Feminist Jurisography: Woman's Estate, Australia, 1970

Abstract

This essay offers some observations on jurisography, an experimental practice named by the author. It draws from Feminist Jurisography: Law, History, Writing (2022) to make an argument about feminist traditions, and how they are inherited. The essay argues that feminist traditions – feminist foundations – are not necessarily forgotten, although they may not always be explicitly acknowledged. It begins with a provocation made by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949):  that to respond adequately to one’s situation in time and place as woman requires self-creation of a persona and methodological transformation of disciplinary writing.  It then examines how that provocation was adapted in the 1970s by writers in the Women’s Liberation Movement; and describes how popular books, written on the periphery of institutional life, introduced a new public persona: the feminist intellectual. Through a reading of Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971) and its reception in Australia, the essay argues that  regardless of whether one separates from or aligns with a textual inheritance, understanding  the methodological innovations of feminist antecedents for projects in the here and now is a political act of acknowledgment.