Wendy Kaminer

Gun sales are said to have increased dramatically since September 11 — to the bemusement of some, who point out that guns won’t protect us from terrorists armed with viruses or nuclear bombs. Still, it’s long been clear that many Americans feel reassured by firearms; and if you fear the civil disorder that further attacks […]

In the locker room, two women are discussing the war against terrorism. They agree that Attorney General John Ashcroft is right not to reveal information about the 1,000-plus people detained since September 11. The trouble is, “we’re too soft” on the detainees, one opines. “No, the trouble is that a lot of people detained are […]

In the 1960s, the Supreme Court recognized that people accused of crimes were imbued with constitutional rights, which the states were obliged to respect. In the course of a few years, the Warren Court applied the exclusionary rule to the states, prohibiting the introduction of evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment; it fashioned […]

I t’s often difficult for a feminist to garner much sympathy for the fathers’ rights movement. At first glance it seems, at best, redundant. Fathers monopolized familial rights and power for much of our history. Nineteenth-century common law gave men the right to control and the duty to support children born in marriage, while women […]

Feminists have long regarded rape as a hate crime, like lynching. The view of sexual violence as a particularly vicious form of bigotry and social control may oversimplify the dynamics of any given sex crime (and overlook the historic use of rape allegations to justify lynching), but it resonates with many women. Both self-identified and […]

Feminists have long been ridiculed for their efforts to purge sexism from language by using words like chairperson and avoiding the use of male pronouns as universal signifiers of both sexes. The results have not always been pretty: “He knows what’s good for him” is a far more felicitous phrase than “He/she knows what’s good […]

Female politicians have not fared particularly well in the Commonwealth ofMassachusetts. We have sent no women to Congress in recent years and have neverelected a female senator, governor, or attorney general; the state legislaturehas never been led by a female senate president or speaker of the house. So asRepublican Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift prepares to […]

More than 15 years have passed since antilibertarianfeminists declared “pornography” a violation of women’s civil rights, allegingthat it demeaned and objectified women. In the 1980s, the antiporn movementenjoyed a lot of publicity and a little local legislative success. But federalcourts quickly struck down antiporn ordinances that classified some sexuallyexplicit speech as discriminatory and offered women […]