Fetal Rights, Women's Rights : Gender Equality in the Workplace

Samuels, Suzanne Uttaro

ISBN 10: 0299145441 / ISBN 13: 9780299145446

Published by University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 655514-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Fetal Rights, Women's Rights : Gender Equality in the Workplace
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299145441
• ISBN 13: 9780299145446
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many private employers in the United States enacted fetal protection policies that barred fertile women—that is, women who had not been surgically sterilized—from working in jobs that might expose fetuses to toxins. In Fetal Rights, Women’s Rights, Suzanne Samuels analyzes these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants, and interest groups. She poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace, including: are women workers or wombs?
    Placing the fetal protection controversy within the larger societal debate about gender roles, Samuels argues that governmental decision-makers confuse sex, which is based solely on biological characteristics, with gender, which is based on societal conceptions. She contends that the debate about fetal protection policies brought this ambiguity into stark relief, and that the response of policy-makers was rooted in assumptions about gender roles. Judges, legislators, and regulators used gender as a proxy, she argues, to sidestep the question of whether fetal protection policies could be justified by the biological differences between women and men.
    The fetal protection controversy raises a number of concerns about women's role in the workplace. Samuels discusses the effect on governmental policies of the ongoing controversy over abortion rights and the debates between egalitarian and relational feminists about the treatment of women at work. A timely and engrossing study, Fetal Rights, Women's Rights  details the pattern of gender politics in the United States and demonstrates the broader ramifications of gender bias in the workplace.

About the Author

Suzanne Samuels is assistant professor of political science at Seton Hall University. She is also a lawyer and a member of the New York State Bar. Her research interests include gender and the law, judicial decision-making, interest group litigation, and AIDS & HIV issues.