Book Review: How Erasing Women from American Narratives has Reinforced Inequity

 

‘Shockingly prescient’ and ‘painfully relevant’ are two phrases that come to mind when considering University of Minnesota Law School Professor Jill Hasday’s new book, We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. Professor Hasday draws on her specializations in constitutional and anti-discrimination law to examine the American judiciary’s systematic erasure of women. She also tracks the trend of anti-feminists claiming that America has already achieved gender equality — even though women still earn around 15 percent less than men, which has barely changed over decades.

It’s hard to think of a timelier topic, but as We the Men asserts, these issues are evergreen. “The seeds for this book, for me, began when I was in law school and the professors — men — would present how the law treated men as the baseline,” shared Hasday at a recent book talk at the University of Minnesota. “They either wouldn’t mention women, or women were the exception. But women are half the population — we’re just as much the baseline as men.”

While much of We the Men is a sobering account of centuries of discrimination and propaganda, it also offers a path forward. In her talk, Hasday highlighted the Equal Rights Amendment, now ratified in the required three-fourths of states, but still facing barriers to implementation. “ Generations of legal authorities have excluded women from the center of constitutional law,” she shared, adding that the ERA could “ transform how Americans understand the relationship between women and the constitution.”

More broadly, by pointing out the centrality of erasure to perpetuating inequality, We the Men spotlights the importance of historical, political, and cultural narratives, and hints that shifting those narratives could have meaningful, positive impacts.

“I hope this book illuminates how America’s dominant stories about itself shield inequality and encourage complacency by forgetting women’s struggles for equality and the work the nation still has to do,” said Hasday. By remembering, commemorating, and preserving women’s history, she indicates, we don’t just honor the past: we give ourselves a fighting chance at a better future.

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Coming Soon: Q&A with Author Jill Hasday

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Excerpts 

From We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. Copyright © 2025 by Jill Hasday. Published by Oxford University Press

About how even the earliest U.S. women’s rights organizers recognized the importance of narrative, and made great efforts to position their struggles as integral to “America’s past, present, and future.”

 

On “self-contradictory victory announcements,” which use false claims of gender and sex equality to justify judicial decisions that violate that very principle:

 

In the closing pages of We the Men, Professor Hasday cites a 1977 speech delivered by Jill Ruckelhaus, known colloquially as “the Gloria Steinem of the Republican Party,” and remembered for her ERA advocacy and for her role in convincing President Ronald Reagan to appoint Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court Justice.  Professor Hasday also read the speech at the close of her book talk, noting that it has hung on her wall since her earliest days as an aspiring legal professional:

 

 

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