Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

421Paradigms of Lawsion of criminal and family laws regarding marital support) or inview of new legal definitions (reproductive freedom, pornography,consensual homosexual activity, etc.). (b) These stand alongsidesocial-welfare demands (an adequate standard of living for all individuals,including income transfers labeled as wages, not welfare,for indigent homemakers with dependent children; federally fundedchild-care services accessible to families at all income levels, withadequate opportunity for parental involvement) . The last clausecan already be understood as the result of disappointing experienceswith the effects of implementing social-welfare demands. (c)A reflexive attitude toward the successes of feminist reforms is alsoexpressed by a demand such as that for full employment, withincreased opportunities for flexible and part-time schedules. Thecontemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous revealed by this ·agenda from the days of the political struggle for the Equal RightsAmendment gives one some idea of the nearly two-hundred-yearlonglearning process. In the present context, it is especiallyinteresting that this learning process reflects a typical transformationof the paradigmatic understanding of law.The classical feminism stemming from the nineteenth centuryunderstood the equality of women primarily as equal access toexisting educational institutions and occupational systems, to publicoffices, parliaments, and so forth. The rhetoric of implementingformal rights was intended to uncouple the acquisition o£ socialstatus as much as possible from gender and to guarantee womenequal opportunities in the competition for education, jobs, income,social standing, influence, and political power, regardless ofthe outcome. Liberal politics was supposed to bring about theinclusion of women in a society that hitherto had denied them fairchances to compete. The difference between the sexes supposedlywould lose its social relevance, once the differential access to therelevant spheres was overcome. Opponents of this liberal feminismstubbornly resisted the neutralization o£ the "natural" arrangement,that is, the traditional role of the (bourgeois) wife, who,according to (thoroughly modern) notions of a patriarchal divisionof labor, should remain bound to the private sphere ofhousehold life. The two sides respectively accused each other of a"cult of the household" and a "preoccupation with self.realiza-