Abstract
My first chapter began with assisted suicide. My last chapter begins with military service. A few days into President Obama’s second term, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that military women will no longer be barred from serving in combat.2 This change has been greeted as a progressive reform both in the Armed Forces and in the civilian population. However, support has not been unanimous. Some Americans are asking, “Who benefits?” One commentator wrote, “I suspect this has less to do with empowering women or gender equality and more to do with an increasing shortage of male bodies to throw into the quagmires we’ve created … I can’t help thinking that the boys’ club is suddenly happy to ‘allow’ women to serve on the front lines.”3
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Notes
Elisabeth Bumiller and Todd Shanker, “Pentagon Is Set to Lift Combat Ban for Women,” New York Times, January 24, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/us/pentagon-says-it-is-lifting-ban-on-women-in-combat.html, accessed January 25, 2013.
Elisabeth Bumiller and James Dao, “For 3 Women, Combat Option Comes a Bit Late,” New York Times, January 27, 2013.
Alexander Meiklejohn, Political Freedom: The Constitutional Powers of the People (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 26.
Minette Walters, The Scold’s Bridle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 336–37.
Jo Roman, Exit House (New York: Seaview Books, 1980), 127–28.
Ben Mattlin, “Suicide by Choice? Not So Fast,” New York Times, October 31, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/opinion/suicide-by-choice-not-so-fast.html?_r=0, accessed November 9, 2012.
Katha Pollitt, “The Strange Case of Baby M,” The Nation (January 1, 1998). http://www.thenation.com/doc/19870523/19870523 pollitt, accessed November 11, 2012.
Margaret Battin, “Legal Physician-assisted Dying in Oregon and the Netherlands: Evidence Concerning the Impact on Patients in ‘Vulnerable’ Groups,” Journal of Medical Ethics 33, no. 10 (October 2007): 591–97. doi:10.1136/jme.2007.022335; Chapter 2.
The result was Judith A. Baer, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women’s Labor Legislation (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), especially chap. 1 and 2.
Respectively, Lisa Blumberg, “Eugenics and Reproductive Choice,” in The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of The Disability Rag, ed. Barrett Shaw (Louisville: Advocado Press, 1994), 222;
Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 2000); and
Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 122–36.
Angela Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” Stanford Law Review 42 (1990): 581–616.
See Baer, Chains, chap. 5; Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), chap. 5 and 6.
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© 2013 Judith A. Baer
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Baer, J.A. (2013). Conclusion. In: Ironic Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031006_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031006_7
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