Jill Elaine Hasday
We the Men
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 decisionmaking, 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.
Preview the introduction for We the Men.
Upcoming Book Talks
Don’t miss Jill Elaine Hasday’s upcoming book talk on April 1st at the University of Minnesota Law School!
View all We the Men book talks
Praise for We the Men
“We the Men is a thoroughly engaging read that offers a rich history of women’s ongoing struggles for equality. Hasday’s compelling book provides a new understanding of women’s halting progress and a roadmap for a more promising, and egalitarian, future.”
Naomi Cahn, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Law & Armistead M. Dobie Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
“Professor Hasday declares bracingly at the outset of her marvelous book that ‘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.’ She convincingly documents her charge, persuasively shows the damage to which she objects, and, most importantly, inspires her readers to be more attentive and demanding.”
Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
“In this captivating and timely book, Jill Hasday chronicles the erasure of women from judicial and popular narratives about U.S. history—and even from accounts of how women’s own legal status has changed over time. She shows how misleading stories of progress in court opinions and school curricula obscure formidable opposition to women’s full citizenship and hide women’s activism and resistance. Illuminating women’s struggles for equality, justice, and recognition, Hasday reclaims our collective memory of women as crucial agents of past change and as indispensable authors of America’s democratic future.”
Serena Mayeri, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
“Jill Hasday’s book is a call to action, unearthing historical conflicts over gender equality—and women’s roles in provoking and sustaining such conflicts—to encourage mobilization today. Hasday documents how legal and popular stories about women’s equal status too often are used to erase women’s struggles for equality and to obscure the persistent reality of gender inequality. Hasday gives us the historical materials with which to understand—and reclaim—mobilizations by and for women. Nothing could be more important at a moment when courts are relying on male-centered views of ‘history and tradition’ to limit the scope of women’s constitutional rights.”
Douglas NeJaime, Anne Urowsky Professor of Law, Yale Law School
“A timely and important look at what has gone wrong in struggles over sex equality and how to move forward, We the Men should be read by anyone who cares about the future of women and gender politics in America.”
Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis School of Law
We the Men is now available from these booksellers:
