Neofeminism

Neofeminism describes a body of feminist legal scholarship and ideas (emerging roughly in the late 1990s) that is concerned with gender justice but critical of many tenets of mainstream or second-wave feminism (the popular feminist theories of the 1960s through mid-1980s). There are a variety of second-wave feminist theories espousing heterodox views of the female condition and how to achieve equality, but three particular theories predominate: (1) liberal feminism, (2) cultural feminism, and (3) dominance feminism. Since the 1970s, feminist legal theorists have often identified with one of these three camps and debated which best describes and addresses women’s subordination. Since the mid-1990s, a new generation of legal scholars has focused on how second-wave feminism more generally affects law and policy, for better or worse, ...