1 As Suk herself notes, misogyny has traditionally been understood as a form of hatred toward women. But following Kate Manne, Suk defines misogyny in broader terms, as “efforts to control women after the law has stopped embracing male supremacy” (at 10). For myself, I wonder if it is useful to view male overentitlement and overempowerment as something distinct—i.e., more like a form of “mantitlement” linked to implicit bias and structural gender inequality, rather than the hatred of women and of women’s agency. In part, I think more distinct rather than all-encompassing labels may help point to more targeted policy interventions: for instance, misogyny may best be addressed through building men’s own self-esteem in conjunction with exposure to powerful female figures. Mantitlement may best be addressed through different models of education and parenting, whereas structural overentitlement and overempowerment on the part of men may be better addressed by gender quotas, positive legal duties to protect women and girls, and radical changes to how we structure and reward care as opposed to other forms of labor.2 But that is another debate for another day. For now, and for the purposes of this audience, it is important to focus on Suk’s second argument: that constitutions provide an important response to this problem. The story of men’s “overentitlement and overempowerment” compared to women (cis and trans) is alas not new. Feminist scholars—including Suk herself—have been drawing our attention to it for decades. And in writing this review I read several other excellent books, including Kate Manne’s Down Girl and Laura Bates’s Fix the System, Not the Women, which contain shocking stories and statistics about the continuation of these patterns.3 But After Misogyny tells that story in an extremely powerful way—drawing connections between US case law, history, and comparative experience, to highlight the origins and consequences of male “overentitlement and overempowerment.” One area of male overentitlement relates to women’s bodies: women in almost all countries continue to be harassed and assaulted by men at unacceptably high rates. And the law does little effectively to prevent this. Another area relates to women’s labor: restrictive abortion and contraception laws can mean that women are often forced to perform unwanted reproductive labor. And especially in market-based systems, women are often pressured to perform a vastly disproportionate amount of unpaid household work compared to men. Of course, sexist practices exist in communist as well as capitalist systems. But Suk usefully highlights the ways in which communist systems sought to recognize—and redistribute—reproductive and household labor. For instance, Suk notes the advocacy of German and Italian communist women for paid maternity leave, and for scheduled breast-feeding breaks during working hours (at 182–91). Another recent book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini,4 provides another striking example: many communist regimes had long-day public creches and canteens where workers were able to eat all three daily meals. Hence, cooking in communism was effectively a collective rather than household-level activity, whereas in a capitalist economy, the best that many women can hope for is to purchase an overpriced pre-prepared meal. These patterns are averages, not iron laws. In some households, men do more cooking and childcare than women. And in others, the household is headed by a single mother or father, where there is no relevant comparator for the purposes of judgements about “over-” or “under-”empowerment. But the macro patterns matter as much as the micro ones. They have flow-on effects to women’s overall social, economic, and political power in a society. Men’s overentitlement, as Suk notes, is closely linked to their overempowerment: if women had greater political power, they would almost certainly pass more laws and policies designed to guarantee access to affordable contraception, safe and legal abortion, paid childcare and parental leave, and the economic recognition of household labor.5 But women’s time, poverty, and lack of accumulated capital limit their capacity to enter and remain in elected politics. This is especially true for mothers. There is good data on this,6 and I can attest to it first-hand from my current role as the NSW Director of the Pathways to Politics for Women Program in Australia. And this limits the pressure for legal change aimed at addressing male overentitlement. This is where Suk suggests constitutions may serve an especially important role. They can create norms that require (and not just encourage) greater female political participation. Witness the forms of “parity democracy” that have developed in many European countries, which Suk expertly explores in chapter 5. They can guarantee minimum access to contraception and abortion. Think Colombia or Canada, or the United States during the period between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs.7 And they can reset social and economic expectations regarding the recognition of and reward for care work. Take constitutional norms regarding motherhood in Germany, Italy, and Ireland, or the recent proposal in the Chilean 2022 constitutional draft to recognize that “domestic and care work are socially necessary and indispensable for the sustainability of life and the development of society” and therefore that the state is obliged to promote “social and gender co-responsibility” for care work (Suk, at 178).8 In addition, constitutions play an important role in setting out processes and procedural norms that either increase or decrease the likelihood of policies aimed at countering structural gender inequality. The parity norms set out above are good examples. Suk also emphasizes the value of popular, citizen-led processes in achieving feminist constitutional change—pointing to Iceland, Ireland, and Chile as examples. The question, however, is how much of a role capital-“C” constitutional change or norms are likely to play in this context.9 Capital-“C” constitutional change surely matters for all the reasons noted above. But that does not mean it is necessary or sufficient for overcoming misogyny as Suk defines it. For instance, better paid family leave and childcare policies may be more likely under a care-conscious legal, capital-“C” constitution. And Suk highlights the important continuities in this context between feminist constitution-makers and legislators (for example in Italy in the early twentieth century) (at 190). (Elsewhere, I have made a similar point about constitution-makers as judges.10) But my experience as an Australian—where almost none of the country’s substantive values or ideals are placed in the capital-“C” Constitution11—reminds me that feminist progress is still possible within the realm of small-“c” political constitutionalism. The adoption of universal paid parental leave by the Gillard government is a leading example.12 Indeed, it may sometimes even be more likely—because feminist activists are more focused on getting concrete change now, not just constitutional wins that can deliver change in the future, and opponents are less mobilized against that change. Rightly or wrongly (in many cases, wrongly), they may see legislative change they disagree with as easier to reverse in the future. Some might even suggest that the success of Nordic countries in advancing gender equality lends broader comparative weight to this argument.13 This does not mean that in countries with a history of legal constitutionalism, and limited care-conscious policies, the best response is to abandon attempts at formal constitutional change. Indeed, doing so may be counterproductive—because in a system in which most important protections are capital-“C” in nature, no change really lands or lasts without being constitutionalized.14 It does suggest, however, that we should be cautious about equating care-conscious law and economics with care-conscious constitutionalism. This is even more true if we are constitutional lawyers: as constitutional lawyers, all forms of behavioral biases (including confirmation and availability bias) may cause us to overestimate the importance of constitutional mechanisms compared to non-constitutional ones.15 It is quite possible, for example, that the answer to misogyny (as Suk defines it) lies mostly in education, and the tax and transfer system, not formal constitutional guarantees of “social and gender co-responsibility” for care work.16 Indeed, some of my own new work in this area aims to explore what it would look like to adopt a “universal carers’ income” that echoes, but marketizes, the kind of historical and proposed subsidies or supports to mothers Suk explores in the book (at 15–17). This does not mean that constitutions are irrelevant. On the contrary, no democratic system is likely to adopt such changes unless it has a relatively competitive, dynamic political system, or is minimally “responsive” in nature.17 But it does mean we should be careful about romanticizing the role of constitutional aspiration compared to structure, or at least aspiration without structure.18 My only real concern about the argument, therefore, lies in its capacity to overemphasize the centrality of constitutional as opposed to legislative responses to misogyny, or at least strong- as opposed to weak-form models of feminist constitutional change. In celebrating the feminist potential of a constitutionalism of care, we should be careful not to reify that potential, or overlook the importance of parallel or complementary forms of small-“c” constitutional change.19 But whatever one may think of the ultimate promise of constitutions in this context, there is no denying the value of increased attention to the relationship between constitutions and care. And few scholars have the breadth of feminist and comparative knowledge to make these connections as skillfully and powerfully as Suk. For that reason alone, After Misogyny should be compulsory reading for all those interested in building a more gender-just future.
DOI: 10.1093/icon/moaf022
Author: Rosalind Dixon
Institution: UNSW Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410908549