Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism

by Barbara Havelková, Colin Harvey

Overview

Gender equality law in Czechia, as in other parts of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, is facing serious challenges. When obliged to adopt, interpret and apply anti-discrimination law as a condition of membership of the EU, Czech legislators and judges have repeatedly expressed hostility and demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of key ideas underpinning it. This important new study explores this scepticism to gender equality law, examining it with reference to legal and socio-legal developments that started in the state-socialist past and that remain relevant today.


The book examines legal developments in gender-relevant areas, most importantly in equality and anti-discrimination law. But it goes further, shedding light on the underlying understandings of key concepts such as women, gender, equality, discrimination and rights. In so doing, it shows the fundamental intellectual and conceptual difficulties faced by gender equality law in Czechia. These include an essentialist understanding of differences between men and women, a notion that equality and anti-discrimination law is incompatible with freedom, and a perception that existing laws are objective and neutral, while any new gender-progressive regulation of social relations is an unacceptable interference with the 'natural social order'. Timely and provocative, this book will be required reading for all scholars of equality and gender and the law.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509933037
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/31/2019
Series:	Human Rights Law in Perspective
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Barbara Havelková is the Shaw Foundation Fellow in Law at the University of Oxford.

Editorial Reviews

This book is an excellent work of feminist legal genealogy, bringing a useful contribution towards our understanding of the relationship of equality, gender and the law, as well as discrimination and rights. It also shows the limited impact of anti-discrimination law if it is not underpinned by general social acceptance of the need for gender equality in all spheres, something that the current #MeToo campaign has made relevant also in the West.

This is the first book since 1989 to apply a feminist and critical studies methodology to the legal system of a CEE country. It is therefore indispensable to any scholar writing about gender and equality in CEE and a must-read for anyone with an interest in understanding the CEE legal culture(s) and societies.

What Havelková sets in train ... is a thorough engagement with feminist legal materials to trouble conventional accounts of EU implementation in recent accession states. Her book is methodologically distinctive, offering a fluid blend of archival analysis, doctrinal excavation (both domestic and EU), and socio-political theory. Her resulting contribution to scholarly literature through this monograph is undoubtedly fascinating and remarkably broad.

From the Publisher