Deborah Dinner
My work uses history to reveal how the law regulates the boundaries between the family, market, and state. I perform research in primary source historical materials to investigate how cultural, political, and legal concepts change over time and in relation to one another. Since graduating from Yale Law School in 2005, I have clerked for a federal judge and received the Samuel I. Golieb and Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellowships in legal history. I am now completing my dissertation; please feel free to contact me with any questions about the joint-degree program.
My dissertation, "The Law of Work and Family: Feminism and the Transformation of the American Workplace at Century’s End," describes a sea change in the relationship between motherhood and women’s labor market participation in the United States. I argue that legal feminists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s pursued anti-discrimination laws and jurisprudence that would accommodate women’s biological difference and social-welfare entitlements that would transform childrearing structures. The politics of both women’s employment and motherhood generated a split among conservatives over the legal feminist agenda. While activists on the religious right advocated for social protection for motherhood, economic conservatives opposed regulation that would increase businesses’ labor costs and states’ fiscal burdens. Legal feminists achieved considerable success in realizing women’s right to formal equal treatment. Opposition, however, foreclosed more profound changes for which feminists advocated: a more equitable division of childrearing labor between men and women within the home and the sharing of the costs of reproduction between the family and society. The dissertation’s narrative examines how feminist and conservative activists, business executives and labor leaders, judges, lawyers, and politicians, all negotiated critical tensions within American liberalism: between social protection and individual rights, the recognition of sex difference and sex equality, reproduction as a service to society and as a personal choice.
My advisor is Joanne Meyerowitz, and my committee also includes Glenda Gilmore, Robert Gordon, and Reva Siegel. I also did an orals field with Jean-Christophe Agnew. Articles related to my dissertation appear in Law & History Review (August 2010) and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism (forthcoming fall 2010).
